Hughes, Ted.
New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998.
A series of husband-to-wife [Hughes to Sylvia Plath] love poems in free verse, including two poems that refer to Chaucer: "St Botolph's" (pp. 14-15) which connects Chaucer with Dante and astrology, and "Chaucer" (pp. 51-52) which commemorates a…
Examines the role of the Bishop Guðmundr in mediating the relationship between the papacy and the Icelandic Church in the thirteenth century. Demonstrates how Guðmundr’s actions, and strategy for challenging traditional notions of papal authority,…
There is little or no archival or topographical evidence to suggest that the Prioress's convent of St. Leonard's Priory in Stratford-at-Bow profited from houses of prostitution in Southwark. Bordellos existed along the Thames (and were duly taxed and…
Shonk, Timothy A.
Essays in Medieval Studies 15: 81-91, 1999.
Produced in Leicester, Harley 7333 supplies information about how Chaucer was known in the "provinces" outside of London. Shonk disagrees with several of Manly and Rickert's (1940) ideas about the manuscript and challenges their suggestion that it is…
Neel, Travis, and Andrew Richmond.
Myra Seaman, Eileen A. Joy, and Nicola Masciandaro, eds. Dark Chaucer: An Assortment (Brooklyn, N. Y.: Punctum Books, 2012), pp. 103-16.
Reviews Chaucer's three uses of a crow (in ManT, PF, and as a "metaphor for the very blackness of blood" at the end of KnT) as a "marker for silence, sterility, and death."
Harrison, Leigh.
Myra Seaman, Eileen A. Joy, and Nicola Masciandaro, eds. Dark Chaucer: An Assortment (Brooklyn, N. Y.: Punctum Books, 2012), pp. 59-69.
Argues that Form Age transcends its sources to offer "its own glimmer of hope" for new textual communities.
Examines William Blake's painting of the Canterbury pilgrims for its artistic value and its place in the history of taste. Blake's "Descriptive Catalog," which accompanied the first exhibition of the painting, and his "Prospectus" for a subsequent…
Mertz describes documents and commentary that relate to the illustrations of the Canterbury pilgrims by William Blake and Thomas Stothard, the latter published by Robert Hartley Cromek. The materials belonged to antiquarian Francis Douce (1757-1834)…
D'Agata d'Ottavi, Stefania.
Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds. Mediaevalitas: Reading the Middle Ages (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), pp. 115-28.
William Blake's painting "The Canterbury Pilgrims" and his commentary on it in a "Descriptive Catalog" (1809) are a "complex allegory of life, where the classicist belief in the imitation of nature is thoroughly discarded." Blake returns to a…
The successive deaths between 1810 and 1816 of several men associated with Thomas Strothard's "Canterbury Pilgrims" painting would seem to have executed a certain poetic justice, for Blake had dubbed himself "Death" in one Notebook poem and, in…
Examines the imagery and irony of FrT, RvT, ShT, MerT, SumT, and MilT, focusing on how in each tale Chaucer achieves "organic" unity through transformation of the "conventional formulae" of medieval rhetorical handbooks. Summarizes the practices…
Ellmann, Maud.
Jeremy Hawthorn, ed. Criticism and Critical Theory. Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 2d ser. (London: Arnold, 1984), pp. 98-110.
BD discursively performs the act of burial. Blanche's death is comparable to Freud's "primal scene"; her "whiteness" traces primordial obliteration; as in Lacan, narrative arises in loss.
Byrd, David G.
Ball State University Forum 19.3 (1978): 56-64.
Standard modern studies of courtly love do not refer to a term used in French poetry, "blanche fever." A study of this sickness endured by the lovers in TC, "Confessio Amantis," "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale," and Caxton's "History of Jason"…
Questions whether BD circulated in the fourteenth century and whether it was commissioned by John of Gaunt as an elegy for his wife. The mid-fifteenth-century manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 16 bears the arms of a court functionary,…
Allen, Valerie.
Juliette Dor, ed. A Wyf Ther Was: Essays in Honour of Paule Mertens-Fonck (Liege: University of Liege, 1992), pp. 23-29.
Blaunche's description in BD centers on her eyes, whereas Alisoun's in MilT centers on her bottom. These descriptions show the relationship between each character's essential and physical selves, suggesting that both characters "locate their virtue…
Rowland, Beryl.
[Kent, Ohio]: Kent State University Press, 1971.
Studies various aspects of Chaucer's animal imagery (particularly mammals), describing their traditional associations, and exploring Chaucer's uses of these conventions, drawing on natural history, exegesis, and popular lore as well as the animals'…
Ruud, Jay.
Michelle Sauer, ed. Proceedings of the 11th Annual Northern Plains Conference on Early British Literature (Minot, N.D.: Minot State University, 2003), pp. 43-55.
The dawn song in TC (3.1415-1526) stresses "contrast between the mundane love of the two lovers and the heavenly love associated with the dawn and the light in a Christian context."
Hobbs, Kathleen M.
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. 181-98.
Although women and Jews were "equivalent others" in medieval orthodoxy, the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity enabled the Church to sever the "historical ties between Christianity and Judaism" and to "exalt itself as a fixed and timeless…
Looks at "late medieval texts in which writing functions both verbally and pictorially," such as texts of the Passion, in which red ink in the manuscript creates a picture of Christ's blood, mentioned in ABC. TC similarly describes tearful verses,…
Dauby, Hélène.
Le sang au Moyen Âge. Cahiers du CRISIMA, vol. 3, no. 8. (Montpellier: Universit de Montpellier, 1999), pp. 227-35
Although the terms in the title are not the most frequently used in Chaucer's vocabulary, their collocations enable us to explore associations and meanings of colors, the gushing of blood from wounds, the physiology of emotions, devotion to Christ's…
Sauer, Michelle M.
New York: Bloom's Literary Criticism, 2010.
Pedagogical introduction to Chaucer's works, presented as advice for writing college-level essays (written by Sauer with Laurie A. Sterling, with a sample essay on male physiognomy in GP by Timothy Richards) and writing about Chaucer more…
Nyffenegger, Nicole.
In Nicole Nyffenegger and Katrin Rupp, eds. Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2918), pp. 145-65.
Argues that hue or skin tone "makes skin visible in texts that do not explicitly mention it" and serves to act as an indicator of narrative structure, emotional interactions, and generic conventions of romance in TC.
