Browse Items (16035 total)

An examination of Chaucer's original family name, Malyn, casts doubt on previous claims that Chaucer's family was involved in leather making. For social and commercial reasons, Chaucer was a more acceptable surname. Chaucer used Malyn or its…

Chaucer's MerT may have influenced William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury." Each work presents the pear tree as a central symbol in a plot focused on greed and deception, one comic and the other tragic. Chaucer's and Faulkner's narratives also…

Gower's tales of Lucretia and Virginia in "Confessio Amantis" VII are exempla of the fates of lecherous rulers; however, Chaucer's versions of these stories (in LGW and PhyT, respectively) focus, not on the villains, but instead on the admirable…

Examines Chaucer's impact on medievalisms of early and later Romantic English poets. Portrays Chaucer's influence on Wordsworth, not only in deliberately medievalist work, but throughout his corpus, focusing on daisies and their presentations in text…

Chaucer's Monk is by no means an ideal clergyman. He is one of the best targets of Chaucer's satire. He shows the degenerating status of the Church and the religious orders, to remind the readers of the need of renovation from within.

Examines the contradictory religious and secular aspects of the complex Prioress, an important personality in CT.

Argues that the rational absurdity of the plot of NPT and the inapplicability of the various morals applied to the Tale expose the ridiculousness of the fable genre; the Tale is an "anti-fable," as Th is an "anti-romance."

The Wife of Bath first weakens the conventional notion of men as reasonable and women as sensual by showing how sensual and unworthy of sovereignty were her five husbands. Then she overthrows this notion when her own feminine-sensual image dissolves…

Certain characteristics of Chaucer's poetry resulted from the influence of the court of Richard II, but paradoxically "in reaction against Richard." Brewer refutes Gervase Mathews's claim for a high state of culture and its influence in the reign of…

The opposition of knowledge in HF suggests the fourteenth-century reaction to the scholastic efforts of the thirteenth century to forge a synthesis between reason and faith. However, this dissertation does not argue that Chaucer was a reformer. The…

SqT illustrates how "a poet may come to poetic and prosodic mastery." Chaucer's conscious creation of an inept teller who overuses or misuses rhyme, enjambment, and caesura illustrates the difficult process of maturing as a poet.

Discusses apostrophe as speech (or writing) that is "'overheard' rather than merely heard," assessing it as a "powerful esthetic instrument for plumbing the emotional and emotive depths" of literary characters through "overheardedness." Comments on…

CT resists the dominant medieval gender discourses that it inscribes.

Chaucer's knowledge of medieval mathematical imagery is evident in several ways, beginning with his reference to "Argus, the noble countour," who is Algus, the great Arab mathematician Al-Khwarizmi. By refiguring the beginnings and endings of…

Since the noun "armee" or a variant appears in the "best" and earliest Chaucer manuscripts and was used in Old French and Middle English, "armee" (rather than "aryve") is probably the word Chaucer intended in GP 60.

Chaucer's art of characterization is an act of poetic creation rather than the mere use of rhetorical convention. By employing rhetorical devices which vivify emotion and intensify dramatic action, or which infuse suggestion of movement, Chaucer…

Gauges how subject, author, and reader "interact with varying degrees of subtlety in the GP descriptions of the pilgrims: the "snapshot" (Yeoman), idealization (Parson), caricature (Summoner), balance between ideal and caricature (Wife of Bath), and…

Demonstrates Chaucer's "skills as a miniaturist," discussing antecedents in rhetorical tradition to the phrase "places delitables" (i.e., "locus amoenus") in FranT (5.899) and the interdependence of "moral and physical gifts" in the description of…

WBT is an ironic Arthurian romance, particularly when viewed alongside Marie de France's "Lanval" and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," which parallel it in several ways.

Considers Chaucer's use of Arthurian legend, from his use in TC of the traditional French conception of Lancelot for Troilus to his examination of the subtext the legend provides for the fabric of fourteenth-century English society. In particular,…

A comparison of the manuscripts of TC with those of Boccaccio's "Filostrato" indicates that Chaucer's narrative divisions correspond to the summary rubrics in the earlier work, even if he did not retain Boccaccio's internal subdivisions.

Identifies "traces of the primitive folk tale" that underlie the Cupid and Psyche myth and WBT, and maintains Chaucer's familiarity with some version of the myth. Compares and contrasts aspects of the Tale with its English analogues, and argues that…

Argues that Chaucer uses portions of Pope Innocent's "De Miseria" in MLPT to "further characterize" the Man of Law, deepening the "concern with wealth" found in the GP description of the Sergeant. Furthermore, the portions from "De Miseria" unify the…

Surveys prior criticism of ManT and observes recurrent irony in the tale, particularly in Chaucer's assigning unnecessary expansions and repetitions to the verbose narrator.

In the Middle Ages the term "art" meant the liberal arts or almost any serious endeavor (other than the visual arts), also involving Gregory the Great's dictum that "the art of arts is the rule of souls." Chaucer was less influenced by the visual…