Hanna, Ralph, III, intro.
Rochester: Boydell & Brewer, 1989.
A reproduction of the rare 1911 facsimile. Hanna's critical introduction treats manuscript preparation, accuracy, scribal practice, and the value of the Ellesmere in textual matters.
Discusses the two marginal dragons found in the Ellesmere manuscript of CT, arguing that, like dragons in bestiaries and iconography, they "symbolize the marvelous," but in addition they also "prompt readers to attend to the marvelous aspects of…
Stevens, Martin.
Martin Stevens and Daniel Woodward, eds. The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation (San Marino, Calif.: Huntingon Library; Tokyo: Yushodo, 1995), pp. 15-28.
Describes the inadequacy of the 1911 facsimile of Ellesmere and introduces the new facsimile--"as accurate a photographic copy of the original as modern technology allows."
Pearsall, Derek.
Martin Stevens and Daniel Woodward, eds. The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library; Tokyo: Yushodo, 1995), pp. 263-80.
Situates the Ellesmere manuscript in the scribal production of "literary" manuscripts in London from 1400 to 1450-1475, i.e., manuscripts of "Chaucer, Gower, Langland, Walton, Hoccleve, and Lydgate (in verse), Trevisa and Nicholas Love--and ...…
Describes and exemplifies the Renaissance genre of epyllion (minor epic), including, as background, discussion of KnT and TC as examples of works that dramatize a hero's "confrontation with the tragedy of mutable love" presented by a distancing…
Wood, Chauncey.
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1984.
Asks for a "Gowerian" reading of TC--by which is meant "moral Gower," the poet of "honeste," married love. "What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato" was to re-shape the story of the besotted Trojan prince as a warning to the inhabitants of "New…
Bloomfield, Morton W.
Modern Language Review 53 (1958): 408-10.
Argues that the correct reading of TC 5.1809 is the eighth sphere (not seventh as in some manuscripts), and that Chaucer's "making use consciously or unconsciously of an old tradition, placed his hero for all eternity in the sphere of the fixed…
Jost, Jean E.
Albrecht Classen, ed. Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: The Material and Spiritual Conditions of the Culture of Death (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), pp. 193-237.
Discusses Chaucer's awareness of the plague and reference to it in his works, especially PardT.
Donaldson, E. Talbot.
Speaking of Chaucer (New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 30-45.
Reads MerT as an "intensely bitter story," dilating upon the "central juxtaposition of the seemingly, or potentially, beautiful with the unmistakably ugly," examining the nuances of several words, discussing the "vacuity" of the marriage encomium,…
Reads Theseus as a uniquely dynamic character in KnT and in CT more generally--able to "change over time in response to experience." In the course of the Tale, Theseus achieves some of the detachment and insight that characterize the Knight.
Reidy, John.
Harald Scholler, ed. The Epic in Medieval Society: Aesthetic and Moral Values (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1977), pp. 391-408.
In KnT Theseus usually acts honorably according to medieval military code. He gradually discovers, however, the insufficiency of such a code as he gains insight into Boethian philosophy.
Horobin, Simon.
Journal of the Early Book Society 12 (2009): 195-203.
Paleographical evidence and similarities of decoration establish that the Edmund-Fremund scribe, known for his work on manuscripts of John Lydgate, also worked on a CT manuscript which survives in two fragments: John Rylands Manuscript English 63…
On Manly-Rickert's faulty assumptions: prior circulation of individual tales among Chaucer's friends; two archetypes, O and O1; individual lines of textual transmission for separate tales; scribal use of several lost exemplars for some tales. It is…
Production, consumption, and profit have helped to define individuals in more recent eras; however, an "economy of need" was an aspect of late medieval identity. Galloway traces the economy of need in sermons and prose writing and comments on its…
Reads aspects of Theseus's stadium, tournament, and funeral arrangements in KnT as "performance of power" in response to the procession of his "regional rivals": Arcite and Palamon of Thebes, Emetreus of India, and Lygurge of Thrace. George…
Manzanas Calvo, Ana M.
Bernardo Santano Moreno, Adrian R. Birtwhistle, and Luis G. Girón Echevarria, eds. Papers from the VIIth International Conferenceo of SELIM (Caceres: Universidad de Extremadura, 1995), pp. 175-85.
Key figures of the pre-modernity and pre-capitalism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Pardoner and Margery Kempe exemplify inverted values.
Assesses payment and revenge in MilT and RvT as economies of sexual exchange following Aristotelian notions of "distributive" justice, reflected in the "poetic" justice of the Tales. Women are the commodity in MilT and RvT, as in KnT and CkT. Edwards…
Withers, Jeremy.
Dissertation Abstracts International A69.08 (2009): n.p.
Withers examines medieval writers' interest in the effect of medieval warfare, tactics, and technology on "the natural world," arguing that several works (including Lydgate's "Siege of Thebes," the "Alliterative Morte Darthur," and KnT) paid…
Engelhardt, George J.
Mediaeval Studies 37 (1975): 287-315.
Each of the ecclesiastical pilgrims of CT is related to a type of ethos codified in church commentary. The Clerk, who gladly teaches and learns, is a kind of "hilaris dator". The Monk is a "praelatus puer" whose passion for hunting makes him a…
Courter, Jean M.
Dissertation Abstracts International 53 (1993): 3206A.
The term "Scottish Chaucerians," evolving from Henryson's "Testament of Criseyde," proves inaccurate, overly limited, and unfortunate, since the fifteenth-century Scottish poets,superior to their English contemporaries, initiated their nations great…
Boffey, Julia, and A. S. G. Edwards.
Isabel Davis and Catherine Nall, eds. Chaucer and Fame: Reputation and Reception (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), pp. 87-102.
Surveys knowledge of and responses to HF from the earliest manuscripts and printed editions to Alexander Pope's adaptation, "The Temple of Fame" (1710), with commentary on early uncertainty about the title and author of HF, and on the "ways in which…
Although both were Londoners, Chaucer and Langland did not share a common readership. Chaucer was acknowledged as a founder of a literary tradition; Langland was appropriated less often and more in ideological than aesthetic terms. Ownership of…
Green, Richard Firth.
Simon Horobin and Linne Mooney, eds. Middle English Texts in Transition: A Festschrift Dedicated to Toshiyuki Takamiya on His 70th Birthday (York: York Medieval Press, 2014), pp. 1-20.
Connects Chaucer's possible scribe Adam Pinkhurst to the London Scrivener's Guild. Provides historical background of Pinkhurst's connection with the guild.
Driver, Martha Westcott.
Dissertation Abstracts International 41 (1981): 4391A.
Previous investigators of the sixteen extant TC MSS assumed three "parent" forms, presumed to represent Chaucer's recensions. Two MSS before 1400 may be the work of Chaucer's scribe.
