Browse Items (15534 total)

Investigates uses of the words of address "heren," "herken," "herknen," "listen," and "listenen" throughout CT to find out differences of usage among them. Points out the peculiarity in the choices of such words in Th and discusses Chaucer's…

Fumo analyzes Chaucer's use of Ovid's Heroides 5 (Oenone's letter to Paris) in TC, discussing Chaucer's sustained and allusive use of this text and its "metanarrative function" in the structure of TC.

Williams assesses the Pardoner's abuses of a wide range of signs, including words, relics, and the sacrament of the Eucharist, arguing that the Pardoner is "antisemiotic" and perverse in his privileging of signs over what they signify.

The names of the students in RvT recall the court musician John Aleyn, contemporary of Chaucer and composer of the motet "Sub arturo plebs."

To Chaucer, Dante, Henryson, and Milton, the heavens were a celestial text, and movers of the spheres governed earthly affairs. Astral configurations allegorized to serve theological ends show the poets using accepted interpretations.

The various parts of MLPT "cohere around the multiple meanings of 'law,'" although the "Introduction" was still being shaped.

The name "Lollius" (from "loll" "to hang out the tongue") is Chaucer's punning attempt to imitate Boccaccio's name in English ("boccaccio" "ugly mouth"), as well as to create a plausible sounding Latinate name for his supposed author.

J. A. Burrow has demonstrated that Th falls into three fits of 18, 9, and 4.5 stanzas, but does not identify the complementary pattern in the number of lines.

In KnT, courtly love seems antithetical to brotherhood in arms, but the eventual disposal of Emelye reinstates male friendship. Lydgate offers a related, more explicit model of supposedly benign homosocial exchange.

The price of love for Palamon and Arcite in KnT is violence and death, a feature of the "gender/violence/courtship paradigm" of medieval courtly literature that continues into the present, as evident in Brian Helgeland's "A Knight's Tale."

Chaucer increases Boccaccio's emphasis on the social situation of the lovers to dramatize the separation between personal and public lives. Pandarus, ever conscious of the social context, trains Troilus as the "literary" lover. The action reflects…

Explores how Dafydd's "connections, and the lack of them, with Chaucer . . . illuminate the English author." The poets share modal and conceptual similarities, but they differ in style and genre. Chaucer is less a poet of nature than is Dafydd and…

Boccaccio's "Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta" and Machaut's "Jugement dou Roy de Behaingne" parody Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy" as "a source of humor and as a means of characterization." Troilus's Boethian soliloquy (TC 4.960-1082) exploits…

Considers whether the Prioress was capable of "love celestial," examining her invocation to the Virgin Mary and suggesting that the heaviness of Mary's pregnancy is analogous to the Prioress's need to be delivered of her tale. In PrT, "affective…

Both poets move between extremes of "lust" (delight, pleasure,love) and "lore" (the wisdom of the past). Gower sees lore as a passive standard, while Chaucer questions its relevance and efficacy as a moral guide. Chaucer exhibits extremes, from the…

Presents the text of the Middle English poem, "Lyarde," discussing it in light of Goliardic satire and identifying instances where the poem shares themes with parts of CT: the "sexual superiority" of clerics (the Monk in MkP and NPE), wives' control…

Explores the connection among name, birth, and personal achievements. The study is based on "Lybeaus Desconus," but also draws on other medieval sources such as HF.

Influenced by courtly Chaucerian conventions earlier in his career, George Gascoigne emulated Chaucerian penitential seriousness in "The Grief of Joye." Laam comments on Gascoigne's and George Puttenham's uses of Chaucer, and briefly explores the…

Supports the research of J. D. North by attesting that the astrological structure of SqT can be perceived through purely literary means, i.e., without astrological training or predisposition.

Genius's discourse on Orpheus in Jean de Meun's "Roman de la Rose" provides a vocabulary with which to address the sexuality of Chaucer's Pardoner. Genius's views on language, law, homosexuality, and art illuminate similar issues in PardT, linking…

Explores how the Manly-Rickert edition of CT "undoes its own arguments about textual history by noting its own textual history of doubt and contingency," suggesting that Manly and Rickert "tell stories" about the composition of CT and that the death…

Contrasts human song and birdsong in GP, NPT, MilT, PrT, and PF: humans employ reason to understand and appreciate music, while birds sing purely for pleasure. Generally, the human voice is "an indicator of how Chaucer's characters misuse their…

An "ideological approach" to TC demands the appropriation of discordant elements by a single dominant principle; a rhetorical analysis of the ending of TC, when combined with structuralist categories, suggests that Chaucer engaged in a multiple…

The prayer for might to "make in som comedye" (TC 5.1788) is not a scribal error but an indication that Chaucer may have seen the poet, like God, as a creator who enters his own fictive world and creates from "within" it.

In the carter's episode, the ethical center of FrT, balanced curses and blessings invoke medieval images of humanity, "in the middle" between heaven and hell, and so preoccupied with daily life that it forgets spiritual concerns. Carters are so…