Browse Items (16035 total)

Considers evidence from ParsP (10.42-44), KnT (1.2605-16), and LGW (635-58) that Chaucer may have been familiar with Middle English alliterative romances, arguing that the proposition is unlikely. While he may have known alliterative religious…

The English word "digression" is first recorded in TC 1.143, where the narrator comments on the fall of Troy. This digression anticipates ideas and images that occur later in the poem and reflects the narrator's difficulty in coming to a conclusion.

In SNT and PrT, hagiography is used in an orthodox form, while in MLT and ClT, the devices of hagiography are used to amplify the moral character of secular tales. Hagiographic devices indicate that these tales are serious, not satire.

Contrasts the unequivocal hermeneutics of "eating a book"--i.e., internalizing the text of the Bible and its "one true meaning"--as depicted in the illustration of the Cloisters Apocalypse (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters Collection, MS 68.174)…

Scholars of the early twentieth century such as Naunin and Manly denied any significant influence of medieval rhetoric upon Chaucer. In more recent days, however, this attitude has been reversed, so that Payne ("The Key of Remembrance") could claim…

Koff argues that "Chaucerian irony does not lead to Chaucer's own meaning. Instead, Chaucer's deflecting self-characterizations and the characterization of the storyteller who 'cannot tell stories' enable Chaucer to relinquish omniscience, thereby…

Reconsiders Laura Hibbard Loomis's method for gauging Chaucer's familiarity with the Auchinleck manuscript--a method based on collocations shared by Auchinleck and Th--arguing that the method does not prove his familiarity with Auchinleck, but does…

Chaucer used English as a revolutionary gesture: "the vernacular destroyed the intellectual and political control of the aristocrats of church and state." Potter addresses several 14th-century English concerns: aristocratic control exercised…

Compares a folktale analogue found in County Tyrone with FrT, examining issues and implications.

Explores Chaucer's interest in the Bible and assumes that he possessed his own copy and read it seriously. Suggests that Chacuer's piety may be connected with the late-fourteenth-century courtly interest in Carthusian ideals.

Addresses how Chaucer uses religious "collections, florilegia, anthologies, and miscellanies" along with Latin Bibles and patristic sources to develop his characters in CT, and to reflect "their level of biblical knowledge and literacy." Refers to…

Surveys scholarship and criticism on Chaucer and the Bible from Lounsbury to the present.

The main text consists of "Index I: Chaucer's Biblical Allusions--An Annotated List," arranged by Chaucer's works, and "Index II: Scriptural References," a reverse index. The apparatus includes an introduction; an essay, "Research on Chaucer and…

Examines Chaucer's skeptical pose concerning theological and biblical controversies of the fourteenth century: "glosynge," parody, biblical allusion in PardP, PardT, GP, CT, and TC.

The nearly thirty evocations of the Bible in MerT are comic and ironic. They flirt with blasphemy and so expose huamn folly.

Item not seen; cited in MLA International Bibliography.

Introduces students to Chaucer's life (opening chapter), comments on critical approaches to Chaucer, and presents several groups of recurring topics in CT: gender, religion, race, and class; love, sex, and marriage; God and spirituality; adaptations…

Surveys the uses of the biblical Song of Songs in medieval secular love poetry as background to exploring Chaucer's uses of it in BD and TC, and his comic adaptations of it in MerT and MilT.

Twenty-three essays by various authors examine intellectual currents in medievalism, arranged in six categories: Text, Image, and Script; Text and Meter; Reception; Chaucer; Hagiography; and Lay Piety and Christian Diversity. For the nine essays that…

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…

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.