Browse Items (16012 total)

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."

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)…

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…

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.

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,…

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…

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'…

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."

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,…

Murder mystery in which Chaucer aids medieval detective Crispin Guest to solve the murder of a man who apparently was seeking the Spear of Longinus.

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…

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…

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.

Chaucer's treatment of Cassandra in TC illustrates his changes in the tone and import of Boccaccio's "Filostrato." Whereas Boccaccio's portrayal provides interesting psychological study, Chaucer's Cassandra introduces a philosophical context by…

Argues for the influence of the Eros and Psyche myth on Boccaccio's Griselda tale, and thereby on ClT.

Surveys the influence of Boccaccio's Italian and Latin works on English writers and literary tradition through the nineteenth century, with extensive analyses of Chaucer's uses of the "Teseida" in KnT, "Filostrato" in TC, and "Decameron" in ClT.…

Surveys the nature and directness of Boccaccio's influence on English literature from Chaucer to the 1611 Authorized Version of the Bible, with emphasis on style.

Part of a nine-volume compilation of Henriquez Ureña's writings, describing CT and Boccaccio's Decameron; reissued as an e-book in 2011.

A film script which combines "key lines and phrases" from Boccaccio's "Filostrato," TC, and Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida," interspersed with appearances of the three writers in moments of fictional biography. Re-tells the broad outlines of the…