Browse Items (16035 total)

The red hose of the Wife of Bath may be her method of preventing venereal disease. According to the "doctrine of signatures," a fancied resemblance of a color to a disease could aid in remedy of prevention. Red was thought to be obnoxious to evil…

Chaucer's use of commercial law provides ShT with image patterns and word play as well as with models for his shaping of character.

Chaucer's reference in RvT 4096 to "make a clerkes berd" (i.e., "cheat") may be echoed a few lines later in the oath "by seint Cutberd" (line 4127), suggesting terms for shaving and castration.

Compares and contrasts aspects of RvT with two analogues, the A and B versions of "Le Meunier et les .II. Clers," arguing that Chaucer's version achieves greater vitality, clearer characterizations and motivations, and a great deal of comic irony.

Chaucer's RvT contains sufficient close parallels with Boccaccio's story of Pinuccio and Niccolosa to suggest that the latter might have been a source for the former. Two German versions of the cradle-trick story, although more similar in general…

Comparison with the ending of TC shows that Chaucer's Ret is not a literary device but rather an absolute statement of repentance.

Assesses Chaucer's Ret as an adaptation of rhetorical and literary conventions of prologue, epilogue, and literary confession, arguing that his uses of the conventions in both ParsP and Ret indicate that he is resisting traditional rejections of…

Examines the play on "reyn" (as rain, reign, and rein) in Chaucer, especially in MkT, comparing such play with that in Somerset Maugham's "Rain."

In light of Hans Jauss's reception theory, most scribes' and readers' glosses characterize SNT as either a study of Cecilia's personality or a reflection of Chaucer's religious nature. The narrative structure, however, places it at the juncture of…

Views SNT as a "generic experiment" built "upon an epistemological premise whose axiomatic status was crumbling." Discusses analogical, hermeneutical, and hagiographic elements of the "Tale" as well.

The portrait of the five guildsmen in CT is a critique of "petty bourgeois pretensions to political power." Though each was "shaply for to been an alderman," the guildsmen were not members of the professions from which aldermen were elected. Their…

Argues that "by studying Chaucer's handling of the story told by Boccaccio we may form a very good idea of the direction in which he modified the received French fabliau (if there was one)." In Boccaccio's tale, there is no individuation of the…

Stresses that genre markers influence audience reception. Surveys the "mass of single works called "fabliaux proprement dits" to determine "invariant elements," which are genre markers in four categories: "communicative situation, province of…

Th, according to L. H. Loomis, follows no previous pattern of burlesque. This article disputes Lommis's contention through comparison with "prise de Neuvile" in action, language, opening address, catalogues, descriptions, parody, abrupt ending, and…

Argues that SqT "presents the growing impulse toward exoticism and disorder at work in the courts of late medieval Europe," the antithesis of classical order depicted in KnT. Also comments on notions of "gentilesse" and the uses of rhetorical colors…

Romances that parallel the SqT's interest in "meticulous attention to the niceties of courtly life joined with an inexhaustible appetite for marvels" were fashionable for Chaucer's age.

SqT is Chaucer's one foray into the genre of "interlace" romance, where characters and episodes are treated, then dropped, and subsequently treated again. SqT is not a parody like Th; it is a different genre that Chaucer wanted to try. He did not…

Examines Chaucer's two brief but similar references to the "St. Anne Trinity," a portrayal of Mary, Jesus, and St. Anne in the cultural context of fourteenth-century England. Concludes that the references in MLT and SNT represent two sides of a…

Sketches the range of Chaucer's diversity in CT and suggests that Chaucer abandons artistic diversity for the Parson's warning against sinful excess.

Rejecting Siegfried Wenzel's view that the character Thomas suffers from insensitivity, Malone finds that Thomas shows more sensitivity to the death of his only child than his wife shows in all she says.

SumP and various puns in SumT not only transform Friar John into a fart but also indicate that his prayers invert the Pentecostal wind and "suggest that his brethern share his odious nature."

Identifies physiognomic details in NPP and NPE that characterize the Nun's Priest as a "healthy and handsome young cleric, of temperate disposition." He "has the virtues of the widow" of NPT- (good health and moral rectitude) which counterpoint the…

In Mel Chaucer's idiomatic translation from the French of Renaud de Louens skillfully imitates and elaborates the "style clergial," especially in its use of introductory phrases, doublets, subordinate clauses, and trailing sentence structures.

Unlike other recent critics, who have viewed Mel as a "treatise," Kempton sees it as a "tale" with dramatic personages. It is meant not to enforce one didactic point but to teach us to give up the search for authority and to enjoy the play of…

Blends a "historicist" approach that sees Mel as topical to the later 1380s with "formalist" emphasis on its discontinuities and contradictions. Concludes that "in the context of the Appellants' struggles with Richard II,...the deconstruction of the…