In WBP, the Wife delivers not a sermon but a mock legal case. Her reasoning is typical of courtroom reasoning, and (like lawyers) she buries her argument in rhetoric. Her unwritten law of marriage triumphs over the written laws of St. Paul, thus…
Siegel, Marsha.
Studies in Philology 82 (1985): 1-24.
The fragment considers how well human beings can understand and order reality. KnT and MilT provide positive solutions: KnT through Boethian metaphysics; MilT by restricting sources of causation. The debate founders in RvT and CkT, where…
Morse, Charlotte C.
A. J. Minnis, ed. Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions. Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall (Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y.: York Medieval Press, 2001), pp.41-56.
Morse comments on how the Canterbury Tales Project may reinvigorate textual questions thought to have been answered by the Manly-Rickert edition and latent in the Variorum project. Explores such issues as tale order, tale revision, and manuscript…
Assesses the influence of Chaucer and CT on Longfellow's poem, commenting on the poets' differences in sexual attitudes and concerns with mimetic realism and observing that Longfellow sought to become Father of American Poetry. Critical approaches to…
Bowden, Betsy.
Susan Yager and Elise E. Morse-Gagné, eds. Interpretation and Performance: Essays for Alan Gaylord (Provo, UT: Chaucer Studio Press, 2013), pp. 33-46.
Discusses four versions of Arcite's death and focuses on the actions of the horses in each: in Boccaccio, as in Statius, divine interventions frighten the horses; Chaucer's Arcite falls due to both a god's intervention and his own pride; in Dryden,…
Analyzes Edmund Spenser's "The Ruines of Time" as a response to TC, arguing that Spenser emulates aspects of TC as a mediation of "the humanist imitation of classical texts" and concludes that the Renaissance "rediscovery of classical texts was…
Bradbrook, M. C.
Shakespeare Quarterly 9.3 (1958): 311-19.
Argues that "[c]ompression and inversion direct Shakespeare's use of" TC in "Troilus and Cressida," particularly, "the clear inversion of every idealistic feeling save those of Troilus is so relentless that a 'mirror image' emerges." Shakespeare…
Although the initial description of the egalitarian marriage in FranT seems to open liberating possibilities for Dorigen,the ultimate concern is which man is most "fre." Dorigen's actions and intentions have been lost in the insistence of Arveragus…
Patterson, Lee.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989): 117-75,
Th and Mel should be read in light of Chaucer's struggle to define his authorial role in opposition to courtly "makers"--thus, the appropriation of minstrel performance in Th and of a narrator and hero described in terms associated with children. Th…
Carruthers, Leo.
Claire Vial, ed. 'Gode is the lay, swete is the note': Résonances dans les lais bretons moyen-anglais / Echoes in the Middle English Breton Lays (2014): n.p. (web publication).
Explores the semantic and cultural fields underlying the terms 'Breton' and 'Celtic'. Posits that Chaucer willingly betrays his knowledge of the traditional geography and culture connected with Breton lays in FranT.
Marzec, Marcia Smith.
Tison Pugh and Marcia Smith Marzec, eds. Men and Masculinities in Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 58-72.
Marzec surveys portrayals of Hector as a knightly paragon of prowess and virtue in sources and analogues of TC, arguing that Chaucer's Troilus is a distinctly "courtly" figure in contrast to his brother. The contrast critiques courtly love.
Jost, Jean [E.]
Albrecht Classen, ed. Words of Love and Love of Words in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008), pp. 395-420.
Courtly literature is an intellectual battleground in which reversals of gender and social positions clash. The men's rhetorical competition in FranT shows a courtly love of words.
Connolly, Margaret.
Karen Pratt, Bart Besamusca, Matthias Meyer, and Ad Putter, eds. The Dynamics of the Medieval Manuscript (Göttingen: V&R Academic, 2017), pp. 81-100.
Assesses the value of John Shirley's attribution of Adam Scriveyn to Chaucer in the only manuscript where it appears, arguing on the grounds of Shirley's “other statements about Chaucer" that the attribution is reliable and, on more general external…
Examines GP portrait of the Monk, and his obvious infractions against monastic norms and regulations, in light of Giorgio Agamben's "The Highest Property: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life" (2011), stressing not only the Monk's disdain for monastic…
Williams, George.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 57.2 (1958): 167-76.
Considers Mars "as an exercise in describing human action and emotion in terms of a supposed astronomical event," with the planet/pagan god representing John of Gaunt in his affair with Katharine Swynford (Venus), Mercury representing Chaucer…
Deals with relationship of PhyT to FranT and PardT and suitability of tale to teller, treating the sources in Titus Livius and Jean de Meun's "Roman de la Rose," as well as the theme of justice.
Magnani, Roberta,
McAvoy, Liz Herbert
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 42 (2020): 311-24.
Posits a "radical revisioning of canon formation . . . made possible by positioning women as queering agents," and discloses the "female-coded discourses of spirituality and literacy embedded" in KnT. Reads the romance against "The Booke of Gostlye…
Myojo, Kiyoko, and Noburu Notomi, eds.
Tokyo: Keio University Press, 2015.
Includes a chapter on the issues of the text of CT. In Japanese. For an essay that pertains to Chaucer, search for What Is a Text? under Alternative Title.
Spearing, A. C.
Digital Philology 4.1 (2015): 59-105.
Questions the "narrator theory of narration," critiquing the "concept of the internal, potentially unreliable narrator"; examining "the history of the term narrator"; studying "the theories of narration implied by scribal annotations in some medieval…
Frost, William
Western Humanities Review 27 (1973): 39-59.
Seeks to define the phrase "Canterbury tale," by exploring the relative usefulness of various critical approaches to Chaucer's tales. Comments on how the tales engage their respective genres in "unpredictable" ways, how they characterize their…
Greenwood, Maria K.
Colette Stévanovitch, ed. L'Articulation langue-littérature dans les textes médiévaux anglais, II. Actes du colloque des 25 et 26 juin 1999 á l'Université de Nancy II. Collection GRENDEL, no. 3. (Nancy: Publications de l'Association des Médiévistes Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur, 1999), pp. 143-62.
Explicates Chaucer's uses of grammatical tenses in GP, especially in the descriptions of the Knight, Squire, and Yeoman, distinguishing how various tenses and narrative points of view direct readers' reactions to the pilgrims. Considers indirect…
Greenwood, Maria K.
Rosalynn Voaden, René Tixier, Teresa Sanchez Roura, and Jenny Rebecca Rytting, eds. The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 189-200.
Dryden's translation of KnT "tidies, clarifies, and modernizes" the text for its eighteenth-century readers, turning Chaucer's "subversive parodies back into the illusory heroic idealizations" of Statius and Boccaccio. Greenwood focuses on the…
Annotations by 16th- and 17th-century readers show an ongoing interest in Chaucer as a source of sententiae and a focus of antiquarian interest; they also shed light on the role of women readers and on the household as a reading center. Their net …
Lewis, Robert Enzer.
Chaucer Review 2.3 (1968): 139-58.
Analyzes the context, syntax, and lexicon of Chaucer's reference to his now-lost "Of the Wreched Engendrynge of Mankynde" (LGWP-G 414-5) to help establish its nature as a translation of Pope Innocent III's entire "De miseria humane conditionis."…
