Hanly, Michael G.
Norman, Okla. : Pilgrim Books, 1990.
Investigates "topics relevant to the central question: Did Chaucer use the 'Roman de Troyle' of Beauvau, Seneschal of Anjou," in the composition of TC? Hanly reviews a number of candidates for authorship of the "Roman" and concludes that Chaucer…
Utley, Francis Lee.
Western Folklore 33 (1974): 181-201.
Comments on the roles and methods of folklore study in literary criticism, arguing that international folktales are as important as elite narratives for understanding and appreciating medieval literature. Discusses plots shared by Boccaccio and…
Hanning, Robert W.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.
Close comparative analysis of CT and Boccaccio's "Decameron," arguing that they present "pragmatic prudence" or "expediential calculation" as essential forms of human agency in negotiating limited knowledge, faulty perception, and cultural turmoil.…
Kellogg, Laura Dowell.
Dissertation Abstracts International 52 (1991): 909A.
The narrators of Filostrato and TC, both selfishly motivated, create irony through their misconceptions of Cressida's traditional image. Although Boccaccio's narrator distorts Boethius and Dante, Chaucer's narrator represents Criseyde's flaw as…
Scaglione, Aldo.
David Daiches and Anthony Thorlby, eds. Literature and Western Civilization, II: The Medieval World (London: Aldus, 1973), pp. 579-600.
Sketches the rise of mercantilism in medieval Europe, and details the presence of the "bourgeois spirit" in Boccaccio's "Decameron" and Chaucer's CT, evident in realism, economic motivation, and challenges to aristocratic privilege. Similar in their…
If we recall the Thomistic distinctions among vows, oaths, and promises and if we focus on action rather than on character, the long complaints in FranT can be seen as essential to the structure rather than as excrescences.
Assesses Boccaccio's and Chaucer's attitudes toward their sources by examining the relations of their narrators with Cressida in "Filostrato" and TC. Cressida's legendary status as dishonest and inconstant had been established before Boccaccio and…
Heffernan, Carol Falvo.
Florilegium 22 (2005): 105-20.
Cipolla's tale concludes a set of stories focusing on wit, and PardT ends a fragment that precedes one centered on poetic language. The tales of both speakers coincide in "genre, character, theme, and placement," even though Cipolla improvises his…
Assesses the Proem to Boccaccio's Il Filostrato as a source for TC: the artist's "dual-self of helpless lover and ingenious artist" is split between Troilus and Pandarus, and Boccaccio's two ladies, Filomena and Criseis, "are first merged and later…
Ginsberg, Warren.
Suzanne Conklin Akbari and James Simpson, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 303-24.
Treats Boccaccio's romances, concentrating on "Filostrato" and "Teseida," "as if they were intralingual translations,' by analyzing the collusion and contravention of the narratives' aims by their own prologues. These prologues, apparently unknown or…
A detailed comparison of the Job story and Boccaccio's Decameron 10.10. Boccaccio's novella is seen as a variation of the biblical Job story that lacks the justification of God's divine attributes. Schöpflin argues that Boccaccio and subsequent…
Argues that CT (specifically GP, KnT, MilT, and RvT) and Bodiam Castle "converge as ideological constructions," comparing the lives of Chaucer and Sir Edward Dallingridge (builder of Bodiam)--both witnessed at the Scrope vs. Grosvenor trial--and…
Edwards, A. S. G.
Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel, eds. The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 53-67.
Examines various aspects of late-medieval manuscript compilation in light of Selden B.24, a "transitional collection" that extends the Chaucerian canon and connects with the emerging print culture.
The fifteenth-century MS Fairfax 16, considered the finest of the Oxford Group of Chaucer manuscripts, contains BD, HF, Anel, Mars, and PF. Regarding the frontispiece, a mythological illumination for Mars, Norton-Smith advances a new theory of…
Boffey, Julia,and A. S. G. Edwards.
Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline, eds. Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400-1602 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), pp. 3-13.
Assesses orthographic and lexical "Scottishisms" and their effects on meter in the poems of Bodleian MS Arch Selden B. 24, including TC, PF, LGW, CT, Truth, and poems by Hoccleve, Lydgate, and others. The density of such Scottishisms is generally…
Costomiris, Robert.
The Library, 6th ser., 20 (1998): 99-117.
Uses correspondences between the Tanner texts of Clanvowe's poem and that printed in Thynne's 1532 edition of Chaucer to argue that Thynne's dependence on this manuscript was greater than scholars have avowed.
Štrmelj, Lidija.
In Gert Hofmann and Snježana Zorić, eds. Presence of the Body: Awareness in and beyond Experience (Boston, Mass.: Brill Rodopi, 2017), pp. 77-91.
Characterizes the Wife of Bath as "full of life and energy," with a "material" rather than a "romantic" view of marriage, based in her "sexual instincts." Summarizes the GP description of the Wife as well as that in WBP, offers a Freudian analysis…
Choi, Yejung.
Feminist Studies in English Literature 10 (2002): 223-44
Choi explores the relationship between body and text in medieval hermeneutics. arguing that MLT represents the uncontrollable signification of the text and reveals how textual transmission becomes a process of textual transgression.
Blum, Martin Albert.
Dissertation Abstracts International 59 (1998): 163A.
Examines various ways gender, ethnicity, and disease interact with social class in selected texts. In MLT, race is less important than place in salvation history. The tale of Lucrece (LGW) seeks to keep women virginal for marital traffic. Erotic…
Tisdale, Charles P. R.
American Benedictine Review 24 (1973): 365-80.
Commends BD for its reconciliation of extreme tones: despair derived from "earth-shattering sorrow" and "intellectual hope" derived from "heaven-sent consolation." Inspired by Bothus's "Consolation of Philosophy," Chaucer achieves consolation and…
Cherniss, Michael D.
Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1987.
Studies six medieval poems in a genre structured by the "Consolation of Philosophy," beginning with an exploration of Boethius's literary strategies and shaping influence and continuing to examine "De planctu naturae," "Roman de la Rose," "Confessio…
Fein, Susanna.
Wendy Harding, ed. Drama, Narrative and Poetry in The Canterbury Tales (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2003), 195-212.
FranT describes a true-love marriage in Boethian terms and impossible contradictions, in a language that strains for comprehensibility amidst paradox and conditions that tend to undo prior terms. Stability and union replace oppositions, dualities,…
