Gibbons, Victoria Louise.
JEBS 11 (2008): 198-206.
Modern notions and theory of literary titles ("titology") cannot be applied readily to medieval works. Gibbons comments on the titles of several of Chaucer's poems as an aspect of the "ordinatio" of their manuscripts. Medieval titles, especially…
Mosser, Daniel W.
Chaucer Review 41 (2007): 360-92.
Scribal glosses in a copy of this third incunabular edition of CT (STC 5084) provide further evidence of manuscript W, a hypothesized manuscript affiliated with Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.3.15, and Wynkyn de Worde's edition of CT. They also…
Drimmer, Sonja.
Exemplaria 29.3 (2017): 175-94. 7 color illus.
Argues that medieval "media consciousness," despite the lack of "verbal declarations of such awareness," is evident in the text-image relations of the Chaucer portrait in manuscripts of Thomas Hoccleve's "Regiment of Princes," coining the term…
Hill, Ordelle G.
Selinsgrove, Penn.: Susquehanna University Press, 1993.
Traces the changing reception of the literary images of the plowman and the shepherd from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. In the fourteenth century, the plowman begins to shift from representing such values as hard work and thrift to…
Comments on the five contributions to SAC 25's "Colloquium: The Manciple's Tale," reading them as a "snapshot of some of the ways . . . Chaucerians read today" and exploring how the interruptions and reversals in ManT efface moral distinctions.
Baker, Donald C., ed.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
The latest volume of the Variorum Chaucer to appear, Baker's edition based on Hengwrt, collates ten manuscripts and twenty-one printed editions with extensive critical commentary, survey of the criticism, and bibliographic index.
ManP and ManT reveal, through Lacanian insights, Chaucer's position as court poet. The Manciple's silencing of the Cook prefigures the tale in which the regal Phebus, who cages both his free-spirited wife and the truth-telling crow, kills and…
Trask, Richard M.
Studies in Short Fiction 14 (1977): 109-16.
The last 43 lines of ManT indiate that at home the Manciple must not have been able to get a word in edgewise. His domestic experience has made him obtuse and incoherent. If one so obtuse can cheat his lawyer-masters, the satire is finally on the…
Psychoanalytic analysis of ManT as "an example of a narrator's strenuously repressing the maternal yet subliminally negotiating its inevitable return." Various features of the Tale are projections of infantile "primal" relations with the mother:…
Scattergood, V. J.
Essays in Criticism 24 (1974): 124-46.
Shows how concern with lack of "self-control in speech" unifies ManP and ManT, especially in its traditional association with anger, one of the "sins of the tongue." The theme also occurs in SumT and MerT, but it is presented with greater "subtlety"…
ManT is concerned with the method by which a story is told. Emphasis on the "gods' role in human marriage" restores the relationship between word and deed, a relationship important to the narrator of CT. Chaucer's numerous voices can be heard as…
Ramsey, Nigel.
Stephen H. Rigby, ed., with the assistance of Alastair J. Minnis. Historians on Chaucer: The "General Prologue" to the "Canterbury Tales" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 386-98.
Reviews the history of medieval manciples, lawyers, and stewards. Reads Chaucer's Manciple as "ironic and allusive" and an "indispensable middleman" in ManT.
An abstract of a paper that considers ClT and Petrarch's version of the Griselda tale in comparison with "Laxdaela Saga" and Marie de France's "Le Fresne". In all, the central female figure "possesses a greater value than may at first appear."
Isaacs, Neil D.
American Notes and Queries 1 (1962): 52-53.
Suggests that the version of the Constance story in the Middle English romance “Emare” may help to account for why in MLP the Man of Law says that he learned the story from a merchant.
Sanok, Catherine.
Frank Grady, ed. The Cambridge Companion to "The Canterbury Tales" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 89-104.
Traces several interpretative concerns raised by MLT and demonstrates how the tale "has much to teach us about the layered, multipart narrative of project" of CT. Discusses "gender and religious difference," the secular and the sacred, the…
Coghill, Nevill, and Christopher Tolkien, eds.
London: George G. Harrap and Co., 1969.
A textbook edition of MLPT in Middle English, with an introduction and end-of-text notes and glossary; includes the GP description of the Sergeant of Law. The Introduction (pp. 7-57) assesses various "puzzling features" of MLP, its place in Chaucer's…
Chaucer's primary source for MLT was not Nicholas Trevet's Chronicles but Gower's Tale of Constance. Chaucer found in Gower's tale a streamlined shape, sharper focus, a greater depth of character, and a heightened moral emphasis. It was Gower who…
Psychoanalytic exploration of the "fantasy-structure" of MLPT, arguing that medieval and modern audiences "would have similar unconscious responses to the text." Suggests a similar, broader reading of all of CT.
Assesses modern "unease" with Chaucer's "pathetic" tales, focusing on the combination of the "superficially tragic and the slightly comic" aspects of MLT in which the subject matter invites audience sympathy or empathy while the style encourages…
