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,…
Stretter, Robert.
Comparative Drama 55 (2021): 331-54.
Identifies complex intertextual relations among KnT, the story of Amis and Amiloun, Shakespeare and Fletcher's "Two Noble Kinsmen." and archival references to two lost Tudor plays, "Palamon and Arcite" and "Alexander and Lodowick, "exploring…
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…
Moseley, C. W. R. D.
Modern Philology 72.2 (1974): 182-84.
Suggests that the influence of Mandeville's "Travels" on SqT and on alliterative poetry including "Pearl" may have been due to the circulation of the work at the Lancastrian court of John of Gaunt.
The anti-Semitism of PrT is attributable to the Prioress, not to Chaucer, who would have known Jews through the courts of Castile (referred to in MkT) and who presents Jews as "renowned historians and transmitters of knowledge in the field of…
Fuller, David.
Sarah Haggarty, ed. William Blake in Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 173-83.
Reads Blake's "varied interactions with Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare" as "an education in possibilities of serious reading." In the case of Chaucer, Blake reads "for archetypes, not distracted . . . by historical contingency or an appearance of…
Hieatt, A. Kent.
Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1975.
Spenser drew upon Chaucerian and Milton upon Spenserian narrative for mythopoeic embodiments of moral ideas, which they in turn adapted and transformed. From PF, KnT, Marriage Group, and SqT Spenser assimilated ideas of continuity, harmony and free…
Traces the medieval legend and cult of Saint Loy the horsesmith, especially from British sources; identifies references to the saint in GP and FrT. Two gazetteers assemble artistic and cultural evidence for the legend in Europe and the British…
Goldstein, R. James.
R. F. Yeager and Charlotte C. Morse, eds. Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V. A. Kolve (Asheville, N.C.: Pegasus Press, 2001), pp. 185-304; 3 b&w figs.
Goldstein assesses the "rhetoric of Troilus's suicidal death wish" in TC 1, 4, and 5, comparing passages with Boccaccio's version and challenging critical traditions that view Troilus's thoughts as merely rhetorical or absurd. Also evident in LGW and…
