Blurton, Heather, and Hannah Johnson.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017.
Explores the anti-Semitism of PrT, producing "a discussion animated by the ways in which antisemitism has emerged as the problematic that organizes scholarly response," and resists dismissing or excusing prejudice and hate in PrT. Tracks history of…
Brewer, D. S.
A. C. Cawley, ed. Chaucer's Mind and Art (New York: Barnes & Noble; Edinburgh and London: Oliver & Boyd, 1969), pp. 3-28.
Discusses representative examples of book-length studies of Chaucer written in the twentieth century (by Kittredge, Chesterton, Lowes, Dempster, Speirs, Donaldson, Muscatine, Payne, and Robertson); surveys several "main literary topics" in Chaucer…
Fletcher, Alan J.
Review of English Studies 58 (2007): 597-632.
Evidence suggests that Chaucer's careless scribe in Adam is Adam Pynkhurst. The Trinity College manuscript, containing prose tracts evincing Wyclif's influence, may be in Pynkhurst's hand. Chaucer's connection with this scribe could account for…
Horobin, Simon.
Review of English Studies 60 (2009): 371-81.
Reconsideration of Alan J. Fletcher's evidence (RES 58 [2007]: 597-632) does not support the claim that Adam Pynkhurst is the scribe of Dublin, Trinity College MS 244.
Hanning, Robert W.
James J. Paxson, Lawrence M. Clopper, and Sylvia Tomasch, eds. The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer and the Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 143-59.
In TC, the narrator and Pandarus are mediators--purveyors of desired commodities (women or love stories) to a designated recipient (Troilus; the audience assembled for the occasion). Hanning examines the "crisis of mediation" of late-medieval…
Chaucer's changes to source material emphasize what shapes a person and how she comes to understand and experience the world. If Virginia had continued to refuse her father and Virginius had cut off his daughter's head despite her protests, the Tale…
Kumamoto, Sadahiro.
Kumamoto Journal of Culture and Humanities (Kumamoto University) 104 (2013): 41-60.
Contends that the uniqueness of Chaucer's poetry lies in the combination of emotive theme and manipulation of "tone." Classifies "tone-elevators" and compares their effects between different genres of Chaucerian texts as well as between Chaucerian…
Cowgill, Kent.
Rochester, Minn.: Lone Oak Press, 1995.
A comic novel that derives its characters from GP and most of its sub-plots from CT, cast as the thirty-year reunion of a hapless college baseball team, the Tabelard Bees, with first-person narration by the team's utility player, Jeffrey Shoemaker,…
Deschamps had in mind Chaucer's short lyrics--Truth, Gent, Sted, Wom Nob--when he praised him in the ballads. These poems constitute Chaucer's advisory poetry whose subjects is moral philosophy stated in polished language and in French forms.
Lerer, Seth.
Dolores Warwick Frese and Katherine O'Brien O'Keefe, eds. The Book and the Body. University of Notre Dame Ward-Phillips Lectures in English Language and Literature, no. 14. (Notre Dame, Ind., and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), pp. 78-115.
Examines how Stephen Hawes's "Conforte de Louers" and "Pastime of Pleasure," in selected allusions and references to TC, conflate the poet's identity and the act of reading. Reactions to the Hawesean poems in Humphrey emanuscript collection suggest…
Modernizations of Chaucer's short poems, maintaining original rhyme schemes and metrical patterns, with facing-page texts from The Riverside Chaucer and Walter Skeat's edition. Includes, in the following order, ABC, Pity, Lady, Mars, Ros, Wom Nob,…
Political and social history of court life during the reign of Richard II, with emphasis on art and literature. Includes a chapter pertaining to Chaucer (pp. 62-73) and recurrently attends to his relations with contemporaneous poets Thomas Usk,…
Bennett, Michael J.
Barbara A. Hanawalt, ed. Chaucer's England: Literature in Historical Context (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 3-20.
Richard's court was important as a cultural force in England's first "golden age" of literature. Members of his coterie were the first audience of poets such as Chaucer and Gower, and it seems likely that his travels were related to the production…
Considers how Bohemian culture in the late fourteenth century influenced English medieval writers including Chaucer, Gower, and the Gawain- poet.Focuses on Anne of Bohemia, who married Richard II, and claims she "may have been in Chaucer’s mind as a…
Hoffman, Donald L.
Will Wright and Steven Kaplan, eds. The Image of Nature in Literature, the Media, and Society (Pueblo, Colo.: Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, 1993), pp. 61-67.
Compares the depiction of social order in Aristotle's 'Politics' with that in PF. Chaucer's Natura is a figure of "communal order" who properly subordinates the drive for procreation to the need for social hierarchy.
Discusses Chaucer's accomplishments in the development of lyric poetry, with commentary on Machaut, Deschamps, Hoccleve, Lydgate, and Villon. Chaucer is the "high point" of the English tradition inspired by the French.
Mullally, Evelyn,and John Thompson,eds.
Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N. Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1997.
Thirty-seven essays by various authors arranged under five headings: Contexts for Courtliness, Fashioning History and Romance, Negotiating a Courtly Voice, Texts and Readers, and Limits of Courtliness. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search…
Brewer, Derek.
Flemming G. Andersen and Morten Nojgaard, eds. The Making of the Couple: The Social Function of Short-Form Medieval Narrative: A Symposium (Odense: Odense University Press, 1991), pp. 129-43.
Surveys views on sex and marriage in Chaucer's works and argues that his fabliaux reflect human desires to escape from and to re-create the couple. The brevity of the fabliau limits the possibilities of readers' identification with the characters…
Hill argues that Troilus's pagan, earthly joy in the second half of Book 3 of TC is Chaucer's representation of "the maximum of good and beauty to be found outside of Christian belief and the dispensations of faith." The intense joy experienced by…
Guidry, Marc S.
Dissertation Abstracts International 58 (1997): 2224A.
As diplomat, MP, and associate of important political figures, Chaucer understood the operation of government and its rhetoric, reflected in Mel, MLT, ClT, KnT, and MerT. Chaucer's themes of class and gender relate to the nature of counsel-taking.
Moseley, Charles.
Linda Cookson and Bryan Loughrey, ed. Critical Essays on The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale (Harlow: Longman, 1990), pp. 46-54.
PardP characterizes him as "a mirror-image of all that is good," revealing his "ghastly pride" in his skills and his immorality. Ironically, PardT is a superb sermon, although its moral appears to be "quite lost on his hearers" (the pilgrim…
Grossman, Judith.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 1 (1979): 41-54.
John Barbour in "The Bruce" (1375) depicts Sir James Douglas as conforming to the knightly ideal in character and manner,but not in physical appearance. In Chaucer's TC, Criseyde occasionally departs from the pattern of idealized heroine. Through…
Doyle, A. I.
Martin Stevens and Daniel Woodward, eds. The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation (San Marino, Calif.: Huntingon Library; Tokyo: Yushodo, 1995), pp. 49-67.
Paleographic analysis of the five manuscripts or fragments attributable to the Ellesmere scribe: Ellesmere itself; the Hengwrt manuscript, except for "a few lines"; twenty-four folios of a copy of Gower's "Confessio Amantis;" a fragment of a leaf of…
Sweany, Erin E.
In Nicole Nyffenegger and Katrin Rupp, eds. Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2918), pp. 119-44.
Reads the Cook's ulcer as potential leprosy in an effort to show how such signs on the skin act as points of uncertainty that impact the relationships among the pilgrims.
