Donovan, Mortimer J.
Philological Quarterly 36 (1957): 49–60.
Identifies parallels between the characterizations of January and May in MerT and those of Pluto and Proserpine in Claudian's "De Raptu Proserpinae." Anticipating the role of the fairy deities in Chaucer's Pear-Tree episode, Claudian's "myth of…
Bleeth, Kenneth A.
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. 45-60.
Examines various evocations of paradise as a garden in MerT as parodic inversions of Christian understanding of the scene of the Fall.
Wright, Will,and Steven Kaplan,eds.
Pueblo, Colo.: Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, [1993].
Fifty-seven essays on a variety of topics. For essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Image of Nature in Literature, the Media, and Society under Alternative Title.
Jones, Terry.
R. F. Yeager and Charlotte C. Morse, eds. Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V. A. Kolve (Asheville, N.C.: Pegasus Press, 2001), pp. 205-36; 15 color figs.
The GP description of the Knight suggests that he wore clothing and equipment typical of "military opportunism." More specifically, the Knight's dress and career call to mind Sir John Hawkwood, and changes to the Ellesmere portrait of the Knight may…
Miskimin, Alice (S.)
Modern Philology 77 (1979): 26-55.
Two sets of Chaucer illustrations altered the late eighteenth-century and early Romantic readers' perception of Chaucer: George Vertue's for Urry's edition (1721), and Thomas Stothard's for Bell (1782-83). Stothard's illustrations were later…
Analyzes the border illustrations and other codicological features of twelve manuscripts of the hooked-g group of manuscripts (including three CT manuscripts), using them to construct a "tentative chronology" of the dates of production and the…
Zeeman, Nicolette.
Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman, eds. Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2002, pp. 43-62.
For Chaucer and other medieval writers, "the figure of the idol is a means of focusing on problematic aspects of imaginative textuality and its contexts" (44). The sculptures in HF and Lollius in TC are partially represented or broken figures of…
Windram, Heather F., Christopher J. Howe, and Matthew Spencer.
Literary and Linguistic Computuing 20 (2005): 189-204
Uses a statistical technique derived from DNA research to reexamine the possibility of examplar changes in the copying of WBP. Results agree with earlier studies, indicating the usefulness of this method.
Robinson, Peter.
International Journal of English Studies 5.2 (2005): 115-32
Selection from among variant readings should be based on both literary judgment and variant distribution. In the case of MilT, the richest readings are likely to be Chaucer's own. Analysis of them leads to greater appreciation of MilT, "of the…
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…
