Peck, Russell A.
Annuale Mediaevale 8 (1967): 17-37.
Explores the imagery, action, and word-plays of SNPT to show that they are "concerned with the interplay" between the dark, mundane world and the bright heavenly one. In their "werk," both the Second Nun and Cecilia help others to achieve "their full…
A comparison of the medieval descriptions of idealized feminine beauty with depiction of women in medieval and modern Japanese literature points up characteristic Japanese aesthetics and philosophy of beauty.
WBT, FrT, and SumT exhibit a thematic unity through common concern of "championing one...of two antithetical ways of perceiving the world." Wife and Summoner tell tales from an Aristotelian perspective, the Friar from a Platonic perspective.
Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans, eds.
University Park : Pennsylvania State University Press; Exeter: University of Exeter Press 1999.
Anthologizes fifty-seven excerpts from works written in Middle English, most of them prologues, documenting the nature and history of "Middle English literary theory," i.e., the "sophisticated and still-influential traditions of theorizing . . .…
Doob, Penelope Reed.
Ithaca, N.Y., and London : Cornell University Press, 1990.
Considers models, taxonomy, metaphor, etymologies, and verbal implications of the labyrinth; mazes in medieval art and architecture; moral labyrinths; and textual labyrinths in medieval literature. Examines Chaucer's use of the labyrinth in BD, CT,…
Gellrich, Jesse M.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985.
Using insights of Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Barthes, and Derrida, and treating the history of textuality from Augustine to Chaucer, Gellrich examines the relationship of literature to other medieval cultural forms that are often expressed in the…
Howard, Donald R.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
Although CT is unfinished, it is aesthetically complete. The GP is structured to reveal typifying groups. The tales are ordered into thematic clusters. The ParsT provides a satisfying closure. The structure of the poem is the interlace or…
Defines and describes the social and rhetorical emphases that characterize the persona and poetic "common voice" of late-medieval English "public poetry," exemplified here most extensively in analyses of Langland's "Piers Plowman" and Gower's…
Sebastian, John T.
Seeta Chaganti, ed. Medieval Poetics and Social Practice: Responding to the Work of Penn R. Szittya (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), pp. 95-108.
Looks at the public aspect of devotional poetry, referring to Chaucer and PF.
Dean, James M., and Christian Zacher, eds.
Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992.
A collection of original essays by friends and students of Donald R. Howard--Oliver H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University--who died in 1987 at the age of fifty-nine.
For individual essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for…
Tasioulas, Jacqueline.
Charlotte Brewer and Barry Windeatt, eds. Traditions and Innovations in the Study of Middle English Literature: The Influence of Derek Brewer (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), pp. 111-27.
Discusses medieval views of feminine beauty as related to Troilus's desire and the "ordinariness of Criseyde."
Pearsall, Derek.
Helen Cooney, ed. Nation, Court and Culture: New Essays on Fifteenth-Century English Poetry (Dublin and Portland, Ore.: Four Courts Press, 2001), pp. 15-27.
There was no growing sense of an English nation until the time of Henry VIII, although there were momentary surges in 1290-1340 and 1410-1420, the latter focused on Chaucer. Language is crucial to nation building, and the process of "accrediting…
Wicher, Andrzej.
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 36: 289-301, 2001.
In HF, the description of Fame's hall raises questions about the status of classical authors. The poem as a whole reflects "Chaucer's struggle to find some place [. . .] for his individual talent in the mainstream of the Western and Mediterranean…
McGregor, James H.
Chaucer Review 11 (1977): 338-50.
The Chaucer portraits in Hoccleve and TC are iconographic, not realistic, stressing Chaucer's role as artist-philosopher and teacher of poets and princes alike.
Wailes, Stephen A.
Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 5.2 (1969): 92-101.
Opens a discussion of hare-hunting as parody in the Middle High German fabliau "Das Häslein" with comments on Chaucer's Monk (GP 191-92 and MkP 7.1945-48) and, with reference to medieval hunting practice, shows that the German work is farcical.
Suggests that the Dreamer in BD is "on a kind of hunt," knowing all along the cause of the Black Knight's grief but seeking to "draw him out." His hunt joins with the "forest chase," the love quest, and "Fortune's stalking of Blanche," so that…
Greene, Richard Leighton.
Notes and Queries 211 (1966): 169-71.
Discourages pursuit of ironic and sexual implications in details in Tho (7.748-59), suggesting that the mention of "bukke and hare" is best understood as parodic conjoining of two categories of hunted beasts.
Utley, Frances Mae.
Dissertation Abstracts International 35 (1975): 6684A
The systematized tradition of the "Chasse Royal," as described in contemporary handbooks of venery, establishes a pattern for the action of BD and explains many of the images and allusions.
Clark, John Frank.
Dissertation Abstracts International 43 (1983): 3490A.
Three other ME poems--"The Parlement of the Thre Ages," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," "The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn"--and BD associate hunting with death. In Chaucer's dream vision the hunt draws the narrator to the bereaved so…
Allmand, Christopher.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
This distillation of modern scholarship traces not only the causes and conduct of the Hundred Years' War but also its effects and reflections, including literature, in both societies, England and France.
Bellis, Joanna.
Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 2016.
Examines the narrative and linguistic effects of the Hundred Years War, and claims that the war functions similarly to the Conquest of 1066 as an event that shapes a relationship between word and war and emphasizes the mimetic relationship between…
Argues that the Hundred Years' War has been overemphasized as a moment in which war, identity, and language coalesced to form distinct English and French nations and vernaculars. Portrayals of France in the works of Chaucer and others are not…
Bennett, J. A. W.
Boitani, Piero, ed.
Wolfeboro, N.H.: Boydell & Brewer; Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1982.
Fifteen essays, some reprinted from earlier publications, including essays on Langland, Chaucer (one reprinted essay on PF), Gower, James I of Scotland, Henryson, the vernacular, liturgy, and the "nosce te ipsum" theme. For five essays that pertain…
