Browse Items (16035 total)

Testing the premise of A. C. Spearing's "Textual Subjectivity" (2005), Klitgård explores the dramatic monologues of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner and uses of narrative personae.

Summarizes medieval attitudes toward dreams and traces their roots in the Bible and classical tradition, emphasizing their prophetic qualities. Then discusses dream vision conventions and their uses in "Pearl," "Piers Plowman," and several shorter…

Reads MLT as a "thought experiment" in which the topos of the ship (familiar in both romance and political/legal philosophy) is used to confront the "conflict of laws" among the various cultures represented: Christian, Islamic, and pagan. With ClT,…

Medieval literature utilizes landscape symbolism for both positive and negative emotional effects. The article touches on KnT, FranT, BD, and medieval lyrics.

Pask develops a distinct genre from Foucault's formulation of an "author-function": the life-and-works narratives that emerge in the historical perceptions of readers of Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, and Donne.

Prints eight previously published essays with a new introduction, all pertaining to the influence of bureaucratic and literary language on the standardization of English. Chronicling the development of Fisher's idea that standard written English…

Looks for evidence that certain medieval writers were aware of the newly emerging "arithmetical mentality." Because of his work at the Customs House, Chaucer was much more aware than most writers. He knew counting boards and algorisms, the ancestor…

Since the text of the Ellesmere manuscript is highly edited, Hengwrt is superior to it and should be used as the basis for standard editions of CT.

The Ellesmere miniatures recreate the word pictures by Chaucer in the text, but the only miniature that is truly lifelike is that of Chaucer himself.

Studies the reception of the Ellesmere manuscript of CT and its use by scholars, concluding that the manuscript is remarkable not only for the poem it records but also for the part it plays in development of modern ideas about the author.

Describes the Ellesmere manuscript, with particular attention to the illustrations of the pilgrims (here reproduced), the program of semi-vinet illumination, and the "Portrait of Chaucer." Also includes a description of the manuscript's text of CT, a…

Revised reprint of 1966 original; a description of the Ellesmere manuscript, its illuminations, and its history. Includes a new "Bibliographical Note" by Joseph A. Dane and Seth Lerer, plus their additions to Schulz's list of reproductions of…

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…

Examines the manuscript portrait of Chaucer in the Ellesmere manuscript (El) and its scribal rubrics as they reflect the poet’s status in his own age. Reviews historical study of the manuscript, its provenance, tale order, and text, accepting…

A companion volume to "The New Ellesmere Chaucer Facsimile."

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."

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…

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…

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…

Discusses Chaucer's awareness of the plague and reference to it in his works, especially PardT.

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.

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.