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…
Binski, Paul, and Patrick Zutshi, with the collaboration of Stella Panayotova.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
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…
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.
Heffernan, Carol Falvo.
Papers on Language and Literature 15 (1979): 339-57.
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…
Bordalejo, Barbara.
Digital Medievalist 14, special issue (2021). 36 pp.
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…
Trigg, Stephanie.
Glenn D. Burger and Holly A. Crocker, eds. Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 25-46.
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…
Sidhu, Nicole Nolan.
Maryanne Kowaleski and P. J. P. Goldberg, eds. Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing and Household in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 177-208.
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.
Delony, Mikee C.
Priscilla Pope-Levison and John R. Levison, eds. Sex, Gender, and Christianity (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012), pp. 33–57.
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…
McNamara, Rebecca F.
Literature and Medicine 33.2 (2015): 258-78.
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…
DiMarco, Vincent.
English Language Notes 25:4 (1988): 15-19.
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…
Hole, Jennifer.
Jennifer Hole. Economic Ethics in Late Medieval England, 1300-1500 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 99-125.
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…
Kaplan, Philip Benjamin.
Dissertation Abstracts International 59 (1999): 3465A.
Defines anti-Semitic art as any work that employs pejorative stereotypes about Jews without repudiating them. Focuses on Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice" but also considers PrT and Marlowe's "The Jew of Malta."
Suggests possible sources for Chaucer's ideas on parenthood that influenced CkT, including the "Wisdom commentary of Dominican friar, Robert Holcot." Also compares Holcot's views on parental responsibility with those in PhyT.
Daichman, Graciela S.
Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986.
Examines the medieval nunnery as an institution and the records of indecorous behavior of medieval nuns. A stock character of medieval literature, the "profligate nun" is seen in Chaucer's Madam Eglentyne and the Archpriest of Hita's Dona Garoza.
Allen, Valerie.
Lisa Perfetti, ed. The Representation of Women's Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005, pp. 191-210.
Uses examples from Chaucer, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," and the "Ancrene Wisse" to explore how shame differs for men and women. For men, shame stems from a wide range of cultural experiences associated with chivalry, while women's shame is…
The discourse of PardPT "disrupts binary structures and exposes the fallacy of essentialist ideologies"; it "interrogates the literary and social consequences of identity categories" assumed in "christological exegesis." The Pardoner's relics recall…
Over six centuries, Chaucer's verse has been construed in a "bewildering variety of ways." This essay surveys the reception of Chaucer's metrics from his immediate contemporaries to the present and considers the process of "transmitting metrical…
Proposes that "fade" is an "Anglicized form of Occitan "fado"/"fada" and therefore further evidence that the "Gawain" or "Pearl" Poet served in Aquitaine, associated with military and/or diplomatic exploits, as did Chaucer. Proposes several possible…
