Dane, Joseph A.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 95 (1996): 497-514.
Larry Benson's understanding of "queynte" as an adjective (SAC 9 [1987], no. 54) is untenable since it depends on a rhyme pattern inadmissible in Chaucer. The true meaning is the traditional one of "pudendum."
Vial, Claire.
Danielle Buschinger and Arlette Sancery, eds. Mélanges de langue, littérature et civilisation offerts à André Crépin à l'occasion de son quatre-vingtième anniversaire (Amiens: Presses du Centre d'Études Médiévales, Université de Picardie-Jules Verne, 2008), pp. 312-16.
Examines the laughter of Troilus in light of the tradition of contemptus mundi and stresses links between TC and pilgrimage literature.
Weisl, Angela Jane.
Anna Roberts, ed. Violence Against Women in Medieval Texts (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), pp. 115-36.
Though Chaucer grants women agency in CT, they act against a background of violence that is often ignored or mitigated. The fabliaux, the romances, and the religious narratives all present violence against women as a normal part of society. WBT comes…
Marchand, James W.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 100: 43-49, 1999.
Chaucer's punning use of "quoniam" in WBP was not the first time this word was used as a sexual euphemism. Giraldus Cambriensis, Matheolus, Juan Ruiz, and the author of the "Roman de Flamenca" used this euphemism in their writings.
Delasanta, Rodney.
Papers on Language and Literature 8 (1972): 202-06.
Characterizes the Wife of Bath as "an ecclesiastical camp follower" who tellingly misuses her familiarity with Scripture and liturgy, exemplifying this tendency through her blasphemous use of the term "quoniam," which is the "opening word of the…
Robertson, Elizabeth.
Robert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior, eds. Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), pp. 302-23.
The representations of rape (sexual assault and abduction) in WBT and "Kingis Quair" invite consideration of free will and agency as part of a critique of late medieval social formulations of male/female relationships. In WBT, Chaucer indicts…
Examines the word "raptus" in late-fourteenth-century English law and concludes that it meant "forced coitus." Also prints a newly discovered document relating to Cecily Chaumpaigne's case against Chaucer and suggests that the phrase "de raptu meo,"…
Comments on Umberto Eco's, Jacques Derrida's, and Marianne Dekoven's contributions to animal studies, and assesses the Host's references to "jade" and "trede-fowl" in NPP and NPE as "prime examples" of the "human habit of appropriating the animal…
Thompson, Jefferson M.
Piotr Fast and Wacław Osadnok, eds. From Kievan Prayers to Avantgarde: Papers in Comparative Literature (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Energeia, 1999), pp. 83-98.
Thompson traces parallels among several dichotomies--eros and agape, cupiditas and caritas, love and reason--arguing that Chaucer was unsatisfied with the simple dichotomies he found in the "Roman de la Rose." In KnT, love is "reprimanded" as folly,…
Attempts to "rehabilitate the status and reputation of lines 1.890-96," which some authorities have viewed as an insertion that breaks the continuity of Pandarus's encomiums for Criseyde. Starting from the supposition that these lines were composed…
Maclean, Hugh.
Jane Campbell and James Doyle, eds. Essays in English Literature in Honour of Flora Roy (Waterloo: Laurier University Press, 1978), pp. 29-47.
Like Chaucer before him, Spenser uses the literary complaint with greatest success, not as a separate genre, but to heighten the dramatic context of larger works.
Prior, Sandra Pierson.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 85 (1986): 1-19.
The hunt passages in BD involve technical terms that have not been fully understood, e.g., "embosed," "forloyn," and "strake." The literal hunt dissolves to a metaphorical one in which the dreamer seeks the hurt heart. In terms of the narrator's,…
Johnston, Andrew James.
Claudia Lange, Ursula Schaefer, and Göran Wolf, eds. Linguistics, Ideology, and the Discourse of Linguistic Nationalism (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 37-51.
Johnston scrutinizes Chaucer's comments on alliterative poetry in ParsP, interpreting them as evidence of a power struggle in England's evolving literary field. By presenting aesthetic difference as linguistic difference, Chaucer consciously presents…
Williamson, Anne.
Henry Williamson Society Journal 39 (2003): 30-60.
Explores the possibility that Henry Williamson's novel "The Dream of Fair Women" was influenced by Tennyson's poem "A Dream of Fair Women" and, in turn, by Chaucer's LGW.
Discusses the relationship between "translation and historical alterity" in TC, examining how Dante's vernacular language in his "Convivio" connects with how Chaucer "exploits the transformative potential of translation" within his own vernacular…
Yeager, R. F.
T. L. Burton and John F. Plummer, eds. "Seyd in Forme and Reverence": Essays on Chaucer and Chaucerians in Memory of Emerson Brown, Jr. (Provo, Utah: Chaucer Studio Press, 2005), pp. 151-64.
Yeager finds a partisan second level of meaning underneath the sycophantic surface of the envoy of Purse - one that challenges Henry's right to rule.
Hanks, D. Thomas, Jr.
English Language Notes 31:3 (1994): 25-29.
The lord in SumT speaks of "the salt of the erthe and the savor," usually taken as a reference to Matthew 5.13. Yet no Bible known to Chaucer uses the word "savor" (Latin "vapor") in this passage. Instead, Chaucer may have drawn the phrase from…
Baird, Joseph L.
Chaucer Review 6.2 (1971): 117-19.
Cites examples from Middle English literary texts to support reading "secte" as meaning "petition" or legal suit in ClT 4.1171, referring to the Wife of Bath's argument.
Olsson, Kurt.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 9 (1987): 123-53.
"Securitas" as defined by William of Conches, Phillip of Bergamo, William Peraldus, and others explains both the Knight's response to other pilgrims in the narrative frame of CT and his relation to Theseus in KnT. Both the Knight and Theseus attempt…
Ruff, Nancy K.
Classical and Modern Literature 12 (1991): 59-68.
Chaucer's ironic treatment of the Dido legend in LGW and HF involves a naive narrator who erroneously sympathizes with Dido; a medieval audience would have recognized differences from the treatment of Dido in Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Heroides. …
Cooper, Geoffrey.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 79 (1980): 1-12.
"Sely" (from OE "gesaelig") originally meant "happy, fortunate," and hence "blessed by God, pious, holy." Later,however, the word took on connotations of "pitiful" and "silly, rustic," while still retaining its earlier meaning in different contexts.…
As part of a larger consideration of John Shirley's role in English literary culture and canon formation, mentions the presence of several unique Chaucer poems in Shirley's library.
