Browse Items (16035 total)

TC opens in "high style" comparable with Virgil's "Aeneid" or Milton's "Paradise Lost." This style creates an epic frame for the poem which is sustained by the correlation of Troilus the lover with Troilus the warrior. Donaldson is wrong in…

A cross-cultural, transhistorical anatomy of one motif in the "mythology of sex" in literature and film--the "story of going to bed with someone whom you mistake for someone else." Discusses structuralist and psychoanalytic explanations of variations…

As seen in GP, the formal method of characterization is rooted in Cicero, Priscian, and Matthew of Vendome. The physical repugnance of the Summoner symbolizes moral ugliness.

The BBC's 2003 adaptation of MLT updates Chaucer's Tale, incorporating plot, character names, and thematic elements such as faith, exile and return, trauma and healing, and time and repetition. Constance, a Nigerian refugee, finds love and fellowship…

Comments on each of the BBC television versions of Chaucer's narratives (MilT, WBP, KnT, PardT, ShT, and MLT), exploring how adaptation, updating, and remediation duplicate or change aspects of Chaucer's aesthetics and morality.

Suggests that T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" echoes RvT 1.3889-3898, where Chaucer "personifies Death as a bartender."

Among the oral-tradition analogues for FranT is the story of the Bari Widow, similar to it in ways that Boccaccio's version is not. Analysis of Chaucer's adept use of it and other oral-tradition stories demonstrates the mastery of his creation.

Patristic and scholastic writers condemn flattery as misuse of speech and an activity conducive to fraud. Chaucer's stricture on flattery initially appears comic, yet it is more direct and explicit than Langland's harsh condemnation, which Chaucer…

Surveys ballad scholarship and argues that exploration of medieval ballads has value for broader study, suggesting, for example, that "King Henry" provides useful contexts for the gentility speech in WBT.

Identifies "new Romance analogues" for details in GP, MilT, WBPT, PardT, ShT, and ParsT in three fifteenth-century Catalan narratives: "Disputa de l'ase" ("The Argument of the Ass") by Anselm Turmeda, the "Llibre de fra Bernat" ("Book of Friar…

Since literature is linear and sequential, the reader must reassess each line in terms of all previous lines to influence the total effect and alter perspective. Comparing Chaucer's treatment of the past to "Beowulf," Gower, and Malory, refers to…

Describes the English royal interest in the political and military maneuvers in Castile, Navarre, Aragon, and France that involved Pedro the Cruel, Pedro the Bold, Henry of Trastamara, Bernard du Guesclin, the Free Companies, and England's Black…

Reviews scholarly criticism of TC. Argues that the effectiveness of the work is in part the result of Chaucer shaping the reader's complicity with Pandarus. Also discusses Criseyde's desirability, and the theme of sexuality in TC and LGW.

Rejects "unsupported biographical inference" about the lives and personalities of Chaucer and William Langland, arguing that it is illogical to assume that the personae they project in their poetry are autobiographical. Conflation or confusion of the…

Concludes that the case for Chaucer's authorship of Equat remains "not proven"; i.e., Equat "cannot be identified as Chaucer's work." This conclusion is built on examination of handwriting, dialect, and style, showing that Equat is a holograph in…

Presents new evidence that "shows that the author [of Equat] was not Chaucer," connecting the unique manuscript of the treatise (Cambridge, Peterhouse, MS 75.I) with the work and life of John Westwyk, a monk of Tynemouth. Includes paleographical…

In his first three dream visions, Chaucer employed traditional form to transcend the genre, exploring poetic authority and ironic possibilities.

Chaucer's presentation of himself as a reader of literature is a metaphor for our own reading of his work, an acknowledgement of his concern with the reciprocal relationship between the reader's mind and the text.

The hermeneutic method in Nicholas of Lyra's "Postilla" gave new richness to the understanding of the biblical "sensus literalis," expanding it to include parabolic senses and typology, and fostered more interactive reading. Similar principles seem…

Although both Chaucer and Shakespeare inherited the classical misogynist tradition, their works reflect a belief in the equality of the sexes, the value of marriage, and the association of virtue with with women.

The central question for NPT is not whether it is allegorical or ironic but how it uses allegory and irony to refigure its own past. This tale was composed for a court audience at the beginning of a new vernacular tradition. What kind of authority…

By manipulating his presumed sources and through the voices of the narrator and his characters, Chaucer develops reader-response strategy with such rhetorical devices as repetition and wordplay. The reflexive TC shows both love and language as…

Explores the "complicated medieval matrix of ideas concerning the relationship between authority and fallibility," commenting on representations of the topic from Petrarch's depiction of Cicero to Chaucer's depiction of the Pardoner. As a preacher…

"Medieval authors mistrusted their readers' potential responses and felt obliged to direct that response accordingly"; in medieval literature, the author's address to the reader was "a device to activate the critical intelligence, while deactivating…

Identifies and describes portraits of authors in initials of British Museum MS. Add. 42131. Two of the three depictions of Chaucer are by the same hand as the miniature accompanying Hoccleve's Regement of Princes (Arundel MS. 38).