Campbell, Bruce.
Edwin Brezette De Windt, ed. The Salt of Common Life: Individuality and Choice in the Medieval Town, Countryside, and Church: Essays Presented to J. Ambrose Raftis. Studies in Medieval Culture, no. 36 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1995), pp. 271-305.
Extant manorial accounts representing over two hundred different demesnes in Norfolk (from the period 1250-1449) suggest that Oswald the Reeve's dwelling and husbandry were based on a specific landscape and rural economy that would have been…
Beidler, Peter G.
Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2015.
Describes how Chaucer adapted his source, Heile of Beersele, increasing the "theatricality" of plot and details in making MilT, concentrating on the architectural setting (house and window), dramatic details, and additional "scenes." Surveys and…
Cannon, Christopher.
Seth Lerer, ed. The Yale Companion to Chaucer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006, pp. 31-54.
Cannon observes parallels between the "forms of life Chaucer made in his poems" and "what can be reconstructed from his own life from the public record." Suggests that both the textual lives and Chaucer's biography derive "in part from social…
Vitz, Evelyn Birge.
Thomas J. Heffernan and E. Ann Matter, eds. The Liturgy of the Medieval Church (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute, 2001), pp. 551-618.
Vitz surveys the influences and echoes of liturgical wording and practice in a range of medieval literature--English, French, Italian, narrative, lyrical, parodic, etc. Includes focused treatments of "La Queste del Saint Graal," "The Roman de la…
Revisits Carleton Brown's 1910 suggestion of source relations between the "Alma Redemptoris Mater" in PrT and the "Gaude Maria," offering a liturgical explanation for Chaucer's use of the former.
Dahlberg, Charles.
Hanover, N. H., and London: University Press of New England, 1988.
"Unlikeness" refers to the "coherence and contradictions" in the conviction encouraged by D. W. Robertson that "the characteristic mode of reading and writing in the Middle Ages was quite different from ours and that it assumes an underlying…
Robertson, D. W. Jr., ed.
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970.
An anthology of literature produced in Britain and Ireland in the Middle Ages: Celtic, Latin, Old English, French, and Middle English. The section pertaining to Chaucer (pp. 467-569) includes introductions to Chaucer's life and language, along with…
Surveys late medieval "attitudes toward alchemy" in order to establish their influence on CYPT. Although Chaucer's depiction is generally orthodox in its condemnation of alchemy, it derives language and details from treatises that promote the study,…
In a chapter called "Renaissance to Enlightenment, 1300- 1800," includes a section (pp. 68–71) entitled "Turn over the Leef and Chese Another Tale: The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400), Geoffrey Chaucer" that describes CT, its innovations, and social…
Ganim, John M.
James M. Dean and Christian Zacher, eds. The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays on Chaucer and Medieval Culture in Honor of Donald R. Howard (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), pp. 209-26.
Explores the importance of the "new history" for Chaucer criticism and for our idea of medieval literature in general. Examines interpretive models by historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Natalie Davis, and Carlo Ginzburg.
Ebi, Hisato.
Eigo Seinen (Tokyo) 135 (1989): 366-70.
There was a new tendency to assimilate paganism to Christian doctrine in medieval European literature. Emphasizing the influence of the sources and analogues of medieval Latin literature on Chaucer, Ebi discusses the meaning of the Alceste myth in…
Ridley, Florence.
Wolf-Dietrich Bald and Horst Weinstock, eds. Medieval Studies Conference Aachen 1983 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1984), pp. 121-36.
Asserts that the label "Scots Chaucerian" clearly does not apply to William Dunbar, documenting the "meagerness of the evidence of Chaucer's influence on him" and demonstrating that Dunbar's poetry is "completely continental" rather than Chaucerian.
Nicholson, Peter Charles.
DAI 34.08 (1974): 3114A.
Argues that the source of ShT is Boccaccio's "Decameron," and that their several differences were "made necessary by Chaucer's alteration of the ending." Chaucer gave his tale the "superficial appearance of a French fabliau" in order to critique the…
Linking the idea of intention to the moral self in the medieval understanding of the subject, considers TC along with Margery Kempe and "The Testimony of William Thorpe."
Traversi, Derek.
Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1982.
Treats (1) the theme of poetry in Dante's "Purgatorio," (2) why Ulysses is in hell, (3) FranT, (4) ManT, (5) "Unaccommodated Man" in "King Lear," (6) The imaginative and the real in "Antony and Cleopatra," and (7) Shakespeare's dramatic illusion in…
Benson, Larry D., and Theodore M. Andersson, eds.
Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971.
An anthology of sources and analogues of MilT, RvT, MerT, and ShT, with more limited analogous materials for SumT, ManT, and FrT, in all cases providing facing-page translations of non-English materials. Each section includes an introduction that…
An international ranking which summarizes the lives and works of 100 writers. Chaucer is listed as number five (behind Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, and Tolstoy), and credited with a "fundamental redefinition of the possibility of poetic expression."
Biebel, Elizabeth M.
Dissertation Abstracts International 59 (1998): 1564A.
Feminist criticism has changed perceptions of the Wife of Bath. Feminist critics perceive her not as a superficial and "garish caricature" of womanhood but as a serious person attempting to establish her identity, rejecting antifeminist tradition,…
Blake, Norman.
Susan Powell and Jeremy J. Smith, eds. New Perspectives on Middle English Texts: A Festschrift for R. A. Waldron (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 107-18.
Like individual tales, the links of The Canterbury Tales exist in several authorial versions, indicating that Chaucer prepared several versions of the whole during his lifetime. Thus, the notion of a single manuscript stemma is impossible or…
