Arner, Lynn.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013.
Explains how the "vernacular rising" expanded Chaucer's and Gower's readership to include "lesser merchants and prosperous artisans" (Introduction and Chapter 1). Chapters 4 and 5 emphasize LGW. In contrasting Gower and Chaucer, argues that in LGW,…
Examines influence of commerce and trade in CT, Gower's "Mirour de L'Omme" and "Confessio Amantis," and Hoccleve's "Male Regle" and "Regiment of Princes." Looks at social and cultural implications of how market economies affect literary narratives…
Kaylor, Harold.
Wolfgang Viereck, ed. English Past and Present: Selected Papers from the IAUPE Malta Conference in 2010 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 257–64
Assesses the narrator of TC as a "translator-commentator" of his story, analogous to Chaucer's relation to Boethius's material when producing his Bo. This dynamic enables the narrator to stand apart from the temporality of his plot while…
Presron, Raymond.
Notes and Queries 206 (1961): 7-8.
Offers information about "medieval papal denunciations of anti-semitism" and how they can be seen to indict the Prioress, especially PrT 7.684-87, particularly because "Chaucer's references to the Hebrew people," outside PrT, "are not at all…
Carlson, David R.
University of Toronto Quarterly 64:2 (1995): 274-88.
Inferences about Chaucer's court life and patronage provided literary successors with a model for the profitabliity of writing poetry, which--along with the increase in the number of Italian humanists and the advent of printing--fostered the…
Evans, Robert C.
James M. Dean, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer (Ipswich, Mass., Salem Press), pp. 144-58.
Proposes viewing Donne's poem "The Flea" from the theoretical perspective of D. W. Robertson, and argues that "if we read Donne's poem as Robertson reads Chaucer, a different kind of Donne emerges" than previously shown by scholars.
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…
