Browse Items (16012 total)

The Clerk of Oxford is Jankyn, the Wife of Bath's fifth husband, travelling incognito.

Presents ClPT in Middle English (based on Robinson's 1957 edition), with notes and glossary at the end of the text, along with an appendix (pp. 91-99) that offers lines 4.813-924 of ClT in facing-page juxtaposition with one of its source texts, "Le…

Examines the irony and paradoxes of ClT, claiming that through the Tale, the Clerk "challenges an audience as Griselda's impassive patience challenges Walter." Views the Clerk as a "complicated figure of utter submissiveness and essential silence…

Griselda and Dorigen embody more coherent subjectivities than do their counterparts in analogous tales, although neither becomes a true agent in the outcome of her plot.

Hilmo encourages the view that wood-cuts enhance text through visual rhetoric; specifically, Caxton's addition of a bow to Chaucer's Clerk in his edition of CT represents the Clerk as a moral satirist.

In telling his tale, the Clerk gradually abandons his allegorical refutation of the Wife's view of marriage by becoming more critical of Walter and more sympathetic to the human plight of Griselda, whom he comes to regard as an embodiment of natural…

Reads ClT as a realist's attack on nominalism, with Walter depicting an unfree diety, and Griselda, rampant fideism. Chaucer moderates the Clerk's realism at the end of the Tale and in the Envoy.

Argues that in SqT, FranT, KnT, and TC Chaucer used romance to reconcile his two responsibilities as a lay clerk: "to speak of morality and of the refinements of love."

Item not seen. WorldCat records indicate this edition of ClT includes an introduction and notes by Marjorie M. Barber.

Interprets Griselda of ClT "as the late medieval English Church wedded to a secular power [Walter] that would radically dominate and divest her in the name of reform." Resists "domineering exegetical acts," using "literary and feminist…

Examines medieval redactions of Boccaccio's Griselda story to suggest that Chaucer retells it in order to raise literary questions analogous to moral ones. The Clerk combines Petrarch's affective purpose and high style with the exemplary force and…

Presents a variety of historical contexts for Chaucer's characterization of the Clerk, discussing medieval universities, manuscripts from fourteenth-century Oxford, and the role of clerks in medieval society. Includes appendices of "Manuscripts…

Demonstrates the importance and central role of the "clerical proletariat"--i.e., clerics who worked "in liminal spaces between the ecclesiastical and lay worlds"--in the proliferation of late medieval books and literature in English, with primary…

Twenty-six essays on the impact of the classics on medieval art, history, philosophy, education, and literature. Topics range widely from Coptic textiles to fourteenth-century England, from neo-Platonism to speculative grammar--all addressing the…

Studies the works of Thomas Walsingham for their importance in the field of late fourteenth-century English "public classical literature," helping to define this field by focusing on nuances in Walsingham's treatments of political events in…

Chaucer drew on two classical sources, Virgil's "Aeneid" and Ovid's "Heroides," to illustrate two themes. In HF, complex characterizations of Venus, Aeneas, and Dido illustrate different meanings of Latin "fame"; in LGW, Dido's queenliness is…

Anatomizes the tradition of the classical epic in Western literature, from Homer to Tolstoy and Thomas Mann, tracing the "Alexandrian" mode that originated with Callimachus and his school and runs counter to the more strictly restrained tradition of…

In PF, Chaucer's Nature fulfills a double role: a divinity who presides over weddings (classical) and a mediatrix for the Christian diety (early modern).

Surveys classical concepts of authority and Chaucer's uses of classical authorities, arguing that although Chaucerian allusions reflect medieval continuity with Stoicism and Epicurianism, the poet uses classical authorities, especially Ovid, in…

Included in this "practical book about leadership" are claims that CT reveals that "people can't be stereotyped" because they are essentially paradoxical. Comments most extensively on the Wife of Bath, who is "incapable of being classified, sorted,…

Aligns Chaucer's style, themes, and characterization in TC with Renaissance humanism more than with medieval conventions, genres, and rhetoric, arguing that the poem anticipates the "poetry of Shakespeare's century" in its fusing realism, epic, and…

Argues that TC, in its "integration of style, structure, and theme with meaning," is best regarded as "transitionally Renaissance in its entire import." Articulates differences between medieval and Renaissance cultures, and argues that TC better…

The obscure circumstances surrounding the three marriages of Joan of Kent are clarified by reference to the original documents. In 1340, at age 12, she secretly married Sir Thomas Holland. In 1341, while Holland was crusading in Prussia, she was…

Argues that Chaucer encourages his audience to "view the affair between Troilus and Criseyde as a clandestine marriage rather than as an illicit love affair," different from the analogous relationship in Boccaccio's "Filostrato" and consistent with…

A Lacanian analysis of ShT questions "the position of the speaking subject within the network of symbolic exchange. The narrative imbrecates three symbolic systems: speech, money, and sexual division . . . synonymously, as metaphors of each other,…