In HF, Aeneas is a "possible love-traitor," while in LGW the "condemnation" is much clearer. In the "Laud Troy Book," he is a political traitor who is never presented as the founder of Rome. Such depictions of Aeneas reflect how the "threat--or…
D'Agata D'Ottavi, Stefania.
Rachel Falconer and Denis Renevey, eds. Medieval and Early Modern Literature, Science, and Medicine. Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature, no. 28 (Tübingen: Narr Verlag, 2013), pp. 49-66.
Referencing SqT and MLT, maintains that Astr was literally meant for a juvenile audience, adducing its concise language, repetition, exhaustive definitions, and liberal use of adjectival possessives as pedagogical tools fit for young readers. Posits…
Friedman, Jamie A.
Jeff Rider and Jamie Friedman, eds. The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Literature: Grief, Guilt, and Hypocrisy. The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 203-22.
Argues against reading Emelye as absent or purely symbolic and instead posits her as having a more complex subjectivity that can be more fully accessed when reading KnT alongside Boccaccio's "Teseida." Close reading of Emelye's prayer to Diana shows…
Johnson, Willis Harrison.
Dissertation Abstracts International 59 (1998): 917A.
Anatomizes the development of anti-Jewish sentiments in medieval England, arguing that the prejudices of Chaucer and his late-medieval contemporaries, which returned to traditional, exegetical stereotypes, were less malicious than those of the…
Argues that CT provides an aesthetic of irony and parody, where part of the pleasure of the experience entails ironic interpretation on the reader's part, thereby both entertaining and instructing.
Bukowska, Joanna.
Jacek Fabiszak, Ewa Urbaniak-Rybicka, and Bartosz Wolskieds, eds. Crossroads in Literature and Culture, Second Language Learning and Teaching (New York: Springer, 2013), pp. 19–40.
Examines intertextual relations between CT and Ackroyd's "Clerkenwell Tales," acknowledging the dependencies of the latter, but emphasizing its postmodernist techniques and themes.
Nowlin, Steele.
Studies in Philology 103 (2006): 47-67.
Nowlin contends that FranT "offers an interpretation of the forces that shape the ability to imagine beyond exempla." Draws on Victor Turner's notions of liminality to discuss the concern with genre as frame in FranT, which shows how frames of…
Examines how "some popular moral lyrics based upon traditional proverbs were modified and reworked" through manuscript transmission in late medieval England, commenting on materials found in the Findern manuscript (Cambridge University Library MS…
Van Boheemen-Saaf, Christine.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987.
Expanded version of the author's dissertation (Rice University, 1987). Using the model of Levi-Strauss, she analyzes the function of plot in the novel and the mythic structure underlying its mimetic adaptation in Chaucer's KnT, Fielding's "Tom…
Hayward, Rebecca.
Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl, eds. Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), pp. 221-43.
Assesses Criseyde in TC and other widowed protagonists in medieval romances (Roman de Thèbes, Chértien's Yvain), exploring how "necessity of possession and ideals of chastity" are the prevailing stereotypes of the literary tradition. Unlike…
TC is a thoroughly Christian poem in which characters of a pagan past bring about through their actions the contrary of their expectations, whereas the narrator achieves his purpose exactly, despite his seemingly varied tones. Thus the palinode…
Smith, Peter J.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012.
In "Turning the Other Cheek: Scatology and Its Discontents in The Miller's Tale and The Summoner's Tale," pp. 12-59, Smith uses farting in MilT and SumT to explore Chaucer's complex and refined "scatological rhetoric," a trope that has been obscured…
Defines meta-humanistic criticism, offers an extended critique of "basic fallacies" in Chaucer criticism, and assesses KnT, particularly its major characters. Dissertation completed in 1971.
One of the stumbling blocks to an unbiased reading of Chaucer is the prevalence of "humanistic" criticism, which is "intra-literary" and a kind of "anti-literature." The necessary corrective is "'meta'-humanistic" criticism, which strives "not to…
Pearsall, Derek.
Marlene Villalobos Hennessy, ed. Tributes to Kathleen L. Scott. English Medieval Manuscripts: Readers, Makers and Illuminators (London: Harvey Miller, 2009), pp. 197-220.
Distinguishes between the modern "expressive" function of book illustration and various medieval practices. Modern practice is evident in W. Russell Flint's 1928 illustrations to CT, while the Ellesmere illustrations evince efforts to "restore social…
Chang, Tuan Jung.
Open access Ph.D. dissertation. University of Georgia, 2018.
Available at https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/chang_tuan-jung_201812_phd.pdf
Accessed February 5, 2021.
Treats Boccaccio's "Famous Women," LGW, and Christine de Pizan's "The Book of the City of Ladies," reading Chaucer's "faithful women" in LGW "as metaphors [of] the relationship between authorship and readership, trying to define his own position [as]…
Surveys representations of sexual violence as both gender oppression and means to self-awareness between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries in England, discussing WBPT and Mel, among other texts.
Aers, David.
Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015.
Provides close reading and interpretation of "Piers Plowman," and observes how Chaucer and Langland often share similar political and religious views of medieval society. Refers to SumT, WBPT, GP, KnT, ParsT, RvT, and PF.
A nationalistic fantasy of legal sovereignty underlies MLT and its depiction of England in relation to Rome through the figure of Constance. Anxiously embracing the geographic and forensic marginality of England, "Chaucer's lawyer exhibits a version…
Lavezzo, Kathy.
Kathy Lavezzo. Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000-1534 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 93-113.
Revised version of an essay of the same title in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002): 149-80.
The ending of CT is intentionally ambiguous,leaving the choice of a final meaning--if there "is" one--to the reader. The most characteristically "Chaucerian" reading of the ending is also the most modern: to choose not to make a choice is to make…
Kendrick, Laura.
Bulletin des Anglicistes Medievistes 49 (1996): 7-37
Challenges assumptions underlying traditional studies of sources and relative chronology, suggesting that similarities between Deschamps's work and Chaucer's are evidence of late-fourteenth-century literary style and common "mentalites". Compares…
Notes that the visual imagery of falling rocks and millstones Pandarus uses to convince Troilus of his future success is associated with death and destruction in the Bible, which actually undermines Pandarus's argument in TC.
Curtis, Carl C. III.
Christianity & Literature 57 (2008): 207-22.
Biblical analogies embedded in KnT constitute an implied critique of the pre-Christian setting: Palamon and Arcite's first sight of Emelye accords with David's first sight of Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11:2); loving Emelye reorganizes Arcite's psyche and…
