Wicher, Andrzej.
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture 11 (2021): 334-52.
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.
Nixon, Emily Joanna.
Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Chicago, 2021,
Dissertation Abstracts International A83.04(E).
“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.
Turner, Marion.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.
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…
Strouse, A. W.
New York: Fordham University Press, 2021.
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…
Kay Price, Vicki.
Ph.D. Dissertation. Bangor University, 2021.
Dissertation Abstracts International C82.12(E).
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.
McLemore, Emily.
Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Notre Dame, 2022.
Dissertation Abstracts International A83.11(E).
Studies "representations of women's desire and . . . its intersections with eroticism, pleasure, and power" in WBPT, Robert Henrysons' "Testament of Cresseid," "The Book of Margery Kempe," and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."
Carey, John, ed.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2021.
Collects selections from western poets, from Homer forward, including WBP, 587–608, translated by Carey, with a brief introduction that characterizes the Wife as having a "good claim to be the first feminist in literature."
Hurley, Mary Kate.
Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2021), pp. 125-50.
Assesses the "temporally heterogeneous portrayals of an emerging sense" of "Engelond" in the scenes of Saxon conversion in the Constance narratives of Trevet's "Cronicles," Gower's "Confessio Amantis," and MLT. These scenes are "sites where the power…
Cooper, Helen.
A. S. G. Edwards, ed. Medieval Romance, Arthurian Literature: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Archibald (Cambridge: Brewer, 2021), pp. 46-60.
Argues that "repetition should be included among the family resemblances that trigger the imaginative response that signals 'romance'." ” Includes discussion of MLT and the analogous accounts in Nicholas Trevet's "Chronicles" and John Gower's…
Explicates details in the GP description of the Cook, CkPT, and ManP, exploring their physical and moral implications for characterization, "food safety" in Chaucer's London, and hygiene among its victuallers--cooks, innkeepers, and manciples.
Pecan, David.
Journal of Narrative and Language Studies 10 (2022): 281-92.
Assesses the social and economic dynamics of CkT and the GP descriptions of the Cook and the guildsmen, arguing that the tale "indicts both the laterally mobile prodigal apprentice and the decadent hypocrisy" of his master "through the linked…
Taylor, Joseph.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Examines "the North as a regional concept in the literature of medieval England," considering a range of texts from Bede's "Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum" to the Towneley plays. Chapter 4, "Chaucer's Northern Consciousness in the 'Reeve's…
Shutters, Lynn.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 44 (2022): 359-60.
Responds to two essays concerned with sexual consent in medieval literature, including Leah Schwebel, “Chaucer and the Fantasy of Retroactive Consent." SAC 44 (2022): 337–45. Suggests that we might read RvT "as an incel revenge fantasy."
Schwebel, Leah.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 44 (2022): 337-45.
Explores aspects of sexual consent and non-consent in RvT--particularly Malyne's romanticizing of Aleyn's assault--linking them with Augustine's comments on Lucretia in "De civitate Dei," modern notions of "retroactive consent," and the Chaucer life…
Miller, T. S., and Elizabeth Miller.
Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 62 (2021): 133-56.
Connects the "gendered terror" of female sexuality and the "evasiveness" of J. R. R. Tolkien's treatment of sexual violence against women in his Middle-Earth narratives, and assesses suppression of rape in Tolkien's 1939 bowdlerized version of RvT in…
Focuses on RvT and argues that newly discovered documents allow scholars to move beyond Chaucer's individual blame and address structural issues and concerns with language describing and depicting sexual assault in late medieval texts.
Radulescu, Raluca L.
Claire McIlroy and Anne M. Scott, Literature, Emotions, and Pre-Modern War: Conflict in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Leeds: Arc Humanities, 2021), pp. 45-63.
Investigates the restless "emotional movement" of "roaming" in KnT, as expression of both confined frustration and openness to new adventures enacted by Palamon, Emelye, and Arcite. Compares Chaucer's depictions of these movements and emotions with…
Pigg, Daniel F.
In Albrecht Classen, ed. Incarceration and Slavery in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age: A Cultural-Historical Investigation of the Dark Side of the Pre-Modern World (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2021), pp. 347-60.
Argues that the "unique aspect" of the depiction of imprisonment in KnT is that the "only liberation that can happen is apparently at the end of this life, which is seen as a prison," hence "hardly a liberation at all." Comments on Chaucer's likely…
Nall, Catherine.
Stephanie Downes, Andrew Lynch, and Katrina O’Loughlin, eds. Writing War in Britain and France, 1370–1854: A History of Emotions (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 73-88.
Explores the theme of knightly and royal pity (and related concepts, such as mercy, compassion, and resulting actions) in literary representations of war in a range of late medieval English texts, with particular attention to the Alliterative "Morte…
