Jordan, Robert M.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967.
Describes the "aesthetic implications" of the medieval world view, rooted in Plato's "Timaeus" and based on notions of quantity, ordered hierarchy, and analogy rather than "organic" unity. Developed by Boethius, Macrobius, and Augustine, this view…
The disjuncture between the confessional (yet not moral) part 1 and the fabliau-like part 2 of CYT derives in part from the essential split between the futile effort toward production in part 1 and the nonproductive but successful cheating of part 2.…
Knapp, Peggy (A.)
New York and London : Routledge, 1990.
Influenced by modern critical approaches such as new historicism and cultural studies, Knapp reworks some material published earlier and adds new essays in a volume designed to examine the pilgrims' social contest and the "larger social contest"…
Knight, Stephen.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 2 (1980): 15-51.
Modern sociological theories of criticism are applied to Chaucer's major works--BD, HF, PF, TC, and CT. In particular Pierre Macherey's ideological analysis is applied to structure and mimesis in Chaucer, and Jacques Lacan's theories on subjectivity…
Strohm, Paul.
Jonathan Fruoco, ed. Polyphony and the Modern (New York Routledge, 2021), pp. 192-205.
Argues that Chaucer's "polyphony and polyvocality" are both "modern" and "progressive"--justification for dismantling the period boundary between medieval and Early Modern literatures. Surveys mixed, condescending praise by Early Modern critics of…
Halle, Morris, and Samuel Jay Keyser.
College English 28 (1966): 187-219.
Explores the assumptions about stress that underlie prosodic scansion, and demonstrates that Chaucer's decasyllabic verse is built upon a contrastive rather than an absolute distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables. Considers elision,…
Scholars such as Sheila Delany, Derek Pearsall, and Thomas Frederick Tout have used bureaucratic records of Chaucer - and records of Chaucer as bureaucrat - to construct subjective portraits of the poet. Mead explores the processes of "reading"…
Patterson, Lee.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.
Chaucer approaches history as a subject and human beings as individualized subjects within history, examining the medieval view of history as degeneration from an ideal and developing the modernist, humanist view of history. In Anel, Boethianism…
Anderson, Miranda.
Miranda Anderson, ed. The Book of the Mirror: An Interdisciplinary Collection Exploring the Cultural History of the Mirror. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007, pp. 70-79.
Anderson illustrates the use of mirror metaphors, common in medieval literature and theology alike, in Chaucer's texts (e.g., SqT, KnT, Rom, For, and Wom Unc). Humanity's internal mirror should reflect the image of God, but human reason can be…
Prendergast, Thomas A., and Jessica Rosenfeld, eds.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Includes nine essays, an index, and an introduction by the editors. Adopting a new formalist methodology that attends both to aesthetics and historicism, the volume focuses on "the incompleteness and self-contradictory nature of form" in Chaucer's…
Phillips, Helen.
Clíodhna Carney and Frances McCormack, eds. Chaucer's Poetry: Words, Authority and Ethics (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013), pp. 75-91.
Examines Chaucer's use of sun-king imagery and references to Apollo in a variety of works. Compiles historical connections among Chaucer's allusions and Richard II and other political figures' iconography, suggesting a multivalent portrayal of…
Argues that as he grew older, Chaucer became disenchanted with the affectations of court life and with the mercantile life of his own father and developed an interest in his paternal ancestors who had been provincial taverners in Ipswich in the…
Dinshaw, Carolyn.
New York and London: Garland, 1988.
Dinshaw argues that we must read the text of Chaucer dialectically, "both (as) the expression of an individual, historical writer and as having significance that is dependent upon preexisting structures of language." Investigates how texts "create"…
Dinshaw, Carolyn Louise.
Dissertation Abstracts International 43 (1983): 2442-2443A.
Produced at a time when authors as individuals and literary structures were emerging, Chaucer's texts should be read both as an individual author's work and as the work of a "construct." The relationship appears in HF and develops through TC to the…
Desmond, Marilyn.
Suzanne Conklin Akbari and James Simpson, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford Handbook of Chaucer), pp. 238-51.
Surveys some of the sources of and connections among the various texts that predate Chaucer and that describe Troy and its fall. Discusses a range of Chaucerian engagements with Troy, including BD and TC.
Describes considerations of mutability from "Antiquity Through the Middle Ages" and then focuses on Chaucer's works, with individual sections that assess aspects of the theme in Chaucer's translations, his lyric poems, his dream visions, TC, KnT, and…
Mogan, Joseph John, Jr.
Dissertation Abstracts International 22.10 (1962): 3669-70.
Traces the development of the notion of mutability from decay to progress, with related motifs, and assesses its place in Boethius' "Consolation of Philosophy" and the "De Contemptu Mundi" of Innocent III. Then examines Chaucer's "peculiar…
Sebastian, John T.
Literature Compass 3.4 (2006): 767-77.
Surveys recent historicist and psychoanalytic approaches to Chaucer's writing, positing an impending turn toward "an emerging norm of multi- and post-theoretical criticism."
Koonce, B. G.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966.
See also Dissertation Abstracts International 20.09 (1960): 3729-30.
Confronts the "deliberate obscurity" of HF, seeking to resolve its apparent disjunctions and disunities by reading it as a "poetic allegory" on the "subject of fame," influenced by scriptural tradition, by the dual aspects of Venus (secular and…
Hosokawa, Satoshi.
Koichi Kano, ed. An Invitation to Chaucer's Cosmos (Tokyo: Yushokan, 2022), pp. 187-210.
Provides a list of French works written in the period up to Chaucer's lifetime in the order of the number of extant manuscripts, from more than 100 to four. Assuming this reflects the French texts that surrounded Chaucer, reviews Charles Muscatine's…
Nolan, Barbara.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Nolan analyzes continental verse narratives from which Chaucer borrowed for KnT and TC--namely, the Roman de Troie, Roman de Thebes, Roman d'Eneas, and Boccaccio's Filostrato and Teseida. TC uses Ovidian fine amor as a "fulcrum," and history as a…
Chaucer draws on a variety of sources--Boccaccio, Ovid, French dawn-songs, popular dawn-song traditions, courtly dawn-songs, and (perhaps) popular poetry--for the dawn-songs in RvT, MerT, Mars, and TC. He uses these sources in a variety of…
Assesses Chaucer's response to ancient poetry, especially as Chaucer (like Dante) fuses the ancient with more recent models while pursuing the ancient concern with the tragic sorrows of love. Wetherbee comments on aspects of BD and HF, examines the…
Dove, Mary.
Sheila Delany, ed. Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 89-107.
Wycliffite translation of Jewish Scripture and the glosses and prologues that supplemented it often reflect curiosity about Jewish scholarship. Chaucer may have read the translation and may have admired the reading practices of the Jews.
