Browse Items (15542 total)

Characterizes the Monk as the "satiric consummation of all possible monastic faults," analyzing him in light of the "seven points of disciple" of the Rule of St. Benedict (obedience, poverty, celibacy, propertylessness, labor, claustration, and…

Maintains that the characterizations of the Monk in GP and in MkPT are consistent, and attributes their differing tones to the Monk's decision to "change his image" in the eyes of his fellow pilgrims while requiting the Host's derision with the…

Invoking a medieval association of book and body, Prendergast examines the cultural history of Chaucer's remains. The study assesses fifteenth-century attempts to mourn Chaucer's death, traces early modern ambivalence toward the poet's body-as-relic,…

Close comparison of passages in TC and their sources in Boccaccio's "Filostrato" discloses how Chaucer "sets in motion" early in his poem "a train of events whose implications go far beyond the immediate moment, perhaps beyond the love story itself,"…

Identifies a "pray for Chaucer" trope in fifteenth-century commentary on the poet, observing a "metaphor of literary history" that is based in "guild-like community," underpinned by notions of purgatory, intercession, and friendship. Rooted in Thomad…

Review article.

Morris Halle and Samuel J. Keyser, through careful computer analysis, seem to have put down the myth of the hundred-year-hibernation of Chaucer's decasyllabic line. By studying the stresses and their positions in the line, Halle and Keyser have…

Chaucer is more attentive to the noises produced by people and their actions than to those of natural phenomena. He often suggests noises rather than describing them directly. His noisiest passages involve tournaments, chases, and music.

Especially in the Eagle's speech on sound in HF, Chaucer's verse reflects his concern not with the monological, authoritative, written aspects of speech but with speech as an exploratory, vital, interactive process, recently explored by such…

WBP/WBT are best read as one woman's satire of both preachers and their anti-feminist propaganda. Attacking antifeminism in medieval preaching, she uses the structure of the medieval sermon.

The admirable and delicate precision with which each character works depends on the poet's skillful use of adjectives and similes. The writer illustrates this fact with particular reference to the descriptions of Troilus and Criseyde.

Study of adjectives to depict courtly manners.

Reconsiders Fisiak's survey of Chaucer's derivational affixes in function of her corpus of French loan words in the conversational sections of CT. Distinguishes between wholesale borrowings and French words onto which morphemes had been attached,…

Tabulates Chaucer's collocations of adjectives with the Christian God and pagan gods in TC.

In TC, descriptions of nature, including natural objects, plants, and animals, reflect the characters' emotions. When characters "act in harmony with nature," things go well; when they act against nature, they are destroyed by its "uncontrollable…

Chaucer's depiction of the legendary battle of Actium likely reflects both his understanding of contemporary naval warfare technology and his awareness of military treatises by Vegetius and Giles of Rome.

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish and Anglo-Irish analogues of FrT, with music.

Both in the GP portrait of the Reeve and in RvPT, Chaucer draws on medieval devil iconography and folklore, deepening the sinister character of this pilgrim and helping to explain his particular hair style, his thinness, his home in the North, and…

ManT reflects Chaucer's awareness of the dangers of challenging authority, yet he repeatedly challenges Christian and Boethian orthodoxies concerning evil. KnT does not reconcile the existence of evil, and the orthodoxy of Christian Providence in MLT…

Outlines "Chaucer's lives as poet, public figure, and literary persona," with recurrent reminders of the limits of what can be known from surviving evidence. Designed for pedagogical, includes suggestions for further reading.

Chaucer has adapted "ironic hints" from the analogue in Machaut's "Voir dit" to a bourgeois persona that demolishes "finer sensibilities," thus ironically reversing the tenor of the older material.

Discusses Chaucer's exploitation of the potential for ambiguity in such devices as cohesion, coherence, deixis, background assumptions, conversational implication, speech acts, and the narrative functions of speech.

Collette examines the tradition of Mariology in relation to PrPT and SNPT. In their "Prologues," the Prioress and the Second Nun invoke the Virgin "as a figure of virtuous female power and speech." In their "Tales," however, women and children die…

Argues that the "artistic unity" of NPT is evident in "light of the [Nun's] Priest's personality," a man who is dissatisfied with "his position in life as a servant to a group of women." Differences between NPT and its source in the "Renart"…

Examines GP sketches of the Wife of Bath, the Miller, and the Franklin to exemplify how Chaucer's arrangements of details can best be understood relationally.