Sharma, Manish.
Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 45.2 (2017): 54-83.
Shows how NPT, FranT, and Ret reveal the rigor of Chaucer's philosophy, comparing matter-form distinctions underlying these works with the positions of a wide range of notable philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle to Jacques Lacan and François…
Aers explores the conflict between traditional Christian ideology and social and individual realities in "Piers Plowman," and Langland's criticism of abuse of power in all ranks of the clerical hierarchy. Langland calls for reformation within…
Introduction by Steven Justice. Collection of essays on a range of subjects, including Ricardian public poetry, form and authorship, and the role of the modern annotator. Includes three chapters primarily devoted to CT: "Chaucer's 'New Men' and the…
Wallace, David.
R. F. Yeager and Toshiyuki Takamiya, eds. The Medieval Python: The Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 195-205.
Comments on how the Hundred Years War "infiltrates" CT by way of "the first trio of portraits" and their depictions of late medieval warfare. Clarifies the meaning of "chyvachie" in the description of the Squire and dilates upon the significance of…
Kellogg, Alfred L.
New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1972.
Collects twenty essays by Kellogg (five co-authored), several of them reprinted. Fourteen of the essays pertain to Chaucer, with four of them printed here for the first time. Includes a subject index. For the new essays that pertain to Chaucer,…
Kane, George.
Mary J. Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk, eds. Acts of Interpretation (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1982), pp. 237-55.
Chaucer derived his concepts of love poetry from various contemporary traditions of romantic love. He satirized the concepts of "fin amour" with a firm knowledge of its contrasting forms and unpredictable variety, utilizing all its aspects from its…
Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning.
Classical and Modern Literature 20.2: 61-65, 2000.
Lucretius's "De rerum natura" may have influenced the reverdie, or spring song, that opens GP. Lucretius's reverdie predates and almost certainly influenced those in the "Georgics" and the "Pervigilius veneris," already linked to The General…
In CT Chaucer defines and redefines "myrie tale." Ultimately it is neither mere entertainment, nor pure instruction, not even sentence and solace. A truly "myrie tale" must be "fructuous," i.e., truly edifying. Only ParsT fits, for poetry is…
Van Dyke, Carolynn.
Susan McHugh, Robert McKay, and John Miller, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 127-40.
Surveys the functions and understanding of the nightingale in myth, literature, music, and sign theory, observing how the bird "inhabits the borders between states of being." Then discusses its roles in John Lydgate's "A Seying of the Nightingale"…
New facets of Chaucer's writing on love, consolation, and repentance are illuminated when we assume that Chaucer did translate Pseudo-Origen's "De Maria Magdalena," as he claims to have done in LGWP G418 ("Orygenes upon the Maudeleyne").
The ms cited, an anthology of astronomical treatises possibly compiled in Spain c.1303, and transferred to England c.1350,may contain the specific sources for Chaucer's Astr. Two Chaucerian interpolations coincide with ms marginalia, and Chaucer's…
Baldwin, Elizabeth.
Wim Hüsken and Konrad Schoell, eds. Farce and Farcical Elements (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 85-105.
Argues that a seventeenth-century play, "The Wisest Have Their Fools About Them," may reflect the influence of Chaucerian fabliau and some late-medieval stage traditions. Baldwin's analysis focuses on stereotypical characters.
Sloane, William.
Notes and Queries 205 (1960): 220-22.
Identifies three references in the correspondence and diary of Reverend Stukeley to a portrait (or portraits) of Chaucer and to a proposed edition of the poet's works.
Prescott, Anne Worthington.
Chaucer Newsletter 11:2 (1989): 1, 6-7.
Chaucer's "modernity" and "humanity" are experienced through his lyrics, says Prescott, who, as composer and librettist, has drawn her own original libretti from CT, HF, LGW, and TC and had them set to music by Roger Nixon.
Galván Reula, J. F.
Epos: Revista de Filologia 1 (1984): 19-34.
Focuses on NPT as an example of Chaucer's combination of linguistic ambiguity and limited or unreliable narration, his "modern" features. Chaucer's works are classics because his techniques accord well with the narrative theories of modern critics…
Evans, Robert C.
James M. Dean, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer (Ipswich, Mass.: Salem Press, 2017), pp. 201-15.
Presents overlap between Chaucer's writings and the writings of Thomas Nashe, particularly the late sixteenth-century poem "The Choice of Valentines," which is "considered to be the most pornographic piece of writing to survive" Shakespeare's time.…
Bourgne, Florence
Cahiers de recherches medievales et humanistes 29 (2015): 199–214.
Examines Chaucer's literary exchanges with contemporary French writers, including his interest in "Flaundres, in Artoys, and Pycardie." Offers
how Chaucer's translation of Rom confirms his fascination with the duchy's growing empire, where Picard…
Cawley, A. C.
Review of English Literature 3.2 (1962): 9-19.
Compares HF and Alexander Pope's adaptation of it, "Temple of Fame," focusing on their uses and meanings of the word "fame." Surveys Chaucer's uses of "fame" in his corpus, and traces the rise and fall of its meanings in HF, from rumor to renown and…
Fyler, John M.
James M. Dean and Christian Zacher, eds. The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays on Chaucer and Medieval Culture in Honor of Donald R. Howard (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), pp. 149-59.
Alexander Pope wrote a youthful imitation of HF Book 3, entitled the Temple of Fame. Pope's imitation of Chaucer and his reworking of that imitation in the Dunciad show he had assimilated Chaucer's troubling thoughts about the centrality and…
Evitt, Regula Meyer.
Monica Brzezinski Potkay and Regula Meyer Evitt. Minding the Body: Woman and Literature in the Middle Ages, 800-1500 (London: Twayne, 1997), (Chapter 8) pp. 139-65.
Himself accused of rape, Chaucer could inhabit the "role of masculine agent" of the crime and that of the "feminized victim of accusation," reworking the traditional "metaphoric equation of deceptive language and female infidelity."
Ferris, Sumner.
Beryl Rowland, ed. Chaucer and Middle English Studies in honour of Rossell Hope Robbins (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974), pp. 210-17.
Explains why both Richard II and Henry IV antedated their grants to Chaucer to October 13 (1398 and 1399, respectively): Richard because it was the feast day of the translation of St. Edward the Confessor, whom he venerated; Henry, because he had…
Benavides, Ronald Gabriel.
Dissertation Abstracts International 50 (1990): 3232A.
Penitential theology, as derived from St. Augustine and subsequent writers, holds humanity to be sinful yet possessed of reason and hence of responsibility. ParsT and Ruiz's Prologue examine this tradition with examples to reveal human nature; thus,…
In WBT, PardT, and NPT, Chaucer exploits many facets of medieval dream and fable lore, including the ambiguous situation of a dream within a fiction and the Augustinian motif of the liar who tells the truth in order to deceive. Shakespeare pushes…
