Browse Items (16012 total)

Read by Philip Thiel; edited by Troy Sales and Paul Thomas. Recorded by Ewart Shaw at Radio Adelaide. Includes ManPT.

Chaucer makes some of his most valid observations on life through inconspicuous characters such as the Manciple, in his tale of the crow.

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…

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:…

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…

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."

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.

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…

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…

For Chaucer, Rome is an ancient imperial capital, a goal of medieval pilgrimage, and a center of trade--trade in devotions, indulgences, and pardons that allies mercantilism and religion. Such a Roman transaction also involves relics or monuments,…

Describes the episodic symmetrical structure of MLT; comments on the characterization of Constance; identifies the rhetorical uses of occupatio and elaboration in the Tale; and (in footnote 1) summarizes its concern with astrology, fate, and Boethian…

Recorded at the University of Adelaide, 1994. Re-edited and digitally mastered as a CD-ROM by Troy Sales and Paul Thomas in 2004.

The tale of Custance is related to medieval lives of sainted women but is opposed to them in its concentration on the secular relations of an ordinary woman. Through this tale, the Man of Law seeks to reconcile the conflicting claims of the divine…

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The Man of Law, in the telling of his tale, wants to present himself as a fount of knowledge. In Part I he frequently interrupts the narrative to voice his own comments. In Part II, as the power of God manifests itself in the trial scene,the…

Contrasts the moral seriousness of MLT with the comic mode of MLP and MLE, arguing that they combine to present the Man of Law as Chaucer's "ironic portrait" of pedantic, dogmatic, or moralistic readers and critics (perhaps John Gower) who would…

In MLT Chaucer does not change the events found in Trevet, but, rather, transforms their telling so as to alter our perceptions of them. His purposeful complicating expresses the Man of Law's narrative technique.

Examines the related topoi of the man in foul clothing and the wedding guest with no robe as they are depicted in "Cleanness," "St. Erkenwald," Langland's "Piers Plowman," Julian of Norwich's "The Showings," and CYPT, arguing that the texts confront…