Browse Items (16320 total)

Compares TC with Boccaccio's "Il filostrato" and points out there are two kinds of death for Troilus in TC, as well as salvations in the Chaucer and Boccaccio texts. Traces the continuity of the theme of death from TC to CT. In Japanese, with English…

Contends that masculine obsession with interiority, especially that marked by courtly love, enables "powerful men to ignore the destructive public consequences of their political" actions. Yet, TC reveals "that such separation between the public and…

Examines the parallels between Cresseid and the narrator showing Cresseid's eventual transformation while the narrator fails to understand the moral point. Includes comments on Chaucer's narrator in TC.

Examines how uses of "sooth" characterize the three main actors in TC. Claims that Chaucer's use "of sooth" also "produces tension" in TC.

Thomas Spencer, a scrivener, purportedly owned a copy of TC in 1394. Presents the historical record regarding Spencer's life, since if this claim is true, it represents the only recorded instance of one of Chaucer's works circulating during his…

Notes that the visual imagery of falling rocks and millstones Pandarus uses to convince Troilus of his future success is associated with death and destruction in the Bible, which actually undermines Pandarus's argument in TC.

Argues that Rom should be recontexualized, viewing the work not as a Chaucerian fragment, which perpetuates a fragmentary approach to the work, but as part of a tradition of translation. Analysis of decorated initials and borders in Hunter 409…

Contends that PF challenges the medieval idea of judgment, based in reason, by also taking into account affective forces.

As part of a consideration of censorship, subjects several works, including PF, to a hypothetical "model of intolerance" based on Abelard, Ockham, and John of Salisbury.

Discusses "the narrator's rhetoric of pity," alluding to Augustine, Aristotle, Cicero, and others, while arguing that both pity and poetry involve "a kind of authentic inauthenticity" that is unstable, paradoxical, and contingent in LGW.

Focuses on the legend of Dido in LGW and compares its representation of Dido in Virgil's "Aeneid," Ovid's "Heroides," and HF. Argues that Dido in LGW desires Aeneas more actively than in other versions and that LGW presents her positively as…

Uses HF, among other texts, to demonstrate a versatile permeability between "science and the humanities" in the medieval period, in contrast to current more isolated approaches to these disciplines.

Reads HF as an example of how a literary work constructs "discursive scale," making us self-conscious about how we read and interpret, when we read closely, and when we distance ourselves and see the text in relation to genres and systems, history,…

Argues that motion in HF is "not the antithesis to form but its condition of possibility." Water imagery links Boethian "enclynyng," the littoral "field of sand" that signals transition between Books I and II, and the eel-trap shape of the House of…

While attempting to locate courtesy literature in a larger literary milieu, examines Machaut and BD on the way to an examination of Langland.

Contextualizes the bedchamber of BD, exploring its adaptations of French source material, the otherness of France, the social and psychological implications of beds and textiles, and the imagery of black and white. Emphatically English in its…

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…

Links BD with Freudian method, arguing that the poem "foreshadows" psychoanalysis through its depiction of how certain uses of language can heal trauma from painful memories

Studies the history of interpretation of BD, surveying scholarly commentary, material transmission, and late medieval/early modern creative reception. Emphasizes the (re)making of BD over time, by means of the interrelated textual processes of…

Considers BD in a larger survey of dream visions, with particular attention to "connections [to] the conventions of medieval mystical texts."

Considers Chaucer's repeated engagement with a passage from Boethius's "Consolation" in Bo, several shorter works, PF, and TC, leading to an argument that Chaucer ultimately suggests that some limits of translation are insurmountable.

Reveals similarities in the rhetorical strategies of the loathly lady in WBT and Lady Philosophy in Bo.

Maintains that in Anel, a poem about the faithless lover Arcite, the poet narrator is also false both in specific details and in reference to his putative sources. Argues that Chaucer emphasizes "the deception inherent in his poetic process" in a…

Reads Ret as the culmination of Chaucer's growing self-knowledge that unifies CT.

Surveys the figure of the alchemist and the uses of alchemical imagery in western literature, focusing on how satire and trivialization of the subject gave way to more esoteric uses, especially as the practice of alchemy gave way to chemistry.…