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…
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.
Moll, Richard J.
Studies in Philology 119 (2022): 371-404.
Shows how Legh uses the dream vision structure from HF but employs a frame of memory and "argues against Chaucer's position that fame is unrelated to deserving."
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…
