Southworth, James G.
College English 26.3 (1964) 173-79.
Critiques the editorial practice of "smoothing" Chaucer's verse to produce iambic pentameter rhythms by adjustments to final-"e," and advocates following medieval scribal practice of using the "'punctus elevatus'--the medial mark" to indicate the…
Benson, L[arry] D.
Derek Brewer, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer. Writers and their Background (London: G. Bell, 1974), pp. 352-72.
Accompanies Benson's discursive "Reader's Guide to Chaucer," included in the same volume (pp. 321-51). Lists selected "critical and scholarly works" (some lightly annotated), and indicates with an asterisk works that are "especially suitable for…
Rossignol, Rosalyn.
New York : Facts on File, 1999.
An encyclopedic dictionary of Chaucer and his works, with entries from "abbeviato" to "Zeuxis." Entries pertaining to Chaucer's works include separate plot summaries and commentaries; those pertaining to his biography include people, places, and…
Hussey, S. S.
London: Methuen, 1971; 2nd ed. 1982.
Introduces Chaucer's life and works to the modern reader, summarizing the plots of individual works and explaining medieval practices and details that underlie them, and attending to their relative chronology, sources, innovations, genres, and…
Hubbard-Brown, Janet.
Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2006.
An introduction to Chaucer for elementary and junior high school students, with nine chapters arranged biographically from boyhood to "final years." Each chapter includes a quiz. The apparatus includes a chronology and timeline, a bibliography, and…
Complaints--courtly, religious, philosophical, moral--were an integral part of Chaucer's poetry, and different combinations of lyric and narrative led to experiments in literary structures. Davenport contends that Chaucer adapts the complaint…
Fein, Susanna, and David Raybin, eds.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010.
Eleven essays by various authors designed for "those who want to explore how the works of Geoffrey Chaucer are now being approached." Arranged under four headings: Chaucer's Places, Chaucer's Audiences, Chaucer and Language, and Reenvisioning…
Hobsbaum, Philip.
Philip Hobsbaum. Tradition and Experiment in English Poetry (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield; London: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 30-67.
Identifies a number of ways in which Chaucer is innovative in various works--metrical variety, interplay of tones, indebtedness to Continental sources and "ingenuity," combination of narrative attachment and detachment--and surveys the range of…
Youmans, Gilbert, and Xingzhong Li.
Donka Minkova and Robert Stockwell, eds. Studies in the History of the English Language: A Millennial Perspective (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002), pp. 153-75.
Argues that Chaucer's decasyllabic lines are based on metrically significant, statistically normative feet, with clear and significant caesuras. Chaucer's and Shakespeare's iambic lines deviate from prototypical lines in similar ways. See Thomas…
An introduction to CT, including discussion of Chaucer's life, the structure of CT, plots and themes of the tales, analyses of the pilgrims and major characters in their tales, and Chaucer's language and meter. Includes bibliographies for each…
Howard, Donald R.
New York: E. P. Dutton; London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987.
This very readable biography by the late Donald Howard brings together "Chaucer, the man and the poet, and the age in which he lived." Howard traces developments in Chaucer's life from birth to death, setting Chaucer's works contextually within the…
Ashby, Cristina, Geoff Couldrey, Susan Dickson, et al.
Woodbridge, Conn., and Reading, U.K.: Primary Source Media, 1995.
A "comprehensive interactive resource for both students and teachers," providing hypertext-linked, point-and-click access to Chaucer's works ("The Riverside Chaucer") and accompanying glossary, introductions to the works and seventeen previously…
Nevo, Ruth.
Modern Language Review 58 (1963): 1-9.
Argues that in the GP Chaucer offers an "analysis of social rank in terms of economic behavior," consistently evident in the descriptions where a "pilgrim's characteristic behavior is defined in every case in terms of the acquisition and use of…
Corsa, Helen Storm.
Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964.
Describes how Chaucer's "mirth reveals his moral premises" and conveys joy throughout his poetic corpus, explaining how the early dream poems, in varying degrees, communicate the progress of the comic narrators toward greater moral and philosophic…
Argues that Chaucer is "multivoiced" and a "realist par excellence" whose "verism . . . encompasses minor elements like obscenity and bawdry." Draws examples from TC and CT, WBPT most extensively.
Tracy, Kisha G.
Kisha G. Tracy. Memory and Confession in Middle English Literature (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 67-92.
Explores the language and operation of confession--especially the importance of remembered transgressions--in Chaucer's depictions of love in TC, BD, and MLT, with Troilus, the Black Knight, and Alla as transgressors, and Pandarus, the BD narrator,…
Miller, Robert P., ed.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
An anthology of selections from Voragine, Augustine, Macrobius, Hugh of St. Victor, Vainsauf, Garland, Bury, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Cicero, Ovid, Deschamps, John of Salisbury, Ramon Lull, Saint-Amour, Boethius, Andreas Cappellanus, Walter Map,…
