Browse Items (15542 total)

Controversy has arisen over Derek Price's theory that Chaucer wrote Equat. Apparently, Chaucer did not. Although Morton's "stylometry" test supports this view, the test itself reveals weaknesses.

Chaucer's digressions distinguish the narrative structure of PardT, WBT, MerT, FranT, PhyT, and ManT from others of the period in a way not accounted for in rhetorical models of the period ("Confessio Amantis," "Decameron," "Ovide Moralise," "Gesta…

Consideration of contemporary education and conditions shows the Physician a capable and ethical "practisour" who "follows the established medical practices and standards of his time."

Suggests that Usk's autobiographical Testament of Love has affected critical understanding of Chaucer's biography, influencing assumptions about Chaucer's level of political involvement and the relations between his politics and his poetics.…

Hard and soft analogues to Dorigen's conversations with Aurelius in FranT indicate that she is less a victim than someone playfully complicit in "flirtation." Offering "positive rhetorical models," Boccaccio and Christine de Pizan depict women who…

Argues that the dramatic interchange between the Miller and the Reeve in MilP "anticipates every important argument in Chaucer's formal defense" of including the ribald MilT in CT. Together the two "apologies" constitute a "richly comic but…

If Chaucer intended to turn Boccaccio's "Teseida" into a chivalric romance, he did not succeed, "but if his purpose was to make the frequently banal conventions and optimistic outlook of that genre play an ironic counterpoint to the tale's bleak…

Despite the tenets of "dramatic theory" from Kittredge to modern times, the links between the pilgrims and their tales are not reliable bases on which to build valid literary criticism. Not the psyches of the pilgrims but the different styles of the…

Studies the "meaning of the dream-poems," exploring Chaucer's concerns with the "nature and causes" of dreams, the importance and role of imagination, tensions between courtly and commonplace ideals, and the "contest" between "authority and…

Edits Book of the Duchess, House of Fame, Parliament of Fowls,and portions of Legend of Good Women (G-version Prologue and Dido), providing an introduction, bottom-of-the-page glosses and commentary, selected source material, and textual notes for…

Japanese translation of BD, HF, and PF, based on Robinson's and Skeat's editions.

The chief French sources and analogues of Chaucer's four dream poems, presented here in translation, are brought together for the first time. Included are Machaut's "Jugement dou Roy de Behaingne," Froissart's "Paradys d'amours," Jean de Conde's…

Examines the philosophical content of Chaucer's dream visions--the interplay between the soul and its courtly context--arguing that in Chaucer's world, the ideal of courtesy rather than any explicitly spiritual principle holds together a fictive…

Sixteen essays by various authors on BD, HF, PF, LGW, and the short poems. Fifteen are reprints or excerpts from longer works published between 1948 and 1994. Includes a brief introduction to each of the poems (and the section on the short poems), a…

Chaucer's dream visions reveal him as immersed in a literary quarrel of ancients and moderns. His iconoclasm is restrained in BD and HF, but he mocks the artificiality and decadence of contemporary love poetry in PF and LGWP.

Applies Joseph Frank's theory of "spatial form" in the modern novel (forms in which meaning is created through simultaneity and juxtaposition rather than through linearity and causation) to BD, PF, and HF. Examines particularly the use of myth (Seys…

Chaucer's reference to "ferses twelve" in BD remains a tantalizing problem. He may have been thinking of a non-standard version of chess, such as the Courier game, which includes twelve pawns; or the narrator may be thinking of draughts. In any case,…

Explains the association of the eagle and air (as the medium of sound) in HF by identifying a number of iconographic affiliations of eagles with air in medieval depictions of the four elements. Includes 6 b&w illustrations

Considers the eagle of HF "in the light of medieval expositions of the soaring eagle as an image of the flight of thought," focusing on the bird as an "intellectual symbol" and its flight as an "act of contemplation" as seen in Gregory's "Moralia in…

In having the Eagle retell the story of Phaethon from Ovid and from medieval interpretations of Ovid, Chaucer oversimplifies and creates conflicts or deficiencies of meaning; this allusive and contradictory treatment of literary tradition in HF…

MkT is very likely a virtually unrevised early poem, the first to be written after Chaucer's return from Italy in 1372 and his first collection of stories. As such, it deserves a separate existence, as Chaucer's early poem 'De casibus vivorum…

Studies how imagery contributes to theme and operates at an element of structure in BD, HF, PF and TC: light and dark imagery in BD, acoustic imagery in HF, natural versus courtly love in PF, and the contrast of fortune's wheel and celestial light in…

Examines how Chaucer's early poems (i.e., those written before 1380) engage the conventional forms, techniques, and themes of French and Italian models, enriching them via "humour and realism" and applying them to "new uses." His innovative…

The success of Chaucer's early translations from French cannot be attributed solely to his knack for finding the "mot juste" or to his "good ear" for English idiom. He drew on the native English poetic tradition for visual concreteness and…

Considers BD, ABC, Pity, and HF to be Chaucer's "Edwardian" poetry, produced when he was closely associated with the royal family--first with the households of Elizabeth of Ulster and her husband, Prince Lionel, and then with the king's household.