Ramsey, Roy Vance.
Studies in Bibliography 35 (1982): 133-54.
Statistical analysis shows CT MSS Hengwrt and Ellesmere as the work of two scribes of closely similar hands, who possibly trained under the same master. The Ellesmere scribe himself is probably "the source of much of the editing" in that MS.
Pidd, Michael,Estelle Stubbs, and Clare E. Thomson.
Norman Blake and Peter Robinson, eds. The Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers, Volume II (London: King's College, Office for Humanities Communications, 1997): pp. 61-68.
Describes how the marginal note "Stokes" in the Hengwrt manuscript of CT may have been erased in a conservation project in 1956, arguing that attention must be given to facsimiles and descriptions as well as to manuscripts. Explores the implications…
Why the digressions in FranT? Formalist criticism identifies Dorigen's digression on the black rocks as a free (abstract) motif and, paradoxically, as an agent of the plot (normally a material motif). Thus Chaucer makes abstraction the cause of…
Orlemanski, Julie.
In Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld, eds. Chaucer and the Subversion of Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 125-45.
Argues that the Ceyx and Alcyone episode in BD, unlike its antecedents in Ovid and Machaut, reveals the inadequacy of "elegiac poetics," particularly the formal strategy of prosopopoeia, to "voice" the dead. Similarly, in the body of the dream, White…
Describes techniques used by medieval authors for presenting human emotions, drawing examples from various writers, and focusing on Chaucer's uses of the heart as a physical object or a concrete image in depicting the pains of love, whether caused by…
Clark, S. L.,and Julian N. Wasserman.
Chaucer Review 18 (1984): 316-27.
Hundreds of references in TC to the heart are not casual but calculated. The heart is both a vessel and something that can be placed within a vessel. Allusions contrast Pandarus and Diomede with the two lovers and also contrast Criseyde with…
Leyerle, John.
Larry D. Benson, ed. The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature. Harvard English Studies, no. 5 (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 113-45.
Examines "heart" (in its several meanings) as the nucleus of BD, and "prison"/"chain" as one in KnT, treating each as a structuring device and a wellspring of the themes and imagery in its respective narrative. Similar nuclei function comically in…
Mallette, Karen.
Suzanne Conklin Akbari and James nSimpson, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 184-96.
Discusses the framed narratives and their progression throughout the Mediterranean, emphasizing framed tales, especially in Italian, that "present narration as a high-stakes wager that may save a population in peril." By examining this Italian…
Robinson, James.
Helen Fulton, ed. Chaucer and Italian Culture (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2021), pp. 45-90.
Demonstrates "intertexuality" linking Chaucer with Dante's "Inferno," 10, and Boccaccio's "Decameron," 6.9. Argues for Chaucer’s rich understanding of his Italian source material, which he uses "purposefully and playfully."
Argues that critical efforts to provide a harmonious interpretation of PF are misdirected because the poem is designed to represent the cacophony of this world rather than heavenly concord.
Leicester, H. Marshall, Jr.
Chaucer Review 9 (1974): 109-24.
Argues that PF "exemplifies and confronts" late fourteenth-century concern with the role of subjective perspective in considering traditional authority. Through various stylized, "thought-marked" perspectives, the poem presents the "disruptive force"…
Historical gothic detective fiction set in the frame of the CT, in which a carpenter tells a story to the rest of the pilgrims about the solving of mysterious murders.
Garbaty, Thomas J.
Chaucer Newsletter 14:1 (1992): 2, 7.
Even though the Hainault Forest in Essex derives from Old English "hyneholt" ("monastic forest"), owned by the Benedictine abbey of Barking, Chaucer's many connections with Flemish Hainault are evident even here since John of Gaunt contributed to the…
Hill, Granville Sydnor.
Dissertation Abstracts International 38 (1977): 1409A.
The rhetorical and narrative conventions used by Chaucer in his saintly tales reveal him an accomplished hagiographer. An analysis of the narrator's rhetoric in describing the characters in GP produces a better understanding of the relation between…
Dean, James M.
R. F. Yeager and Brian W. Gastle, eds. Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower (New York: Modern Language Association, 2011), pp. 143-55.
Compares and contrasts Gower's tale of Florent with WBT and "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle," arguing that Gower and Chaucer "grapple with ethical circumstances in human relationships" (matters of right conduct and governance,…
Hughes combines travelogue and appreciative criticism as he traces the lives and footsteps of Chaucer, Froissart, and Boccaccio, exploring what each author contributed to growth in popular literature. Focuses on Chaucer's life and CT.
apRoberts, Robert [P.]
Wolf-Dietrich Bald and Horst Weinstock, eds. Medieval Studies Conference Aachen 1983 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1984), pp. 131-41.
Eugene Vance's belief that Criseyde's love is a matter of sexual arousal culminating when Troilus rides by is at odds with Chaucer's depiction of the growth of Criseyde's love, changed from the "Filostrato," to show Criseyde falling in love at first…
Cannon, Christopher.
Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2004.
Cannon combines Marxist and Hegelian ideas of "form" to argue that "form is that which thought and things have in common" (5), enabling a valuation of form as a record of thinking in and about a culture. Formalist criticism (in this sense) of Middle…
Bronfman, Judith.
Dissertation Abstracts International 38 (1977): 2105A-06A.
When the Griselda legend first appears in English literature, in ClT, Griselda is praised for her patience. In subsequent versions, as the centuries pass, her patience loses its moral worth and comes to be equated with unhealthy submissiveness.
Verbal echoes and character parallels such as the Wife's hag and the Friar's yeoman/fiend indicate that the Friar's purpose is parody. He uses his theme of moral "maistrie" to debunk the Wife's marital "maistrie." His view of human nature is…
Siewers, Alfred K.
Louise Westling, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 31-44.
Assesses the ecopoetics of the Celtic underworld in the "Immram Brain," "Tochmarc Étaíne," and the "Mabinogi" as background to green-world concerns in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." Closes with commentary on parallel concerns in the opening of GP…
Smith, Jeremy (J.)
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 95 (1994): 433-37.
Some northernisms in RvT have been dismissed as quasi-northern or as scribal misreadings. However, these forms are genuine attempts by post-Shift southern scribes to reflect a pre-Shift northern pronunciation.
