Browse Items (15542 total)

Seeks to complicate--even replace--the figure of Father Chaucer with Child Chaucer, examining children in Chaucer's works, along with figures of childishness, playfulness, and childlikeness, exploring the poet's uses of and resistance to traditional…

The fourteenth century accepted literary conventions of the love code and approved warfare with honor and profit conjoined. Chaucer understands chivalry without attacking it: Theseus, in KnT, is an idealized knight modeled on Edward III; Th…

Twelve essays by various authors under the rubrics "Locations," "Communities," "Institutions," and "Afterlife." The introduction argues that any consideration of city life is an act of recovering the past. Chaucer allows the audience to hear and see…

Examines Chaucer's limited use of "blew"/"blue" in depictions of color, focusing on the phrase “teres blewe” in Mars, 8. Notes that the connotation of "blue" with melancholy surfaces later, and traces Chaucer's usage of "blewe" to its Gallo-Romance…

Shows that "clichés of thought and expression" abound in medieval alchemical treatises, and explains how Chaucer's uses of these "topoi" or commonplaces "contribute to the meaning" of CYPT. Tabulates commonplaces of alchemical behavior, preparation,…

Explains how medieval pilgrimages, including Chaucer's "temporary community" of pilgrims in CT, are influenced by a "series of concentric circles" of multiple communities.

Boethius's "prosimetrum" lets readers experience the "consolation of temporality" that Philosophy offers. In Bo, Chaucer demonstrates his understanding of this consolation by highlighting Philosophy's references to time; however, by rendering the…

Chaucer's poetry must be read as "in dialogue" with his neoplatonic sources such as Boethius, Macrobius, etc. BD is a study of the root cause of "letargye"--the lack of harmony between the real and the ideal. PF is an analysis of man's…

Investigates Chaucer's treatment of astrological imagery, gauging him to be "quite high among the skeptics on the mediaeval scale of belief in astrology" and explicating the tone and meaning of his astrological passages, their comic or satiric…

Fourteen essays by various hands. For individual essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Chaucer and the Craft of Fiction under Alternative Title.

Reads the Knight and Squire (and their respective tales) as embodiments of differing philosophies toward the Crusades. The Knight is linked to the Crusades' earlier origins, while the Squire is seen as embodying a more romanticized approach to the…

By studying pre-Chaucerian and fourteenth-century traditions of Saint Valentine, springtime, hagiography, heortology, etc., Kelly tests the hypothesis that Chaucer invented the patron saint of matchmakers.

Investigates Lollard vocabulary, translation strategies, and rhetorical tropes, arguing that the Parson and ParsT cannot categorically be identified as Lollard. Nonetheless, unmistakable elements of Lollardy undercut the hermeneutic stability of what…

Reads CT, TC, and LGW in the context of late medieval courtesy books, advice literature, and epistolary collections. Considers public and private marital honor in the Paston letters and FranT, and wifely obedience in ClT, "Menagier de Paris," and…

While arousing authorial anxieties, the dream vision permits Chaucer to treat otherwise inaccessible psychological problems. In CT the verbal game repeatedly explores the dangers of violating "pryvetee," privacy.

Chaucer's depreciation of the father figure (biological, theological, literary predecessor) enables him to conceive of poetry separate from the needs for stable interpretation and didactic meaning. Throughout his corpus, his "polyvocal…

Studies "the architecture of Chaucerian metapoetics" in CT and reads several tales as Neoplatonic texts. Criticism of MilT, ManT, and NPT is framed by a consideration of the corrupted natural philosophy of the old man in PardT. Nicholas's impalement…

Butterfield situates the study of Chaucer and London within a framework of theoretical approaches to the construction of urban space.

Tabulates late-medieval uses of ought (owe) as a past form and as a modal auxiliary and explores the forms of infinitives used after ought. Compares Chaucer's uses with those of other late-medieval writers to show that his uses reflect the "unsettled…

The outworn paradigm of courtly love has been discarded but not superseded by a model flexible enough to contain the many variations developed by "moralists and gameplayers." Treats troubadour verse, French and English romances and lyrics, and…

Describes five medieval redactions of Virgil’s “Aeneid,” “widely separated geographically and chronologically,” assessing how they “medievalized” the material in conventional ways, and using these “conventions” to discuss Chaucer’s successful…

Item not seen; WorldCat records indicate that there are two lectures included (Salter: Side 1, "Problems of reading and understanding Chaucer". Pearsall: Side 2, "Realism and convention in the Canterbury tales."); the booklet summarizes the…

Suggests that Chaucer engages the Boethian tradition in TC and HF, only to challenge (and ultimately reject) that tradition's ideas of self-regulation.

Surveys the nineteenth- and twentieth-century development of Chaucer study in Germany and Austria and examines the reception of this study in England and America. German philological practice established a standard that was distrusted after World War…

Historical detective novel with Chaucer as the investigator of a murder in the seaport of Dartmouth; also involves a conspiracy against Katherine Swynford, thwarted by her sister Philippa.