O'Connell, Brendan.
Clíodhna Carney and Frances McCormack, eds. Chaucer's Poetry: Words, Authority and Ethics (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013), pp. 134-57.
Notes that counterfeit and forged documents appear frequently in CT, but most frequently in exemplary and ethical tales such as MLT and ClT. This suggests Chaucer's lack of trust in this kind of writing and his preference for an ethics based on…
Reiss, Edmund.
Larry D. Benson, ed. The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature. Harvard English Studies, no. 5 (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 95-111.
Gauges Chaucer's "view and use of love," concentrating on BD, TC, and KnT as his only narratives that take courtly love seriously, both as a theme and a plot device. Even in these cases, courtly love is presented pejoratively--both foolish and…
The context of CT changes the meaning of SNT. Although SNT is a clear statement of the 'right path,' ParsT reminds us at the end that we cannot come close to following that path. Spiritual perfection is rare; for the rest of us there are remedies…
Bookis, Judith May.
Dissertation Abstracts International 43 (1982): 1140.
In PrT, MLT, ClT, SNT, and PhyT, Chaucer manipulates the genre and rhetoric of the saint's life in differing ways to evoke audience response to the professional stereotypes of the narrators.
Thro, A. Booker.
Chaucer Review 5.2 (1970): 97-111.
Shows that "in Chaucer's comedy the triumph of wit is often a 'creative' act, an act of imaginative invention and ingenious construction," commenting on the division of the fart in SumT, demonstrating the prevalence of creative, constructive…
Howes, Laura L.
Robert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior, eds. Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), pp. 321-43.
Chaucer presents Criseyde as a victim of several betrayals--by Calchas, by the Trojan parliament, by Pandarus, and by the narrator--and prompts the possibility of readers' betrayal of her as well. Obedient to her father but unfaithful to her lover,…
Valdes Miyares, Ruben.
SELIM: Journal of the Spanish Society for Mediaeval English Language and Literature 2 (1992): 142-53.
Explores Chaucer's understanding of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth to argue that Criseyde's reference to Eurydice (TC 4.791) is the poet's way of "lending voice" to a classical figure who, like Criseyde, was the object of barter.
Minnis, Alastair, and Eric J. Johnson.
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al., eds. Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000), pp. 199-216.
Assesses Criseyde's fearfulness in the context of "late-medieval accounts of the psychology and ethics of fear," arguing that Chaucer presents her not as a "culpably fickle female" but as an (equally essentialized) "attractively fearful female."
Ryan, Lawrence V.
English Literary Renaissance 17 (1987): 288-302
Francis Kynaston's translation of TC in Latin rhyme-royal stanzas was influenced by Henryson's and Shakespeare's depictions of Criseyde. Substantial omissions in Books 4 and 5 of the translation simplify the character and reduce readers' sympathy by…
Bevan, E. Dean.
Ulrich Müller and Kathleen Verduin, eds. Papers from the Fifth Annual General Conference on Medievalism 1990 (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1996), pp. 435-41.
Comments on Bevan's efforts to represent in a film script various aspects of Chaucer's art in TC: Chaucer's sense of history, the subtleties of his diction, and his "world view."
In TC 5.1095, "publisshed" (contained in five manuscripts) is preferable to "punisshed" (in fourteen manuscripts) because the fourteenth-century sense of "denounced publicly" better suits the immediate context in the poem and the widespread bad…
Pinent, Pat.
Linda Cookson and Bryan Loughrey, ed. Critical Essays on The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales (Harlow: Longman, 1989), pp. 39-49.
Considers three groups of ecclesiastical figures in CT, categorizing them by religious role and descriptive technique: 1) members of religious orders (Prioress, Monk, and Friar), who the narrator "damns by faint praise and irony"; 2) servants of the…
Hatton, Thomas J.
Chaucer Review 3.2 (1968): 77-87.
Argues that the GP description of "Chaucer's perfect Knight . . . seems carefully constructed to accord with the aims" of a "unified crusade" that was articulated by Philip de Mézières in his proposal to organize an Order of the Passion of Jesus…
Kordecki, Lesley.
Carolynn Van Dyke, ed. Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 249-60.
Argues that the cuckoo-merlin dialogue in PF deconstructs the traditional human-animal binary by presenting a "fleeting realization of anthropomorphism gone awry." The cuckoo's "brood parasitism . . . resolves itself into a mode of communal profit"…
Lynch, Kathryn, ed.
New York and London: Routledge, 2002.
Twelve essays by various authors who assess Chaucer's uses of and attitudes toward the familiar and the foreign, especially the Mid-East, in SqT (four essays), FranT, CT, CYT, PrT, KnT, LGW, and MLT. Includes ten essays published between 1983 and…
Dutton, Marsha L.
Chaucer Review 53.1 (2018): 36-59.
Examines the word "cunning," omission of its sexual connotations in the MED, and the ways in which Chaucer puns on the word in previously unconsidered sexual contexts.
"Balade de bon Conseyl," or Truth, the most popular of Chaucer's short poems, is generally thought to be derived from the Bible and Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy." Out of the twenty-four copies, only in one version does the envoy to "Vache"…
Jones, Claude E.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 64 (1963): 175-80.
Describes various motifs in MLT, observing that it "includes features common to the early form of the 'märchen' combined with relatively late developments," and claiming that Chaucer's "most important addition to his source," Trevet's "Cronicle," is…
Gaylord, Alan T.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 1 (1979): 83-104.
Most critics agree Th parodies Middle English tail-rhyme romances. A regularity of stress, external rhyme, internal alliterations, stanza pattern, and a "bobbing" meter reflect Chaucer's polished craft. While offering an ample measure of "sentence"…
Rowland, Beryl.
Notes and Queries 208 (1963): 210.
Surveys historical comments on the odor of daisies and suggests that Chaucer's praise of its odor in LGWP may be due to botanical accuracy, unusual because he usually follows literary conventions.
Challenges characterizations of the Wife of Bath that treat her as an icon or as a representative figure. Reads WBP for the ways that it may be regarded as a "modern case history" that reflects a complex personality rife with desires and regrets.
Murphy, Russell E.
Yeats Eliot Review 28.1–2 (2011): 3-29.
Reconsiders CT as the source of the opening line of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," exploring intertextual relations with the opening of Dante's "Divine Comedy" as well. Also clarifies the importance of Chaucer's role in the English tradition of…
Neuse, Richard.
Berkeley. Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1991.
CT responds to Dante's Commedia in a "conscious attempt " to continue its "poetic tradition" of pilgrimage narrative. Chaucer's pilgrims "comment or focus on one or more aspects of the Dantean pilgrimage," and both works define the human image and…
Osborn, Marijane.
Vistas in Astronomy 39: 605-14, 1996.
When read "astrolabically" rather than astrologically, the "chronographia" of ParsP is accurate and ripe with spiritual meaning. It was inspired by Dante's presentation of the stars in the "Divine Comedy" and indicates the imminence of Easter.…
