Owen, Charles A., Jr.
Mediaeval Studies 21 (1959): 202-10.
Corroborates and extends Carleton Brown's effort to show (in 1937) that the MLH was intended to introduce the first story in the CT, exploring evidence and counter-evidence for positing an "original opening sequence" as follows: GP, MLH, Mel, MLE,…
Zhang, Lian.
Notes and Queries 265 (2020): 190-92.
Contends that Chaucer made his debut in China in the form of short excerpts of his poetry and "occasional pieces on language and culture" that appeared between 1878 and 1939 in British and American newspapers based in Shanghai.
An examination of the two earliest-known owners of a CT manuscript suggests that Chaucer's secondary audience was literate, secular in its interests, urban, and word-oriented.
Lawlor, John.
D. S. Brewer, ed. Chaucer and Chaucerians: Critical Studies in Middle English Literature (University: University of Alabama Press; London: Nelson, 1966), pp. 39-64.
Addresses Chaucer's "narrative art" in BD, HF, PF, Anel, and Mars, exploring how a coterie audience may have responded to oral performance of the emphases, shifts, and turns in these poems. Also attends to prosodic features, and to the poet's…
Perry, R. D.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 38 (2016): 299-308.
Argues that the scribe John Shirley cultivates a "virtual coterie" in the series of headnotes that he attaches to his copying of five French poems that he attributes (or misattributes) to William de la Pole, the earl of Suffolk. Shirley emulates John…
Wilson, William S.
Quarterly Journal of Speech 50 (1964): 153-58.
Shows that the diction, style, and substance of the Eagle's disquisition on sound in HF (606-863) illustrate the "techniques of Ciceronian persuasive rhetoric on a relevant science, the physics of sound," part of the poem's unifying concern with the…
Zeitoun studies dreams and daydreams in TC, especially daydreaming in Book 1, Criseyde's dream of the eagle, and Troilus's dream of the boar. Violence in the poem has less to do with war than with the internal states of the characters; these states…
Pratt, Karen, Bart Besamusca, Matthias Meyer, and Ad Putter, eds.
Göttingen: V&R Academic, 2017.
Twenty-three essays by various authors and an introduction by the editors, all of which pertain to the study of medieval short narratives as they appear in multi-text manuscripts, addressing concerns such as "miscellaneity," paratexts, genres,…
Pratt, Karen.
Karen Pratt, Bart Besamusca, Matthias Meyer, and Ad Putter, eds. The Dynamics of the Medieval Manuscript (Göttingen: V&R Academic, 2017), pp. 257-85.
Traces the emphases and manuscript contexts of Latin and vernacular versions of the Pyramus and Thisbe story from Ovidian origins to Chaucer's narrative in LGW, with emphasis on the comic or bathetic elements of Chaucer's account and on its place in…
ClT is neither an affirmation of traditional hierarchies nor a critique of them, but rather an exploration of the ways individuals interact with social, marital, and spiritual authority. Michel de Certeau's notions of "intextuation" and…
Magoun, Francis P.,Jr.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 77 (1976): 253.
The so-called original "Dunmow Oath" quoted by G.E.L. Johnson in the quarterly "This England" V (1972), 53, col. 3 is much more recent than the Dumdow [sic] Flitch spoken of by Chaucer's Wife of Bath in her prologue.
Schafer, Judith K.
[Jay Ruud, ed.] Papers on the "Canterbury Tales": From the 1989 NEH Chaucer Institute, Northern State University, Aberdeen, South Dakota ([Aberdeen, S.D.: Northern State University, 1989), pp. 1-12.
Surveys medieval attitudes towards women, with comments on Chaucer's depictions.
Baldry, Cherith.
Mike Ashley, ed. The Mammoth Book of New Historical Whodunits [sic] (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005), pp. 178-96.
Murder-mystery short story in which Chaucer and Froissart in Italy seek to solve the death by poison of Duke Lionel. Published in the U.K. in The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits: Third New Collection (London: Robinson).
Hieatt, Constance B.
English Studies in Canada 14 (1988): 400-18.
Dreams in medieval literature are conventionally used for foreshadowing, rarely with psychological implications. In TC, however, Chaucer combines the prophetic "somnium coeleste" with the psychological "somnium animale" such that neither can be…
Friedman, John Block.
Chaucer Review 3.3 (1969): 145-162.
More than merely consolation for John of Gaunt, BD conveys the "more universal theme" of "personal loss and its effects on man's physical and psychic condition." Traditionally associated in various sources with leading, with healing, and with…
Thundy, Zacharias P.
Carmina Philosophiae 4 (1995): 91-109.
Suggests that as an example of several kinds of prophetic dream described by Macrobius, as an expression of wish fulfillment, and on the authority of Thynne, BD should be called "The Dream of Chaucer." Argues that the poem was probably recited for…
Williams, Deanne.
Seth Lerer, ed. The Yale Companion to Chaucer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 147-78.
Williams summarizes the plots and themes of BD, PF, HF, and LGW, emphasizing Chaucer's layering of sources, his valorizing of English, and his concerns with interpretation and the truth value of literature.
Butterfield, Ardis.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 41 (2019): 1-29.
Contemplates the pains of language change and language death, distinguishing between change and the perception of it; exploring Latinity, vernacularity, and their continuities; and expanding upon the "dream of language" theorized by Giorgio Agamben.…
Edwards, Robert R.
Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 1989.
Argues that Chaucer's dream visions are concerned with both "mimetic representation" (the narrator's story of his dream) and aesthetic systems. Chapter 1, "The Practice of Theory," discusses Chaucer's study of Latin, Italian, and French writers to…
Lewis, James R., and Evelyn Dorothy Oliver.
Detroit: Visible Ink, 2009.
A popular handbook to dream psychology, dream lore, the history of interpretations of dreams, and dreaming in various cultures, with an entry on Chaucer (pp. 38-40) that comments on his biography and his dream-vision poetry. First published in 1995.
Higgs, Elton Dale
Dissertation Abstracts International 27.04 (1966): 1030-31A.
Describes the conventions of late-medieval English "literary dreams," and explores how Chaucer, William Langland, and the "Pearl"-poet exploit the "potentialities of the form," including discussion of the development of the dream narrator in BD, HF,…
Hamilton, Marie P.
Mieczyslaw Brahmer, Stanislaw Helsztynski, and Julian Krzyzanowski, eds. Studies in Language and Literature in Honour of Margaret Schlauch (Warsaw: PWN—Polish Scientific Publishers, 1966), pp. 153-63.
Studies the "fitness" of MLT to Chaucer's teller, surveying critical commentary, considering sources and analogues, assessing the historicity of legal details in the Tale, and suggesting that the trial scene evinces Chaucer's knowledge of…
NPT makes fun of the Monk and the Prioress by combining hunting, rough handling of animals, sexual indulgence, and two morals. The "treading," the hunting, the near sacrifice and downfall, the injunction against flattery, touch upon the…
