Browse Items (16341 total)

Like his French predecessors, Chaucer employs a commonplace detail and dialogue to impart to his fabliaux a sense of domestic, small town, and rural life. However, while unity in design and treatment characterize the French fabliaux, Chaucer's are…

Argues that Shakespeare's reading of Thomas Speght's edition of Chaucer's "Works" (1598) provoked his creative imagination as well as providing source material, looking closely at how Chaucer's depiction of Julius Caesar's death in MkT affected…

Rubrics in "Filostrato" manuscripts label Calkas's bid to trade a prisoner for his daughter as an "oratory." Chaucer's version of the speech fulfills the formal requirements of a speech arguing "for a particular course of action" and in so doing…

Explores Chaucer's "nuanced reworkings" of his source texts in the last twelve stanzas of TC, focusing on his adaptations of Boccaccio's "Filostrato," his "Teseida," and Dante's "Commendia," but also commenting on uses of Virgil, Statius, and…

Like the Canon's Yeoman and unlike St. Cecile (SNT), Roger the Cook is spiritually leaden, exhibiting all four of lead's distinctive qualities: heaviness, earthiness, pallor, and muteness. After his altercation with the Manciple in ManP, Roger is…

Summary description of CT, with comments on Chaucer's life and language, and appreciative analysis of the characterizations of several pilgrims, the conflicts between their tales, and the "eternal relevance" of the work overall. Recommends cinematic…

Analyzes the meter of the opening line of CT (GP 1.1), focusing on renderings of "Aprill(e)" in manuscripts and printed editions, comparing it with meter elsewhere in CT, and arguing "that there is a strong possibility, even a probability, that…

A short story that alludes to the opening of GP in its title, and includes a character who recites Chaucer and is interested in Chaucerian apocrypha.

Explores why Chaucer sets CT in April, rather than the traditional month of May, and concludes that the disruption of expectations leads the reader to reflect and realize the tales are a mix of the secular and the sacred.

Includes a chapter entitled "Chaucer's Westminster" (pp. 83-89) that comments on the effects of the plague in Westminster, Chaucer's knowledge of architect Henry Yevele and carpenter Hugh Herland, and the buildings in Westminster that survive from…

Comprehensive catalog of western European illuminated manuscripts in the Cambridge University Library. Includes several indices of iconography, scribes, artists, binders, and authors (with Chaucer listed under "G" for Geoffrey), along with…

Advocates a multicutural approach to literature by comparing FranT to a thirteenth-century Japanese narrative of the Emperor Gosaga.

Scholars need to reassess the extent of Sercambi's literary influence. A survey of some analogues of the framework and tales of his "Novelle" prove conclusively that his work was imitated in Italy, Spain, France, and Germany. Parallels in ShT and…

Chaucer's depiction of time in the opening of GP is modeled on either Guido delle Colonne's "Historia Destructionis Troiae" or Boccaccio's "Ameto," although Chaucer mistakenly inverted the mention of April and the cliche about March.

Records a Latin poem written by Clemens upon visiting Chaucer's tomb. The poem indicates that Clemens was familiar with Chaucer through Sir Frances Kynaston's Latin version of TC 1-2.

The function of wells and streams in Chaucer's use of the garden "topos" suggests that, where the secular materials are drawn from the courtly love tradition, as in PF and very largely in MerT, religious echoes expose the illusiveness or inadequacy…

Describes "computer-assisted methods for the analysis of textual variation within large textual traditions," clarifying phylogenetic methods, the goal of maximum parsimony, software decisions and usage, variant management, and the crucial importance…

Cooper surveys Chaucer's linguistic and poetic innovations, emphasizing that his rewritings of classical, French, and Italian models were "far from being acts of homage." Chaucer may have thought of himself as a literary heir, but he was an…

Highlights the connections between uses of the phrase "weeping like a beaten child" in both Chaucer and Malory, simultaneously exploring the semantic range of weeping elsewhere. These examinations offer further important lessons about the history of…

Adaptations of its sources shape ClT in ways that encourage male, bourgeois readers to imagine themselves as Griselda's protectors. Infused with a sense of moral and patriarchal responsibility and driven by religious devotion, such readers also…

Considers the work of Chaucer, among others, as an example of non-hypertextual writing that nonetheless creates the user disorientation often associated with negotiations of hypertext.

Examines connections between women's weaving and preaching by focusing on Alisoun. Uses the metaphor of weaving to establish how Alisoun "wove textiles and words as a mode of female expression and critique of the patriarchal church's interpretation…

In BD, Chaucer reinvents the "dits amoreux" tropes of Froissart (in "Le paradis d'Amours") and Machaut (in "Le jugement dou roy de Behaingne"), applying Galen's humoral medicine to depictions of the lovelorn knight. Likewise, in KnT, the banished…

Behind the mysterious "vitremyte" that Zenobia is forced to adopt in MkT 2372 lies the Maeonian mitra, a cloth cap worn by Greek women. As a symbol of effeminacy, it is used in Boccaccio, for example, in the humiliation of Hercules. In Zenobia's…

Surveys literary depictions of economic ideals and economic abuses among the aristocracy in ParsT; Form Age; Wynnere and Wastoure"; "Piers Plowman"; and works by Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate, focusing on the "portrayal of lords and rulers, both as…