Birney, Earle.
Notes and Queries 204 (1959): 345-47.
Clarifies the Franklin's "morning dish" of a "wine-sop," suggesting dietary or medicinal implications necessary to compensate for his culinary excesses.
Purdon, Liam O., and Julian N. Wasserman.
Chaucer Review 33 (1998): 112-15.
Chaucer's somewhat unusual association of his Franklin with food may reflect the frequent migration of the Exchequer from Westminster to York and the prioritizing of the York food trade as a result. The Franklin may have been a York franklin who…
Ronquist, E. C.
Robert Myles and David Williams, eds. Chaucer and Language: Essays in Honour of Douglas Wurtele (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001), pp. 44-60 and 192-98.
A variety of ethical systems--Christian, Boethian, Epicurean, Ciceronian, etc.--were available to Chaucer's audience, and he engages these systems in ways that enable the audience to observe and choose among them. Like commentators on Epicurean…
The analogies between the Franklin and Dorigen allow Chaucer to relate class to gender and to explore the ways romance imagines the possibilities and the constraints of self-definition.
Coss, Peter.
Stephen H. Rigby, ed., with the assistance of Alastair J. Minnis. Historians on Chaucer: The "General Prologue" to the "Canterbury Tales" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 227-46.
Examines current scholarship to illuminate the portrait of the Franklin in GP, arguing that it reflects Chaucer's various opinions about "the social position of franklins in real life" and "the roles Chaucer has its Franklin perform" in FranT.
Morsy, Faten I.
Dissertation Abstracts International 51 (1990): 1605A.
CT is treated, along with the "Decameron," in part 2, chapter 4, following background analysis of "One Thousand and One Nights" in Arabic tradition and preceding consideration of Cervantes and Borges.
The dream-frame ("envelope") of PF reveals Chaucer's struggling with the problems of poetic composition, particularly of fusing form and context. The poem's unity is a function of the narrator's stance, more divorced from the poem's subject (Love)…
Gittes, Katharine Slater.
Dissertation Abstracts International 44 (1983): 1444A.
Frame narratives (Arabic in origin) display open-endedness, structural looseness, and autonomy of component tales. In CT, Chaucer combines Arabic, classical, and Christian elements and draws on their mutual tensions.
Awareness of narratological levels helps us understand differences in intent in Gower and Chaucer. Comparison of Gower's "Tale of Florent" and Chaucer's WBT illustrates these differences. Overall, Gower has a purpose and achieves closure; Chaucer…
Boenig, Robert.
Ann Hurley and Kate Greenspan, eds. So Rich a Tapestry: The Sister Arts and Cultural Studies (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1995), pp. 181-99.
Like the "Cloisters Apocalypse," HF depicts the Day of Judgment. Both works "select, rearrange, and fragment" the biblical account of the apocalypse, reminding us that interpretation is necessary for sinners.
Chaucer's NPT tests the limits of the fable tradition. Containing two complete fables--one from the first half (ending with the cock's downfall and capture) and another from the second (don't open your mouth)--the "Tale" combines to form a third…
Anderson, David.
John V. Fleming and Thomas J. Heffernan, eds. Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings, No. 2, 1986. (Knoxville, Tenn.: New Chaucer Society, 1987), pp. 113-25.
Anderson examines Chaucer's use of Statius's "Thebaid," specifically the description of the temple of the goddess Clemence, within medieval traditions that saw her temple as a "type of foreshadowing of the Church," associated with the "Unknown God." …
Bell, Adrian R.
John France, ed. Mercenaries and Paid Men: The Mercenary Identity in the Middle Ages. Proceedings of a Conference Held at University of Wales, Swansea, 7th-9th July 2005. Smithsonian History of Warfare, no. 47 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 301-15.
Bell analyzes the military record of 5,600 soldiers from Chaucer's lifetime to discover how many had records of military service similar to the experience of Chaucer's Knight. It was not uncommon for English soldiers to serve as mercenaries in…
Buckler, Patricia Prandini.
Dissertation Abstracts International 46 (1986): 2153A.
Studies the literacy, education, and cultural milieu of Chaucer's audience, the courtly circle and the upper socioeconomic echelons, especially the GP portrait of the Pardoner and PardT, to suggest reader response based on theories of Iser,…
Cooper, Helen.
New Medieval Literatures 3: 39-66, 1999.
Assesses Chaucer's relation to Dante as one of "palpable disbelief" in the Italian's claims for authority about the afterlife and God's judgments. In MkT and HF, Chaucer adapts Dante to establish a more worldly and more skeptical sense of poetry.…
Near, Michael Raymond.
Dissertation Abstracts International 49 (1989): 3359A.
Characters' sense of identity emerges variously from the varying contexts in which the selves operate. In medieval literature, this sense of identity, allied to function rather than "object-self," is drawn through purpose; "his own romantic vision"…
Turner, Marion.
Frank Grady, ed. The Cambridge Companion to "The Canterbury Tales" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 1–20.
Emphasizes Chaucer’s development of form in CT. Demonstrates that Chaucer’s experiments with form in CT and other works, including TC, are traced to origins in Boccaccio's works, and argues for a connection between these formal experiments and…
Clopper, Lawrence M.
Medievalia et Humanistica 15 (1987): 119-46.
Considers romance as a vehicle for the resolution of philosophical and theological problems, the relation of history to romance, and the rhetorical systems of each genre. KnT, TC, and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" illustrate how Chaucer and the…
Eade, J. C.
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
On the use of astrology from medieval times through the eighteenth century, the book is in three parts: an explanation of genuine astronomy and astronomical terms; an explanation of false premises in astrological schematics; and application of…
Braswell, Mary Flowers.
Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2016
New York: Routledge, 2017.
A critical biography of Haweis that emphasizes her work as a Chaucer scholar, critic, editor, and illustrator, explaining her accomplishments in relation to the better-known Chaucerians of the nineteenth century and exploring why her influence is not…
Stevens, Martin, and James Paxson.
Studies in Iconography 13 (1989-90): 48-79.
The conflation of the fool with the devil in medieval representation reflected unstable boundaries between the witless man, who had the protection of the Church, and his imitator, the artificial fool. The Wakefield Satan, an artificial fool, is…
Coleman, Joyce.
Carolyn P. Collette, ed. The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 33-58.
Coleman surveys the betrothals, marriage, and literary patronage of Philippa of Lancaster, suggesting that she may have given Chaucer a copy of Deschamps's "Ballade 765," which may have helped to inspire Chaucer's interest in flower and leaf debates…
Lanier, Sidney.
Dissertation Abstracts International 37 (1977): 5800A.
LGW provides an important statement of Chaucer's poetics. It recognizes his genuine debt to his French contemporaries. The poet-dreamer does not reject or parody the tradition of "fin amor," but under its direction he acknowledges the poet's duty…
Pearsall, Derek.
Anne Marie D'Arcy and Alan J. Fletcher, eds. Studies in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts in Honour of John Scattergood (Dublin: Four Courts, 2005), pp. 259-69.
Reads the two title poems in the context of contemporary court activities and conventions as "attempts to present a moralized version of love within an allegorical framework."
Conti Camaiora, Luisa.
Giovanni Iamartino, Maria Luisa Maggioni, and Roberta Facchinetti, eds. Thou sittest at another boke: English Studies in Honour of Domenico Pezzini (Milan: Polimetrica, 2008), pp. 305-18.
The theme of doubleness in "The Floure and the Leafe" appears to have been especially attractive for Keats,whose attention was always drawn to the relationship between life and art. He found in the medieval poem an interesting "authority" that…
