Browse Items (16320 total)

Argues that medieval language theory and the arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric inform CT. They provided Chaucer with his fundamental awareness of the slipperiness of language-its inability to represent truth and reality and its ability to distort…

Translations of Chaucer are inadequate and have no place in serious literary scholarship. Reviews of translations are also misleading since they may suggest that modern English versions lift a veil from the opacity of Chaucer's poetry.

In the Ellesmere arrangement, CT forms a unified whole, modeled on the seven planets and on the traditional divisions of philosophy, offering a "planetary pilgrimage" and a philosophical "journey of the soul." Like Gower's "Confessio Amantis," CT is…

Clarifies the conventionality of Chaucer's references to allegorical and/or exemplary animals and their significances, offering numerous examples to show that Chaucer's allusions are "brief" and generally similar to and/or derived from "the most…

Item not seen. The WorldCat record indicates that this murder mystery involves Chaucer as a young man investigating a case that involves his family and the wine trade in the Vintry Ward,

Describes the importance of mental images to medieval understanding of cognition and memory, and clarifies the importance of such images to understanding Chaucer's works as iconographical poems. Meaning inheres in such images and enables both…

Further enquiry can illuminate Chaucer's references and response to the visual arts, the artistic materials actually available to him, the applicability of artistic principles to his literary style, and the extent to and manner in which he…

Describes and promotes the use of image-rich material and virtual learning environments for teaching Chaucer. Includes cautions and recommendations.

The War of the Maidens, a founding myth of Czech history, may have come to England via Anne of Bohemia and may be part of the "political unconscious" of several of Chaucer's works, particularly his depiction of the Amazons in KnT.

Discusses the conflict between the letter and the spirit in NPT, providing a short survey of the history of literal interpretation. Chaucer freely accepts the letter as literature without excluding the morality. The Priest makes us turn away from…

Chaucer was evidently educated in the "ars dictaminis" (art of letter writing), which emphasized voice and point of view and may have influenced CT. While individual tales may have been written to be recited, CT as a collection was designed to be…

Item not seen; no abstract published.

Explores the "difficulties" Chaucer encountered in translating Latin and continental works into English poetry and various verse forms, surveying complete works such as Bo, Rom, ClT, Mel, Ven, etc., and passages from various sources in larger works…

Identifies an early modern allusion to Chaucer and CYT (by Hugh Platt) and one on dreams and, possibly, NPT (by William Vaughan), neither previously noted.

Surveys commentary on Chaucer in Victorian critical journals, deriving three aspects of the Victorian view of Chaucer: he was a Child-Poet whose simplicity anticipated that of the nineteenth-century lower classes; he was the poet of the "green…

Studies Chaucer's views of war and chivalry, examining biographical and historical data as background to assessments of TC, KnT, and the GP sketches of the Knight and Squire. Pratt summarizes medieval theories of warfare and "just war" and discusses…

Eight previously printed essays, seven on Chaucer and one on Shakespeare's Cressida. For the essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Chaucer and Women under Alternative Title.

Until 1369, Wyclif, powerful and influential, dominated Oxford; the "Lollard Knights" were prestigious men of court;and John of Gaunt was patron of both Chaucer and Wyclif. Appendix applies Wyclif's ideas to Chaucer's poetry: Gent, Truth, Form Age,…

In CT (especially WBT, PardT, CYT, PhyT, SNT, and MLT), Chaucer shares with Wyclif the belief that the Church had lost its miraculous power and its focus on salvation, and he stresses the importance of the individual's role in personal salvation. For…

Gower's "Confessio Amantis" presents Genius's tales as morally simple, although the incest stories stimulate readers to ask moral questions. In MLT, Chaucer represents his narrator as misreading Gower, affecting a simplistically moral stance and…

Surveys commentary on the frontispiece to TC in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University, MS 61, and argues that it was commissioned by Henry V as part of his program to promote Lancastrian legitimacy and English vernacular writing.

Fumo compares and contrasts Chaucer's invocation of Apollo in HF to its source in Dante's "Paradiso," arguing that Chaucer shares with Dante a "fundamental interest in defining the poet's role" as a "vessel of prophetic truth." Both poets are…

Simpson explores Chaucer's absorption of and reactions to Continental influences (Latin, French, and Italian), emphasizing the recurrent influence of Ovid as a source and a model. BD is a poem of deference to Gaunt and to French tradition; HF and PF…

Reviews scholarship on Chaucer and London and briefly examines the impact of the Black Death, noting that "the threat of death is everywhere in Chaucer's work." An appendix lists "Recent Studies Treating Chaucer and London."

Suggests that -- in light of details of Chaucer's career and of medieval chess-playing -- the significance of "fers" in BD 741 may be "threefold," referring to Blanche, to the chess piece, and to "Chaucer himself, the commoner promoted from pawn to…