Browse Items (16318 total)

Chaucer's acquisition of a manuscript of "Teseida" in 1378 suggests that Chaucer omits reference to Boccaccio because he may have seen the imperfect Pavia MS 881, which lacked Boccaccio's commentary and attribution to Boccaccio.

Considers ways that female monastic readers in Amesbury and Syon may have read and used works by Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate. Claims that these "Chaucerian tradition" writings helped influence the devotional culture of female monastic…

References to popular Christianity pervade Chaucer's work, especially CT and the shorter poems, but these usually concern the lower clergy and routine matters. His canon does not include ponderous didactic allegory or theological treatises.

Connects the Clerk's uses of "heigh style/stile" in ClP 4.18 and 41 rather than reading the latter as a mistranslation of Petrarch "stylo alio" as stylo alto."

Discusses how editorial glosses and marginalia in extant manuscripts of CT were received and interpreted by medieval readers in the fifteenth century. Includes examination of Latin source glosses of WBPT.

Chaucer needs no protection from students who question the more negative aspects of his life. Though Chaucer was "no saint," his life is devoid of anything particularly shameful. The Hainault connection simply gave Chaucer leisure and security…

Characterizes Chaucer as "typically" English, commenting on his name, his sense of humor, his "love of nature," and his concern with fate, fortune, and "wyrd." Suggests several English books that Chaucer "must have read."

Although other allusions to the liturgy of Holy Week have been found in MLT, an allusion previously unnoted occurs when Constance is set adrift with her infant son, another instance of Chaucer's adding to the pathos of Constance's situation.

Suggests that Chaucer's dismissive reference to incest in MLP 77ff. alludes not to Gower's "Confessio Amantis" but to his own hesitation in writing a version of the "well known folk tale of the Incestuous Father," hesitating "on grounds of taste to…

Argues that ClT allegorically "reveals key elements of a medieval doctrine of justification," reading Walter as God and Griselda as a "reformed sinner." The tale also "provides a window into how a number of key scriptural texts figured into this…

MerT is not just a merry fabliau, uncomplicated by a fictional narrator. Through evidence included in the prologue, most of the first hundred and fifty lines, and various other passages in the work, we see that Chaucer may have consciously tried to…

In the Merchant and MerT Chaucer objectifies his own cultural bias against women and his own interest in financial profit. The Merchant is like January (Janus was the god of merchants), and Chaucer (born into a family of merchants) is like the…

Surveys Chaucer's attention to the theological issue of bodily resurrection in FrT, SumT, and PardT, set against a survey of orthodox and heterodox positions in the Church Fathers and Dante. Then establishes Chaucer's "conservative" attitude toward…

In late November, 1984, Jupiter, Venus, and the crescent moon were in the same configuration Chaucer may have seen May 12,1385, and mentioned in TC 3, associated with the torrential downpour. The terminus a quo for TC 3 is 1385.

A review of the allusions to rhetoric in London poets of Chaucer's time fails to reveal a single firsthand reference to an original text. Rhetorical concepts contributed indirectly to their conceptions of poetry and gave the poets an air of literary…

Woolf deleted a description of Chaucer and one of the Pointz Hall library when revising materials for "Between the Acts," reflecting her growing belief that books were no longer the center of culture in 1939-40. Traces references and allusions to…

Describes the extract/summary of the "Plowman's Tale" in Henry Vaughn's "The Golden Fleece" (1626, under the pseudonym "Orpheus Junior") and explores his claim that Chaucer influenced Wycliff through this spurious tale.

W.B. Yeats's early interest in Chaucer as a populist poet gave way to a "more occasional interest in the aristocratic and esoteric elements of Chaucer's works." For only a brief time, after receiving a copy of the Kelmscott Chaucer in 1907, Yeats…

Explicates several words and images found in MilT--the "piggesnye" of Alison's description most extensively--and identifies echoes of the tale's concern with "poetic justice" in RvT which contributes to the bitterness of the latter.

Examines the statement about alliterative verse in ParsP 10.42-46, arguing that the "rum, ram, ruf" sequence has its source in French and helps to constitute a "meaningful . . . and technically adroit comment on alliterative poetry."

Offers a historicized, "iconological," Great Texts approach to CT, reading the poem as a "staged retelling of many tales, old and new" that is thereby "particularly pertinent for the larger rationale of a Great Texts curriculum." Traces two thematic…

Designed for readers relatively unfamiliar with Chaucer, this bibliography annotates 1,200+ items in three categories: materials for the study of Chaucer's works, Chaucer's works,and backgrounds.

Appreciative commentary on Chaucer's life and works, considering what can and cannot be determined from his life-records and literature, why he may not have completed several works, why (though a civil servant) he did not comment on political events,…

Provides a critical biography of Chaucer that tells "the story of his life and his poetry through places and spaces, rather than through strict chronology," with a "General Prologue," an "Epilogue," and twenty chapters pertaining to, for example, the…

Considers "Of Aristotle and his commentators and disciples" to be the "most worthy" of several possible meanings of "Aristotle and his philosophye" in the description of the Clerk's books in GP 1.295.