Maleski, Mary A.
Chaucer Yearbook 05 (1998): 41-60.
Debates whether Chaucer's Prioress is childlike or simply childish, and questions why she is on a pilgrimage. Also discusses the extent of Chaucer's understanding of medieval religious women.
Norako, Leila Kathleen.
Ph.D, Dissertation. University of Rochester, 2012. Dissertation Abstracts International A73.09 (E).
Argues that a variety of "fourteenth- and fifteenth-century recovery romances create a convergent set of fantasies that reflect desires both for the reclamation of the Holy Land and for the protection and ascendance of Christianity." Chapter four…
Stanbury, Sarah.
Valerie B. Johnson and Kara L. McShane, eds. Negotiating Boundaries in Medieval Literature and Culture: Essays on Marginality, Difference, and Reading Practices in Honor of Thomas Hahn (Boston: De Gruyter; Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2022), pp. 265-88.
Explicates the "cukkow"/cuckoo/cuckold pun in ManT by identifying the role of the cuckoo (versus the nightingale) in bird-debate poems, analyzed here, particularly in Sir John Clanvowe's "Boke of Cupide." Argues that, by engaging themes of…
Treanor, Lucia.
Santa Casciani, ed. Dante and the Franciscans. The Medieval Franciscans, no. 3. Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2006, pp. 229-88.
Pope Innocent III explicitly recognized the Greek letter 'tau' as representing the form of the cross and saw it as a sign of renewal in the church. Likewise the syllable 'te' was interpreted as a sign of the cross. Treanor explores graphic…
Provides links to online samples of Chaucer's works, "read by professors" and intended to "help students improve their pronunciation of Chaucer's Middle English." Includes passages from CT, TC, and other works. Formerly hosted at Virginia Military…
Goodman, Thomas A.
Dissertation Abstracts International 50 (1990): 1607A.
Religious learning as an aid for salvation is a theme running through late-fourteenth-century works including CT, Piers Plowman, and Wycliffite writing. Chaucer satirizes scholastic studies in WBT, FrT, and SumT. Although not involved in the…
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,…
Fraser, Russell A., ed.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1955.
Edits (with facsimile pages) "three sixteenth-century fragments of a poetical miscellany" found in different extant manuscripts and, in early attributions, was credited to Chaucer. The Introduction explains why these attributions are inaccurate,…
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…
