Browse Items (16012 total)

Reads KnT and TC as "tales of fortune's fools" in which the traditional themes of romantic love and knightly chivalry are undercut by verbal play and the trivialization of notions of pity, mercy, grace, and love.

Chaucer plays on his audience's awareness that Boccaccio (not Lollius) is the true source of TC; he also engages in similar play between the pagan setting of the poem and its Christian message.

Tallies John Keats's early references and allusions to TC in his letters to Fanny Brawne and assesses how his lyric "What can I do to drive away" follows Chaucer's poem in representing the "rhythmic experience of pain passing into sweetness and…

Schowerling investigates the influence of Chaucer's TC on four writers of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. Writers and works discussed include Henryson's "Testament of Cresseid," Sidnam's paraphrase of TC, Shakespeare's "Troilus and…

Male-male intimacy evokes opposing reactions, positive or homophobic. Analyzes male-male bonds from biblical, classical, and medieval literature, including several English and French romances, together with chronicles attacking Edward II's and…

By altering the proverb in TC 4.588 from "day" to "nyght," Chaucer ironically foreshadows the beginning of Troilus's period of unrest.

The ludic responses depicted in these two lines bear out Barry Windeatt's assertion that Chaucer's "displacement of tragedy by comedy" at the end of TC took its inspiration from Dante's "Commedia."

Although recent criticism tends to classify Chaucer as an Ockhamist/nominalist, a close study of his most philosophical poem, TC, indicates that his thought was traditional and scholastic.

The word "hazelwode" in Pandarus's proverbs ridiculing the lovers' fatuous hopes indicates Chaucer's familiarity with the miraculous powers attributed to hazel in Celtic divination and healing rites.

Several passages in TC indicate a covert incestuous strain between Criseyde and Pandarus, the "senex amans" who uses Troilus to fulfill vicariously his own sexual fantasies.

Chaucer's poetry should be regarded as aural rather than oral. Aural poetry is less formulaic and digressive than poetry composed extemporaneously, but it too has special characteristics since it was to be heard and not read. TC reveals Chaucer's…

Considers the medieval medical views on "amor hereos" and Chaucer's descriptions of it, first in KnT and BD, then in TC. In TC 1, Chaucer shows Troilus as suffering from the lover's disease, to which the consummation of his love in bk. 3 is, from a…

Like other late medieval art, TC exhibits a growing concern with the portrayal of emotions, especially through the shifting role of the narrator. He sometimes resorts to "occupatio," claiming inability to describe an emotional state, and eventually…

Chaucer alters Boccaccio's antifeminism and practical conclusion to "Il Filostrato" to emphasize contempt of the world and poetry.

Oka compares various classical and medieval descriptions of Troilus and then offers "The Book of Troilus" or simply "Troilus" as a more appropriate title for Chaucer's TC. Also traces the personal development of Troilus from a "fierse and proude…

In TC, philosophical terminology "provides a continual gloss on the text." A philosophical reading of the poem--free will versus determinism, fantasy versus reason--does not, however, detract from the poem's narrative, "an intensely moving story of…

Surveys critical approaches to KnT, particularly New Critical, Feminist, and New Historical, focusing on discussions of order and disorder in the Tale. KnT functions as a "second prologue" to CT and, with GP, asserts and affirms the diversity of…

A note suggesting the use of present-tense "went" (wend) rather than preterit "wente" in TC 2.36. (In Japanese)

Offers support for the notion that the whelp episode in BD (387-96)—likely derived from Machaut's "Dit dou Lyon"—serves as a "symbol of fidelity," adducing instances of Renaissance "canine symbolism" and the appearance of dogs "on medieval…

Shows that in the Wife of Bath's account of her three "goode" husbands Chaucer "adopted a means of amplification which he found described and illustrated in the 'Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi' . . . attributed to Geoffrey of…

Neither WBT nor "Gawain" presents straightforward satire on late-fourteenth-century English romance. At once ironic and idealistic, the two works provide a human redefinition of the genre as exemplified in contemporary chivalric writing.

"Daungerous," the term Alisoun uses to describe Jankyn's love, reflects an ambiguous relation between courtly love and marriage; canon and civil law clarify the nature of physical and psychological violence in WBP and FranT.

Assesses how WBT, FranT, and other Breton lays in Middle English "underwrite and reinforce the laws of the land"--laws that allowed for domestic violence and left ambiguous the relations between rape and marriage.

Argues that the "allegory of the Four Daughters of God" (also known as "The Reconciliation of the Heavenly Virtues" and "The Parliament of Heaven") influenced several details of ABC.

Explains the use of "impossible" as a noun in SumT 3.2231, discussing the term as a label for classroom examples of logical sophistry and commenting on Chaucer's familiarity with such academic practice.