Salter, Elisabeth.
English: The Journal of the English Association 67 (2018): 163-80.
Shows how Chaucer's oeuvre offers many glimpses of readers' and listeners' encounters with the written word, but that last wills and testaments offer more direct insights into "the ways the majority of people interacted with and interpreted 'English'…
Rudd, Gillian.
In Greg Garrard, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 27-39.
Comments on forerunners of ecocritical thinking in medieval literature, and explores the connotations of "green" (often in contrast with "blue") in Wom Unc, SqT, FrT, WBT, and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," arguing that medieval usage reflects a…
Breuer, Heidi.
Kathleen A. Bishop, ed. "The Canterbury Tales" Revisited--21st Century Interpretations (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 1-15.
Identifies several aspects of medieval legal discourse concerning rape and explores how they "inform the representation of rape" in RvT. Also assesses implications of modern resistance to recognizing the two rapes in RvT, viewing that resistance as…
Ross, Valerie A.
Chaucer Review 31 (1997): 339-56.
Both Criseyde's dream in Bk. 2 and Troilus's dream in Bk. 5 of TC are generally understood in terms that debase Criseyde. But Chaucer's intertextual construction of these dreams and his reconstruction of Cassandra and Criseyde from his sources…
Episode from a science fiction series about memory erasure and personality manipulation via futuristic technology. Several scenes set in a classroom and teacher's office with references to Chaucer and the Wife of Bath, including a brief reading from…
Haruta, Setsuko.
The Society for Chaucer Studies and Koichi Kano, eds. To the Days of Studying Medieval English Literature: Essays in Memory of Professor Tadahiro Ikegami (Tokyo: Eihosha, 2021), pp. 18-39.
Considers the characterizations of Helen and Criseyde in TC through multiple contexts, including estates of medieval women and the ways Helen is depicted in Greek literature.
Evans, Robert C.
English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989): 324-45.
Discuses the complex response to Chaucer in Jonson's annotations on his copy of Thomas Speght's 1602 edition of Chaucer, especially the affinity of ethical and poetic thought, concentrating on two poems, "The Remedie of Love" and "Of the Cuckow and…
Sigal, Gale.
Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi and Gale Sigal, eds. Voices in Translation: The Authority of "Olde Bookes" in Medieval Literature (New York: AMS, 1992), pp. 191-205.
Through their dramatic rendering of the lovers' discrepant responses to the coming of dawn, the aubades in TC highlight the tempermental differences of the characters and prefigure their separate, though intertwined, fates.
Suggests that the "portraits" of Trojan war heroes and heroines in Benoit de Ste Maure's "Roman de Troie" are carefully individuated and arranged, and that Chaucer's "literary techniques" in the "sketches" of GP are similar to Benoit's in several…
Both Beowulf and Chaucer's Walter in ClT are "compulsive." Beowulf is obsessed with his heroic powers; Walter, with testing his wife. Walter is seen as a "monster," his treatment of his wife as inhuman.
Coghill, Nevill, and Norman Davis, readers.
[n.p.]: Spoken Arts, 1960s.
Item not seen. WorldCat records indicate that this spoken-word recording includes "Beowulf's speech to Hrothgar, the Dragon Flight and the Funeral of Beowulf" in Old English (20.02 min.) and GP and PardT in Middle English (29.16 min.).
Pope, John Collins, and Helge Kökeritz, readers.
New Haven, CT: Whitlock's, 1954.
Item not seen. WorldCat records indicate that these readings were released in LP recording and/or cassette tape recurrently by Whitlock's, Educational Audio Visual, and Lexington Records with slightly varied titles. The selections from Chaucer, read…
Fleming, John V.
Susan J. Ridyard, ed. Chivalry, Knighthood, and War in the Middle Ages (Sewanee, Tenn.: University of the South, 1999), pp. 137-50.
Details of the GP description of the Knight reflect the ascetic ideal of knighthood promoted by Bernard of Clairvaux in Liber ad milites templi. Chaucer's Knight is by no means a Templer, but the description harkens back to a related view, perhaps…
Plummer John F.
Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard, eds. New Readings of Chaucer's Poetry (Rochester, N.Y., and Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 107-18.
Plummer explores sexual references and innuendoes in the speeches of the Host, arguing that sexual and textual power are inseparable for the Host. The Parson's concern with spiritual productivity balances the Host's concern with physical generation,…
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…
