Browse Items (15980 total)

Comments on the history and nuances of "syklatoun" as a kind of sartorial cloth used parodically in Th, a prelude to discussing the implications of clothing in "Emaré" as a popular romance.

Focuses on the medical effects of the herbs mentioned in Th to argue that the narrator's impetuosity demonstrates the effects of herbs he mentions in lines 760-65.

Reconsiders questions of the composition and occasion of PrT (here titled "Clergeon") before Chaucer incorporated it into the CT, arguing on biographical, stylistic, and liturgical grounds that Chaucer may have originally composed the poem as early…

Includes comparison of PrT with sources and analogues: the Anglo-Norman Hughes de Lincoln and two accounts--"The Child Slain by Jews" and "The Jewish Boy"--found in the Vernon manuscript. Analyzes the stories' various contributions to the…

Considers the young child who watches the wife and monk in ShT, arguing that Chaucer's construction of narrative perspective, which the child embodies, anticipates more modern handling of narrative perspective, including that of Henry James.

Graphic version of PardT, newly adapted and illustrated in ink and watercolor, with a calligraphic, abbreviated text in modern verse.

Focuses on CT and PardT, specifically. Discusses the Pardoner's fabrication of relics and the "preposterous" transformation of "accident into substance," a reversal of the trope used in PardT, the narrative voice in both GP and PardT, and deception…

Considers the Pardoner in PardT as an "exemplary figure" of what Walter Benjamin argues is a defining trait of modernity: the eclipse of religion's sacralizing capacities by capitalism, which, like the Pardoner’s sales pitch, intensifies guilt…

Explores intertextual relations among versions of the Virginia / Virginius story (by Livy, Bersuire, Gower, and Chaucer), focusing on how the depiction of Virginia's mother in both Gower and Chaucer "offers a broader semblance of propriety by…

Focuses on two texts that feature violence against women to examine how the violated woman functions as a tool for political change. Both Chaucer and Gower foreground the suffering that men experience in response to the violated female body, leading…

Considers FranT as a Breton lay that recalls, not ancient history, but Chaucer's recent memories of his own stays in France, tying the tale to the marital situation of Joan of Kent.

Argues that FranT should be added to "the Chaucerian pandemic canon" for its depiction of pandemic trauma and recovery.

Highlights the utility of proverbs and offers them as a solution to the problem of knowledge in SqT. Emphasizes that proverbs provide new insights for late medieval textual cultures as a microgenre that transcends social and economic boundaries in…

Examines the "workings of empathy" in SqT to situate it in "premodern critical race studies, reading the "falcon-Canacee-lap" formulation as "a homo-affective assemblage, an animal human thing that blurs the borders of body, object, and species,"…

Challenges the limitations of traditional source-and-analogue study, exploring resonances between SqT and the "Kitab al-Manazir" of Ibn al-Haytham /Alhacen to which it alludes (see SqT, 232–45), including discussion of mediating sources in Latin…

Compares and contrasts SqT and the analogous Middle Dutch "Roman van Walewein," focusing on their eastern settings, treatments of marvel, and other romance conventions. Considers Chaucer's possible knowledge of Middle Dutch and "Van Walewein,"…

Considers the role of spectacle in SqT, comparing the poetic strategies for inscribing spectacle to Richard Maidstone's approach in "Concordia."

Examines May of MerT as a version of the motif of the healing woman, familiar "across medieval literary genres from romance to hagiography." The fabliau setting of the tale, however, inverts a range of "courtly and religious hierarchies" as May…

Offers "folkloric analysis" of several motifs--slaughtered wives, lost and restored children, and incest--in ClT and in "The Winter's Tale" (and other Shakespearean plays), arguing that such analysis allows us "to see these texts in connection with…

Examines the frequent mention of Griselda's face in ClT, as compared to his sources, and simultaneously argues that Chaucer's version highlights Griselda's interiority and how she maintains her patience.

“Traces the theme of patience in Middle English verse exempla amid the proliferation of exemplary works in late medieval England to examine the sociality of feeling within narratives of individual virtue,” including a chapter pertaining to ClT.

Combines personal appreciation and critical analysis of the Wife of Bath as a character; Chaucer’s art in creating her and WBPT; and the voluminous historical reception and impact of the Wife from early scribal glosses to international modern…

Uses Pauline "theo-poetics of circumcision" to explore circumcision and "uncircumcision" as hermeneutic tropes, focusing on allegoresis and amplification, and analyzing queerly Augustine's Boy with a Long Foreskin" (from "De Genesi ad litteram");…

Explores "the socioeconomic significance of the ugly, monstrous figures in the Gawain romances" and in WBT, arguing that Chaucer "bifurcates" the "ugly antagonist" of the romances into the "crude, social-climbing Wife . . . and the loathly lady of…

Discusses briefly the Wife of Bath's use of mercantile language to help launch an assessment of such language in women’s writing from Margery Kempe and the Paston women to Aphra Behn.