Browse Items (16035 total)

Examines how BD was influenced by the conventions of French and Latin literature. Concludes that the poet found novelty in classical authors and created his own imaginary love poem.

Analyzes the relationship of the real world to the dream world in BD and surveys noncourtly innovations derived from French romances, taking account of Chaucer scholarship of the late twentieth century.

The Knight in Black is not John of Gaunt but his young squire, who admired and served his dear duchess.

Relates the dream vision in BD to the tradition of the religious vision and the speeches of the Knight in Black to the resurrection theme.

Japanese translation of BD, with introduction and notes by Haruo Harada. Includes six essays by various scholars.
For individual essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Reading Chaucer's Book of the Duchess under Alternative Title.

Equat is not a holograph. The careful preparation of certain aspects of the text indicates a final version, and certain deletions and corrections suggest that the copier did not always understand the material he wrote down. The scribe was likely an…

Numerous Latin insertions on the manuscript suggest that the scribe was translating from a Latin exemplar into English. His notations indicate that he was identifying problems with translation and guarding against them when creating his final…

The Cambridge, Peterhouse MS.75.I, containing Equat, is a Chaucer holograph, perhaps the author's rough draft, since it contains copious revisions, both in content and style. The manuscript's notation, "Radix chaucer," was also written by the poet,…

Examines "soth," "fals," and various derivatives and near synonyms to suggest that Chaucer's basic question in HF is "what on earth can we trust?"

Contrary to critical tradition, Chaucer did not necessarily abandon LGW in boredom. A reading with attention to the discrepancies between LGWP and the legends, and to their ordering and their figurative language, reveals a careful and purposeful…

Examines exegetical interpretations of and allusions to the story of Ruth. Chaucer's allusion to Ruth in LGWP expresses alienation and belatedness and asserts poetic privilege and the interpretive creativity of marginality.

Chaucer is consistent in keeping an unsympathetic attitude to abnormal love and boldly cuts off the "revenge" part of the story of Tereus and Procne.

The tale of Philomela involves a love triangle of one male and two females. Chaucer's narrative focuses on Philomene whereas Gower's analogue focuses on both Philomene and Progne. Chaucer achieves his most important transformation of the story by…

Chaucer's ironic treatment of the Dido legend in LGW and HF involves a naive narrator who erroneously sympathizes with Dido; a medieval audience would have recognized differences from the treatment of Dido in Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Heroides. …

Constructed in contrast to Criseyde of TC, and despite the narrator's veneration, Alceste of LGWP is an unacceptable model for womankind. Even though she is usually regarded as self-serving, Criseyde is a positive model in TC.

Chapter 8 discusses differences between aristocratic and lower-class desire in PF, exploring how endless desire establishes sovereignty in the poem. The essay also assesses the relations of the poem with Scots tradition, especially the version of…

TC 1.78-82 is based on Machaut's Le jugement du roy de Behaigne and his Remede de fortune.

TC is a drama of "entente," concerned more with why people do things than what they do. Chaucer uses "entente" here much more heavily than in any of his earlier works and evokes its numerous meanings. As the poem progresses, there is a "slippage of…

Chaucer's transformations of his sources produced a work that invites multiple and open-ended responses. Benson contrasts TC and its source, Boccaccio's Filostrato; he assesses medieval and modern readership of TC; and he considers the story of Troy…

Anthologizes previously published essays and extracts from longer discussions of TC, BD, HF, and PF. Originally published between 1915 and 1986, the essays are arranged chronologically by work, with the majority (twelve of nineteen) dedicated to TC.

Chaucer's Pandarus is based to a certain extent on the character of Philosophy in Boethius's Consolation, and his Troilus resembles Boethius. Troilus's change during the poem can be attributed to the fact that "he has experienced the consolation of…

Chaucer's connection with Ralph Strode is important in shedding light on the poet's "philosophical preoccupations." His "tutorial" from Strode might have exposed him to the entire range of philosophical speculation of the day.

As a figure of the writer, Pandarus embodies the perverse nature of artist as observer. Having completed his narrative in the consummation scene, Pandarus must invent another tale to make "wommen unto men to comen" and to survive as an author.

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…

Provides historical evidence that if Pandarus was guilty of incest with Criseyde, he was also guilty of cuckolding Troilus. Similarly, if Gaunt had cuckolded Chaucer, he would not have been able to able to marry Chaucer's wife's sister, Katherine…