Rayner, Samantha J.
Amanda Hopkins, Robert Allen Rouse, and Cory James Rushton, eds. Sexual Culture in the Literature of Medieval Britain (Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 2014), pp. 69-83.
Focuses primarily on John Gower's "Confessio Amantis," but does compare Gower's use of spiritual love with Chaucer's subversive lust.
Dor, Juliette.
Leo Carruthers, ed. Heroes and Heroines in Medieval English Literature: A Festschrift Presented to Andre Crepin on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 71-80.
The suffering of Custance in MLT echoes Innocent III's description of human life in his "De miseria condicionis humane"; the tale's end, which indicates that Custance's humility will ultimately be rewarded, draws from the pseudosource of the…
Baumgardner, Rachel Ann.
Medieval Forum 5 (2006): n.p.
Read against Foucault's "What Is an Author?" the Wife of Bath of WBP fits the criteria for representation of a "third ego." Thereby, she can be seen as a character who "establishes her own personality." Chaucer serves as a "medium for her determined…
Questions why Shakespeare--rather than Chaucer or others--is the "favorite son" of Anglo-American textual theory, arguing that the "unilinear transmission" of Shakespeare's plays makes it easier to pursue the illusion of authorial intent. Based on…
A biography of Blake, "William Blake, ein ausgezeichneter Künstler, Dichter und Narr," mentions his work on his "Canterbury Pilgrims" and his troubled relationships with Thomas Stothard and Robert Cromek.
Osberg, Richard H.
Alan T. Gaylord, ed. Essays on the Art of Chaucer's Verse (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 195-227.
Assesses Chaucer's uses of alliteration as recurrent adornment despite the poet's distance from the so-called alliterative tradition. Focuses on the role of alliteration in various kinds of rhetorical situations (high style, courtliness, prayer, and…
Outlines the expression of narratorial self-consciousness through various phrases such as "I kan nat seye" and through rhetorical usages such as "occupatio" and then analyzes its purposes in Chaucer's poems.
Rossiter, William.
Sabine Coelsch-Foisner and Wolfgang Görtschacher, eds. Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' in English Poetry (Heidelberg: Winter, 2009), pp.69-88.
Opens with a consideration of Wyatt's relation to the "Chaucerian tradition" of Ovid in English.
Fuog, Karin Edie Capri.
Dissertation Abstracts International 55 (1994): 959A.
Although Renaissance Scholars have tended to deny subjectivity in medieval literature, medievalists have shown that Chaucer develops it. So does the author of "The Kingis Quair," an important but generally neglected work.
Lipson, Carol [S.]
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 84 (1983): 192-200.
No more than a fraction of Astr is translated; the largest part is Chaucer's own "practical prose." In the "translated" sections Chaucer expanded his source by a factor of eight; thus his version is hardly a "translation."
Rack, Melissa J.
Medieval Perspectives 25 (2010): 89-102.
Argues that, in KnT, Chaucer does not resolve the disjunction between Aristotelian natural philosophy and Christian theology that is found in medieval university discourse; instead, he amplifies the tension to allow the "freeplay of interpretation." …
Fahrenback, William
Essays in Medieval Studies 27 (2011): i-x.
This introduction to a collection of essays on "Representing the Middle Ages" begins by providing an overview of representations of experience in the NPT. After presenting an overview of key criticism, the article asserts that the tale seeks to…
Cawsey, Kathy.
Kathy Cawsey and Jason Harris, eds. Transmission and Transformation in the Middle Ages: Texts and Contexts (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), pp. 189-206.
Cawsey surveys the legacy of the plowman figure in England from the late Middle Ages into the Renaissance, focusing on the composite work "I Playne Piers." The Plowman's Tale was used and reused in multiple ways, presented variously by editors and…
Hanning, Robert W.
Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, eds. Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 27-50.
Quintilian's definition of allegory suggests that "allegorical texts produce stable meanings and mirror unequivocal truths." For Augustine, "Figural language exists so that 'by means of corporal and temporal things we may comprehend the eternal and…
Edwards, A. S. G.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 92 (1991): 469-70.
In one version of the versified Stacions of Rome, the word "prose" clearly designates a change of subject rather than nonmetrical writing. In MLP, "prose" may signal a verse tale of historical and religious significance.
Minnis, Alastair.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 27 (2005): 25-58.
Traces late medieval "vernacular secularity," particularly the influences of Aristotle's "Ethics," "Politics," and "Economics" and Boethius's "Consolation" as transmitted to England by Giles of Rome, Nicole Oresme, Nicholas Trevet, Jean de Meun,…
Chaucer may have tapped into traditional knowledge of the Northern god Loki in creating the description of the Pardoner in GP. Links with Loki, who transformed himself into a mare in the Old Norse "Gylfaginning," encourage us to view the Pardoner as…
A reading of PrT in the mode of Julia Kristeva reveals it to be the narrative of the "litel clergeon's" entry into self-hood and subjectivity by a traumatic passage from the maternal "chora," represented by the singing of "Alma redemptio mater,"…
Charnley, Susan Christina De Long.
Dissertation Abstracts International 57 (1996): 2030A.
Examines right relations of individuals in the medieval Christian hierarchy as shown in the writings of Chaucer, Gower, Langland, the "Pearl" poet, Julian of Norwich, and Guillaume de Deguileville.
Beadle, Richard.
Toshiyuki Takamiya and Richard Beadle, eds. Chaucer to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of Shinsuke Ando (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992), 55-66.
A seventeenth-century account makes it possible to reconstruct portions of a manuscript of CT, once owned by Selden and now lost, here designated *Se2. Beadle hypothesizes that *Se2 presented a longer version of CkP than now available.
The Pardoner obsessively flaunts his unwholesome nature, manifesting hypnotic control and power. His picture of the Old Man, and his subsequent affronting of the Host augment his disturbing self-characterization and lead the pilgrims and author to…
Desmond, Marilynn Robin.
Dissertation Abstracts International 46 (1986): 2687A-2688A.
Studies medieval assumptions about and deformations of Virgil's "Aeneid." Chapter 3 presents the "self-conscious ironic" version of the Dido story in LGW; chapter 4, Chaucer's assumptions about the "Aeneid" in HF. Notes on Chretien, Caxton,…
Rudanko, Juhani.
Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5.1 (2004): 137-58
As speech acts, threats are usually both conditional and commisive; i.e., they depend on an inferred promise, and they commit the speaker to some future course of action. Threats in Chaucer's works are usually modulated by the additional element of…
