Schaar, Claes.
Lund: Gleerup, 1955. Rpt. 1967, with an Index.
Introduces the conventions of "impersonal" style based in classical rhetoric and developed in medieval rhetorical handbooks Then anatomizes the characteristics of Chaucer's descriptive techniques in relation to his "predecessors and contemporaries,"…
Holliday, Peter.
William K. Finley and Joseph Rosenblum, eds. Chaucer Illustrated: Five Hundred Years of the Canterbury Tales in Pictures (SAC 27 [2005], no. 105), pp. 326-67.
Holliday considers Eric Gill's wood-engraving illustrations to The Canterbury Tales (4 vols., Golden Cockerel Press, 1929-31) in light of Gill's collaboration with Robert Gibbings (owner of the press), the legacy of Edward Johnston (Gill's teacher of…
Argues that "linguistic irony which results from [an] extended pun on 'amor'" runs throughout CT, supported by the diction and imagery of gold. Spiritual love is associated recurrently with positive images of gold; earthly love, with negative ones.
Economou, George D.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972.
Traces the uses and development of personified Nature in classical and medieval traditions, focusing on Boethius, Bernard Silvestris, Alain de Lille, Jean de Meun, and Chaucer's relations with all of them in PF. Following tradition, Chaucer presents…
Costello, Mary Angelica, R. S. M.
Dissertation Abstracts International 23.09 (1963): 3352.
Compares TC with Boccaccio's "Filostrato," and explores Chaucer's "controlled use of the gods and the Christian God" as they "function ambiguously and symbolically" in contributing to the "ultimate meaning of the poem."
Fumo, Jamie C.
Carolyn P. Collette, ed. The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 157-75.
Intertextual connections among LGWP, Ret, and the end of TC capitalize on the medieval scholastic literary theory of the co-authorship of books by human authors and God ("duplex causa efficiens"). All three works remind audiences of authorial…
Bloomfield, Morton W.
Harry Levin, ed. Veins of Humor. Harvard English Series, no. 3 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 57-68.
Describes Chaucer's comic perspective as one that "takes all things lightly because fundamentally they are too serious . . . a way of faring the universe bravely." Exemplifies the poet's narrative device of offering rhetorical "defence of the…
Lupton, Julia Reinhard.
Julia Reinhard Lupton, Afterlives of Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 73-84.
Analyzes Chaucer's uses in LGWP of the term "legend" and the image of "gleaning" for literary leftovers, the latter derived from Leviticus and here linked to the Book of Ruth. Reads these devices for their implications in the development of…
Torti's introduction explores the Christian and classical precedents for mirror metaphors in late-medieval English literature and surveys medieval tradition. Subsequent chapters discuss mirror imagery in Lydgate's Temple of Glass, Hoccleve's…
Cooper, Helen.
P. L. Heyworth, ed. Medieval Studies for J. A. W. Bennett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 65-80.
KnT, MilT, MerT,and FranT share the same plot--the story of the girl with two lovers--and show striking interrelations and variations of episodes, conventions, images, and ideas.
Introduces medieval manuscripts, their production, and their legacies, with emphasis on the experiences, surprises, and pleasures of manuscript study. Refers to Chaucer's life, works, and manuscripts recurrently, with a brief section on his…
The Host's reference to the "yiftes of Fortune and of Nature" is the thematic basis for Group C (Fragment 6). PhyT shows how Grace can sustain those injured by Nature's gifts; PardT shows the wretched fate of those who, blinded by Fortune's gifts,…
Cooper-Rompato, Christine F.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010.
Discusses (pp. 143-88) Chaucer's "great translation experiment" in PrPT, MLT, and SqT, arguing that Chaucer is "highly invested in the mechanics of miraculous and mundane translation" and that Custance is a "medieval example of a xenoglossic holy…
Perkins, Nicholas.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021.
Engages several literary and anthropological theories of gifts, and addresses related motifs of reciprocity, generosity, promising, and exchange in medieval English texts, especially romances. Individual chapters assess "King Horn"/"Horn Childe"…
Examines Chaucer's use of gerunds, observing that his usage is generally not unusual for his time except in two respects: he more frequently uses the construction "determiner+gerund+of-adjunct"; and seemingly "modern" gerunds with verbal properties…
Tajima, Matsuji.
Jacek Fisiak and Akio Oizumi, eds. English Historical Linguistics and Philology in Japan (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 323-39.
Like most of his contemporaries, Chaucer used gerunds primarily as nominals. Yet his usage is marked by a penchant for "determiner + gerund + 'of'-adjunct" and by an unusual number of gerunds with verbal properties, especially in his prose.
Millersdaughter, Katherine Elizabeth.
Dissertation Abstracts International 64 (2003): 1245A.
English political claims to Wales depended in part on claims of Welsh incest; Millersdaughter discusses various texts (including MLT) in which this "heterogeneous, colonialist discourse" is evident.
Sanok, Catherine.
New Medieval Literatures 5 : 177-201, 2002.
PhyT and Pearl both explore the assumption that the communal and anagogical can subsume the individual and ethical, an assumption underlying Fredric Jameson's historicist theorizing. The ending of PhyT indicates the "hermeneutic limits" of virgin…
The Franklin is a gentleman with old-fashioned but praise-worthy standards. FranT treats the fourteenth-century interdependent virtues of "trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie" (A46)--moral values in ambiguous wrappings.
McAlpine, Monica E.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978.
"De casibus" tragedy stems from a single event which determines the protagonist's career. By contrast, the genre of TC is Boethian, depicting multiple crises in the lives of its characters with no single experience as the crucial one. The story of…
Brewer, D. S.
Modern Language Review 53 (1958): 321-26.
Surveys the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French tradition of short love-visions, observes similarities between PF and Oton de Grandson's "Le Songe Saint Valentin," and emphasizes that Chaucer's originality most evident in two ways: his…
Details the patience genre in medieval literature. Chapter 5 focuses on Chaucer's female patience figures, including Griselda in ClT and female characters in LGW, and compares how Christine de Pizan and Chaucer treat the patience literature genre…
Pearcy, Roy J.
Leigh A. Arrathoon, ed. Chaucer and the Craft of Fiction (Rochester, Mich.: Solaris Press, 1986), pp. 329-84.
The comic, satiric, and philosophic sophistication in Chaucer's narratives has no precedent in the fabliaux, but there are models in twelfth-century Latin comedy--notably for MilT (Geta) and MerT (Lidia). Also discusses the theories of Northrop…
Sternberg, Irma Ottenheimer.
Dissertation Abstracts International 25.12 (1964): A5392.
Argues that MLT is neither saints' legend nor romance, but that its "heroic theme, setting, and characters suggest strongly that . . . it belongs to the literary genre of epic and to the sociological genre of myth."
