Voth, Grant L.
Chantilly, Va.: Teaching Company, 2007.
Includes a thirty-minute audio lecture (Part 2 of 4, disc 9, Lecture 17) on "Chaucer's 'The Canterbury Tales'," with emphasis on the frame narrative (in contrast to Boccaccio's "Decameron"), appropriateness of tales to tellers, dramatic interaction…
Lerer, Seth.
Chantilly, Va.: The Teaching Company, 1998.
Lerer's lecture, "Chaucer's English" (Part 1, Lecture 10; 17 minutes) comments on the opening eighteen lines of GP, on diction and etymology, verse form, and linguistic conditions at the time. "Dialect Jokes and Literary Representation" (Part 1,…
Downes, Stephanie, and Rebecca F. McNamara.
Literature Compass 13.6 (2016): 444-56.
Surveys "current critical trends" in the history of emotions and in Middle English literature, considering modern and postmodern criticism of TC ("a poem of emotional extremes") and "Sir Orfeo," and suggesting future directions for the study of…
Smith, Valerie.
J. A. Jowitt and R. K. S. Taylor, eds. Self and Society in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure. Bradford Centre Occasional Papers, no. 4 (Bradford: University of Leeds Department of Adult and Continuing Education, 1982), pp. 61-79.
Smith assesses characterizations of Criseyde, focusing on Chaucer's, Henryson's, and Shakespeare's characterizations but commenting on others. She argues that the character must be understood in light of contemporaneous attitudes toward, for example,…
Brewer, Derek.
Reingard M. Nischik and Barbara Korte, eds. Modes of narrative: Approaches to American, Canadian, and British Fiction. (Wurzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 1990,) pp. 166-78.
TC is a dramatic monologue delivered by a narrator who is distinctly detached from Chaucer himself. Brewer reexamines the narrator's position and function in TC and the history of the concept of that narrator.
Obermeier, Anita.
Amsterdam and Atlanta, Ga. : Rodopi, 1999.
Surveys authorial apologies in literature from the classical period to the late Middle Ages, discussing classical tradition, Christian tradition, medieval Latin tradition, and medieval vernacular literatures, including German, French, Italian,…
Robertson, D. W., Jr.
John Mahoney and John Esten Keller, eds. Mediaeval Studies in Honor of Urban Tigner Holmes, Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), pp. 165-95.
Assesses BD as a late-medieval "public funerary poem" rather than a portrait of psychological grief, interpreting the Black Knight as a generic, Boethian figure deprived by fortune, rather than as John of Gaunt, and discussing the character Blanche…
Askins, William.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 7 (1985): 87-105.
Details in ManT parallel the character and life of Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix; this is consistent with the tale's interest in gossip and aristocratic misbehavior.
Sasagawa, Hisaaki.
Journal of the General Education Department, Niigata University 12 (1981): 179-91.
The historical present and perfect tenses in KnT could be said to function mainly to express vividness, which is closely related to the nature of orally delivered poetry.
Payne, Robert O.
Rossell Hope Robbins, ed. Chaucer at Albany (New York: Franklin, 1975), pp. 179-92.
The idea that Chaucerian criticism must be approached from the premise that Chaucer wrote only for a select court circle is bad history and bad criticism.
Discusses the dating of BD, correcting previous scholarship by adducing evidence from a letter by Louis de Mâle, count of Flanders, that helps to establish the death of Blanche of Lancaster as 12 September 1368. Comments on the identity of the Black…
Condren, Edward I.
Chaucer Review 5.3 (1971): 195-212.
Challenges traditional dating of BD and identifications of its characters, arguing for 1377 as a date of composition (eight years after the death of Blanche) and reading Octovyen as both Edward III and John of Gaunt, the Black Knight as a younger…
Du Boulay, F. R. H.
Derek Brewer, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer. Writers and their Background (London: G. Bell, 1974), pp. 33-57.
Characterizes Chaucer's world as "lightly peopled," mobile, in economic transition, and hierarchical; characterizes Chaucer as economically successful, relatively untouched by tumultuous events, entertaining, modest, and with "a foot in several…
The setting and select characters of SqT have historical basis in the reigns of Ozbeg Khan of the Golden Horde at Sarai (ruled 1313-41) and Mamluk sultan el-Melik en-Nasir at Cairo (ruled variously 1291-1340). Their failed alliance influenced the…
Kelliher, Hilton.
Notes and Queries 222 (1977): 197.
The Devonshire MS. (c. 1450-60) of CT, purchased at Christie's on June 6, 1974, by an American dealer, had been noted as having a miniature full-length picture of Chaucer. The miniature is of a man seated on a flowery bank pointing to a gilt purse…
Lynch, Kathryn L.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988.
Examines the "marriage of matter and form in high medieval philosophy and poetics," the "grammar of dream and vision," and vision and dreams in Alain de Lille's "De planctu naturae, Jean de Meun, Dante, and Gower. Lynch presents a model that may be…
Bart, Patricia R.
Donald Prudlo, ed. The Origin, Development, and Refinement of Medieval Religious Mendicancies (Boston, Mass.: Brill, 2011), pp. 307-34.
Comments on the presence and treatments of friars in three Middle English writers, including discussion of Chaucer's depictions of friars and the Friar in CT and his uses of anti-mendicant literature as source material.
Cameron, Allen Barry.
Studies in Short Fiction 5.2 (1968): 119-27.
Assesses the "artistic function" of Emily in KnT, focusing on her place in the theme of order. As the poem moves from chaos to order, she symbolizes "psychological and cosmic order" and serves as an "exemplar of Fortune." As "natural woman," she also…
Koretsky, Allen C.
Annuale Mediaevale 17 (1976): 22-47.
Chaucer's chivalric heroes embody the theme of moral "gentilesse," though these knights are often depicted as corrigibly flawed in their characters. The romances emphasize their private lives (especially in love) over purely military or spectacular…
Traces the development of Troilus' character in TC, arguing that he grows from ignorance to wisdom in confronting the "fundamental mystery of the human condition": his noble, "tragic error . . . is to have tried to love a human being with an ideal…
DeVoto, Marya.
Studies in Medievalism 9 (1997): 148-70.
Lanier in the early 1880s produced versions of Malory, Froissart, the Percy ballads, and other works aimed at exposing boys to the chivalry and simple piety of the Middle Ages. The introduction to "The Boy's Froissart" cites Chaucer as a "large and…
Hanna, Ralph,III.
English Manuscript Studies, 1100-1700 1 (1989): 64-84.
Largely ignored for forty years, Manly and Rickert's "The Text of the 'Canterbury Tales'" is being reconsidered because it favors the Hengwrt. Chaucer's text is now being reconstructed by "Hengwrtism." The soft approach takes Hengwrt as a guide but…
Stubbs, Estelle, ed.
Leicester : Scholarly Digital Editions, 2000.
Full-color complete facsimile of the Hengwrt manuscript (Hg) and the Merthyr fragment (Me) of CT. Includes transcriptions of Hg and the Ellesmere manuscript by Michael Pidd and Estelle Stubbs, arranged for comparison; transcription of Me by Paul…
