Browse Items (16035 total)

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.

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

Connects Chaucer's possible scribe Adam Pinkhurst to the London Scrivener's Guild. Provides historical background of Pinkhurst's connection with the guild.

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.

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,…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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.