Browse Items (16012 total)

Argues that in adapting the conventions of French love-visions Chaucer improves on his predecessors and comes close to perfecting one of major literary genres of the Middle Ages. Discusses BD, HF, PF, and LGWP.

Uses Maghfield's account book of mercantile and monetary transactions (1390-95) to explore the "ways in which mercantile culture and the 'new literacies' associated with credit and commerce contributed centrally to the development of Ricardian…

Addresses historical and social complexities of anti-Semitism and Jewish--Christian dynamics in medieval English texts. Chapter 3, "The Minster and the Privy: Jews, Lending, and the Making of Christian Space in Chaucer's England," focuses on…

Provides an overview of Chaucer's use of the absolute infinitive, and introduces its various types. Focuses especially on the uses of "seien," "speken," and "tellen" in parenthetical construction and discusses their function based on statistical…

Mikhail Bakhtin's study of the grotesquerie of medieval folk festivals encourages us to view certain Chaucerian characters in the carnivalesque spirit of absolute comedy: moral offenders such as Alysoun of MilT escape unscathed; Nicholas is punished…

Translations of Chaucer's works, especially CT, into modern English reflect individual translators' valuations of Chaucer's poetic virtues, whether "freshness," modernity, humor, irony, or something else.

Argues that Chaucer's use of Ovid's "Metamorphoses" in BD is closer to that of Guillaume de Machaut than that of Jean de Meun, and compares and contrasts Chaucer's version of the Ceyx and Alcyone story with those of Machaut and Ovid.

Those compelled to abjure the court in 1388, while less well known than the companions of Richard II who faced charges of treason, can be studied collectively as typical members of Richard's court. They include an older group, friends of Richard's…

Taking its editor's preface as a cue, an examination of this edition, which has heretofore been labeled a reprint of John Bell's 1782 edition, reveals that it is in fact "a considerable re-evaluation of Chaucer's works."

Explores how late-medieval English people regarded their age: as a time growing old and verging on cataclysm, especially as reflected in social unrest and the deposition of Richard II. Includes a number of references to and quotations from Chaucer…

Includes an introduction (pp. 58-61) to Chaucer and his works.

Includes the first eighteen lines of GP in Middle English.

Includes the first third of MercB in normalized Middle English.

Explores medieval theories of narrative closure in Matthew of Vendome, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Brunetto Latini, and John of Garland to argue that if "inconclusiveness" is a thematic goal, the end of a work is the "natural place to accent it." As an…

Comments on how "the medieval mirror and wisdom metaphor is utilized" in WBP and helps to characterize the Wife, ironically, as a figure of comic "worldly prudence" rather than true wisdom. Cites other examples from CT of ironic characterization…

Argues that several prominent figures in the "Troilus" frontispiece (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 61) represent John of Gaunt; his second wife, Constance of Castile and Laon; his mistress, Katherine Swynford; his first wife, Blanche of…

Argues that the power of WBT, though it is commonly regarded as a lai," comes from an underlying subversion by the use of fabliau, which makes the tale a "hybrid story." The "question of what women most want" has surprising affinities with the…

Edition of the "Tale of Gamelyn," including a description of manuscripts, diplomatic transcriptions of ten manuscripts, a critical edition with collated variants, and critical apparatus. Also includes a Modern English translation of "Gamelyn" and a…

Analyzes the dialect forms and textual variants of the "Tale of Gamelyn" in four of the twenty-five CT manuscripts that contain it (Ha4 Cp La Pw), arguing that, in "Gamelyn," these manuscripts evince a textual tradition and editorial practice which…

Identifies "Boethian sentiments" in an eight-line stanza appended to TC in St. John's, Cambridge, MS L.1, fol. 119v.

Encourages readers to keep track of the money in ShT, assessing the coded actions of gifting, receiving, and reciprocating in the Tale, analyzing the merchant's response to Don John's request for 100 franks (7.281-96), and suggesting that the readers…

Challenges claims that the first-person feminine pronouns of ShT 7.11-19 indicate that the tale was originally intended to be told by the Wife of Bath, reading the lines as if they were presented in a "miming male" voice, and suggesting that the tale…

Objects to Robert L. Chapman’s argument that the ShT was originally intended for the Shipman, not the Wife Bath, comparing Chaucer's tale with Boccaccio's "Decameron" 8.1 as examples of the "Lover's Gift Regained" motif, and showing that Chaucer's…

Approaches SNPT as translations of source materials, assessing Chaucer's assignment of his early life of St. Cecilia to the Second Nun as narrator, the implications of rhyme royal, and the thematic and formal concerns of transformation, idleness, and…

Provides textual evidence to confirm that the three portions of the Middle English Rom--A, B, and C--derive from different manuscript groupings of their French source, the "Roman de la Rose," corroborating arguments that the three portions were…