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…
Focuses on Jason in LGW and other sexually predatory men, examines a number of motifs in Chaucer's version of Jason, and highlights the danger of men such as Jason who hide their behavior behind gentility.
Explores Chaucer's rhetorical, "inorganic," "non-narrative" structuring devices in various works: BD, Anel, selected lyrics, and TC, with comments on aspects of LGW and CT, especially Part 7 and ManT.
Rosenfeld, Jessica.
Catherine E. Léglu and Stephen J. Milner, eds. The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 39- 59.
Rosenfeld concentrates on language of lovers and language of clerks ("erotic and intellectual discourses"), arguing that TC affirms the value of earthly happiness during life, as well as the inevitable instability of earthly matters.
Longo, Joseph A.
Modern Language Quarterly 22 (1961): 37-40.
Examines references to times and dates in Book II of TC, arguing that Chaucer creates a double sense of time in order to convey a "rapid sequence of events" among the three main characters while also conveying through a "longer time scheme" the…
Stevens, Martin.
Saul N. Brody and Harold Schecter, eds. CUNY English Forum 1 (New York: AMS, 1985), pp. 155-74.
Argues, from the symmetrical structure of TC, binary rather than the popular five-part interpretation. Manuscript studies suggest that Chaucer originally wrote TC as a two-part poem and later changed it. Shakespeare had the same conflict.
Explains the ambivalences, ambiguities, paradoxes, and ironies--the double meanings--that are generated in TC by Chaucer's combination of Boccaccio's plot with Boethian philosophy (inflected by twelfth- and thirteenth-century philosophy of love),…
Cook, Mary Joan,RSM.
Florilegium 8 (1986): 187-98.
"By developing an inner and outer Criseyde, by occasionally indicating a disparity between the two, by raising questions about her behaviour and usually acknowledging that he, the narrator, does not have the answers, (Chaucer) convinces the reader…
Mitchell-Smith, Ilan.
In Jennifer N. Brown and Maria Segol, eds. Sexuality, Sociality, and Cosmology in Medieval Literary Texts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 101-21.
Includes discussion of KnT in a group of late-medieval English romances that differ from Continental romances in that they "outline a male heterosexual model informed by a Boethian contemptus mundi theme in which sobriety and reservedness replaces…
Wenzel, Siegfried.
Kent Emery, Jr., and Joseph Wawrykow, eds. Christ Among the Medieval Dominicans: Representations of Christ in the Texts and Images of the Order of Preachers. Notre Dame Conferences in Medieval Studies, no. 7 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), pp. 315-31.
Summarizes various kinds of influence Dominicans may have had on Chaucer, Gower, and Langland. From the lumping of Dominicans with other friars in literary portraits, to the influence of individual Dominican writers, to Dominican notions of salvation…
Reconstructs the layout and functions of the rooms and gardens of the households in TC, drawing on details in the poem and evidence from fourteenth-century English architecture, with connections to correlative structures and scenes elsewhere in…
Gothic fantasy graphic novel in which Chaucer makes a cameo appearance, discussing poetry in a tavern in 1389. One of the characters in the tavern seeks to avoid death, an echo of PardT. Originally published in magazine form as The Sandman 9.16…
Labriola, Albert C.
Texas Studies in Language and Literature 12 (1970): 5-14.
Shows that "figures" (ship, castle, and related images) drawn from Augustinian theology and medieval sermons convey the "Christian concept of charity" in MLT and heighten its "religious intensity."
Observes parallels between the discussion of true gentility in WBT ("gentilesse"; 3.1109-1212) and fifteenth-century treatments of the subject in Latin (by Buonaccurso de Montemagno), French (Jean Mielot), and English (John Tiptoft), observing that…
Longsworth, Robert (M.)
Criticism 13 (1971): 223-33.
Characterizes the Physician of GP as "inscrutable," although "smelling mildly of hypocrisy," and argues that the "narrative uneasiness" of PhyT is well suited to this "man of the world [who] seeks to mask his worldliness in affected piety." The…
Rawcliffe, Carole.
Stephen H. Rigby, ed., with the assistance of Alastair J. Minnis. Historians on Chaucer: The "General Prologue" to the "Canterbury Tales" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 297-318.
Analyzes the historical background of late fourteenth-century medical practice in order to understand better Chaucer's portrait of the Physician in GP. Emphasizes how Chaucer reveals his opinions on morality, as well as the medical profession,…
Regenos, Graydon W.
Charles Henderson, Jr., ed. Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Honor of Berthold Louis Ullman. 2 vols. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratre, 1964), 2: 41-46.
Argues that it "seems altogether likely" that when creating his GP description of the Physician Chaucer "at least had in mind" the doctor of the Brunellus the ass episode in Nigellus Wireker's "Speculum Stultorum"; both doctors are avaricious.
Although earlier scholarship has recognized the importance of the Feast of the Holy Innocents in PrT, a reading of the entire mass as it occurs in the Sarum use suggests that the "greyn" is not a mere prop but a symbol with rich liturgical…
Bourner, Paula Christine.
Dissertation Abstracts International 52 (1992): 2559A.
Although Chaucer and Christine de Pisan showed themselves well aware of the distorting mirror of gender constructions by men, the Renaissance produced even more misogynist views, especially in Jacobean domestic tragedy. Shakespeare, however,…
