Locates and assesses a prevailing irony in TC: the narrator and each of the major characters follows the "same pattern" of early knowledge of Fortune's instability, "followed by self-deception, and eventual submission to the facts." Love and truth…
Common characters and incidents in PardT and three Irish versions of Aarne-Thompson folktale Type 763 may indicate cross-fertilization between folklore and medieval literature. Most arguments favor an oral source for the PardT. The episode of the…
Meecham-Jones, Simon.
Corinne Saunders, Francoise Le Saux, and Neil Thomas, eds. Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses to Warfare (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 147-67.
In TC, Chaucer avoids focusing on war, revealing his awareness of its importance in perpetrating the aristocratic culture of his day, as well as his need to evade the expectations imposed on him as a writer. Conflict and the psychological disjunction…
Nolan, Maura.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 41 (2019): 33-71, A1-A12; 6 b&w illus.
Combines computer-assisted stylometry and close reading to explore Chaucer's concept of style and his uses of the word "style" itself as they compare with those of John Gower and John Lydgate. Clarifies aspects of stylometric analysis, distinguishes…
Heng, Geraldine
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Provides a comprehensive view of how "race" is defined in the premodern world and addresses the process of "race-making" within and outside the European context. In particular, discusses how Jews in England were "racialized" and analyzes the "sensory…
Collects excerpts documenting how "the modern study of Middle English became the way it is." Thirteen excerpts discuss language, from George Hickes (1642-1715) to James A. H. Murray (1837-1915), and nineteen consider literary criticism and…
Includes discussion of Rita Copeland's representation of Chaucer as an author intending to supersede previous texts; where Chaucer would supplant classical texts, Langland is presented as attempting to conserve and extend scriptural/liturgical texts.
Historical novel set in London, Kent, Calais, and during a pilgrimage to Durham, 1386; the second in a series that features John Gower as first-person narrator investigating criminal and political events, in this case a mass murder that involves…
Hill, Michelle Queen.
Open access Ph.D. dissertation University of Georgia, 2016.
Available at https://www.libs.uga.edu/.
Accessed February 7, 2021.
Explores how genre conventions and expectations vary between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century and produce different views of history. Includes discussion of BD and KnT for the ways that Chaucer reshapes their conventional genres (dream…
Haman, Mark Stefan.
Dissertation Abstracts International 42 (1982): 4444A.
Certain fourteenth-century works (the York plays, "Confessio Amantis," "Piers Plowman," CYT) function by placing inadequate characters in crisis situations. The audience learns from their limited reactions. Most complex is MerT: the narrator's…
Storm, Melvin.
Studies in Scottish Literature 28 (1993): 105-22.
Chaucer's moral judgment of Troilus may be uncertain, and his judgment of Criseyde is definitely uncertain. Readers have attempted to clarify these judgments by appeals outside the text to law and theology; however, reading Henryson's "Testament" as…
Matsuda, Takami.
Yuichiro Azuma, Kotaro Kawasaki, and Koichi Kano, eds. Chaucer and English and American Literature: Essays Commemorating the Retirement of Professor Masatoshi Kawasaki (Tokyo: Kinseido, 2015), pp. 44–59.
Argues that the medieval notion of wonder helps to explain the Franklin's interruption of SqT.The Squire presents the marvels in his tale as explainable in scientific terms, in accord with the philosophical notion of wonder. The Franklin similarly…
Sheridan explores ways that language is like money in acts of interpretation, examining the role of the Host in CT, readers' valuations of various tales, patronage and interpretive control, and the "mercantile" strategies of May (MerT) and the Wife…
Nakao, Yoshiyuki.
Michiko Ogura, ed. Textual and Contextual Studies in Medieval English: Towards the Reunion of Linguistics and Philology (Frankfurt am Main, 2006), pp. 51-73.
Nakao assesses Criseyde's comment on trusting Pandarus (TC 3.587) as ambiguous, considering "phonological, morphological, lexical/collocational, syntactic and pragmatic" aspects of Chaucer's use of "moste" as an auxiliary and an adverb.
Ganim, John M.
William A. Quinn, ed. Chaucer's Dream Visions and Shorter Poems (New York and London: Garland, 1999), pp. 463-76.
Assesses criticism of Chaucer's dream visions and lyrics for how it has "predicted" the present state of Chaucer scholarship and as a "test case" for various critical approaches. Issues include the subject and subjectivity; resistance to new critical…
Hammond, Paul.
Seventeenth Century 23 (2008): 142-59.
Hammond compares and contrasts Dryden's "Palamon and Arcite" from his "Fables Ancient and Modern" with its source, Chaucer's KnT, finding that Dryden reworked religious and political concerns to create a "macaronic fabric" that combines classical, …
Watts, William H.
Dissertation Abstracts International 51 (1990): 1224A-1225A.
Though read as tragedy, comedy or satire, TC can be understood as "compilatio" or Bakhtinian "polyglossa." With Boccaccio's plot of tragic love, Chaucer incorporates a subtext of Boethian philosophy (as treated by Jean de Meun) and allusions to…
Olson, Clair C.
Beryl Rowland, ed. Chaucer and Middle English Studies in honour of Rossell Hope Robbins (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974), pp. 164-72.
Describes the structure of the so-called marriage group, focusing on how the pairings of FrT and SumT and MerT and SqT contribute to the sense of dramatic climax fulfilled in FranT.
Martin, Ellen E.
John M. Hill and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi, eds. The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Reconstructive Polyphony. Essays in Honor of Robert O. Payne (Madison, N.J., and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses, 2000), pp. 106-29.
Examines the relationships between (mis)reading and (mis)writing, exegesis, and the unconscious in HF.
Fisher, John H.
J. B. Bessinger and R. Raymo, eds. Medieval Studies in Honor of Lillian Herlands Hornstein (New York: New York University Press, 1976), pp. 111-21.
The spaces left for illustrations in this ms, when correlated with the text immediately surrounding them, can rather easily be mentally completed with illustrations of the action of TC or with portrayals of court scenes of the readings of the poem…
Item not seen; described in an online review by Joy Calderwood (http://www.reviewers-choice.com/the_insomniac_tales.htm) as thirteen "Chick Lit" short stories by various women writers in imitation of CT.
Reflects on the term "object" in relation to whether it means a manuscript, circulating text, or real object; includes recurrent references to Chaucer and Chaucer scholarship.
Arduini, Roberto.
Roberto Arduini, Giampaolo Canzonieri, and Claudio A. Testi, eds. Tolkien and the Classics (Zurich: Walking Tree, 2019), pp. 105-20.
Surveys evidence for the influence of Chaucer on Tolkien and adds comments on his impact on Tolkien's ""scenes of common life in the inns and in the figures of the innkeeper and the miller."
Jonassen, Frederick B.
Susanna Freer Fein, David Raybin, and Peter C. Braeger, eds. Rebels and Rivals: The Contestive Spirit in The Canterbury Tales. Studies in Medieval Culture, no. 29 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991), pp. 1-35.
Mikhail Bakhtin's distinction between "carnivalesque abandon and lenten mortification" and Victor Turner's distinction between liminality and "communitas" illuminate the dual nature of the pilgrimage--or of the material and the spiritual, the…
