Summary (without text) and commentary on FranT, arranged in sections, accompanied by glosses to Middle English phrases. Also includes a brief introduction to Chaucer and his backgrounds, commentary on themes and style of FranT, its characterization…
Burton, T. L., dir.
Provo, Utah: Chaucer Studio, 1990.
Recorded at the Seventh International Congress of the New Chaucer Society, University of Kent. Readers include A. C. Spearing; Mary-Ann Stouck; Tom Burton; William Cooper, Jr.; Harvey De Roo; Paul R. Thomas; and Emerson Brown, Jr. Re-edited and…
Traversi, Derek.
Literary Imagination (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1982), pp. 87-119.
FranT, a part of the Marriage Group, which itself is part of a larger design in "patience" or "grace," demonstrates a subtle balance between the courtly tradition and "gentilesse" but does not give the final answer to the marriage debate.
Tripp, Raymond P., Jr.
William C. Johnson and Loren C. Gruber, eds. "New" Views on Chaucer: Essays in Generative Criticism (Denver: Society for New Language Study, 1973), pp. 35-41.
Argues that FranT depicts a "non-solution" to the "marriage debate"; although they seek to escape them in various ways, the characters are not free from the "tyrannies of love" and sexuality that are part of the human condition.
Spearing, A. C., ed.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Rev. ed.
Text of FranT and the GP description of the Franklin (based on Robinson's edition, 1957) with end-of-text notes and glosses. The Introduction (pp. 1-76) describes the sources and analogues of FranT; the Breton lai genre; the tale's major themes of…
Tasioulas, J. A.
Harlow: Longman; London: York Press, 2000.
Study guide to FranPT and the GP description of the Franklin that includes a plot synopsis, running commentary, and glosses (text not included, except for three passages in Middle English, with closer analysis). Also includes descriptions of the…
Allen, Valerie, and David Kirkham, eds.
Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2000.
School-text edition of the GP description of the Franklin and FranPT, accompanied, on facing pages, by extensive glossing and pedagogical commentary and discussion questions. Includes brief essays on pertinent topics, including gentilesse, astronomy…
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.
Smith, Nathanial B.
Comparative Drama 55 (2021): 234-58.
Shows that Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew" and the anonymous "Taming of a Shrew" feature skeptical parody of Stoic certainty about distinguishing reality from illusion or dream. As in HF, the "framing fictions" of the plays "make a show" of…
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…
