Dixon, Lori Jill.
Dissertation Abstracts International 57 (1996): 674A.
Sixteen fifteenth-century CT Tales" manuscripts-- anthologized on the basis of theme, subject, or interest--survive. They reveal middle-class taste through their moral and devotional content and indicate the popularity and availability of…
Kendrick, Laura.
Martin Stevens and Daniel Woodward, eds. The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation (San Marino, Calif.: Huntingon Library; Tokyo: Yushodo, 1995), pp. 281-305.
Surveys French compilations to argue that CT "appears to burlesque the uniformly high-minded French prose compilations ... actively encouraged by the Valois princes in the second half of the fourteenth century."
Emmerson, Richard Kenneth,and Ronald B. Herzman.
Werner Verbeke, Daniel Verhelst, and Andries Welkenhuysen, eds. The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages. Mediaevalia Lovaniensia, Ser. 1, no. 15 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1988), pp. 404-24.
After advocating eschatological explication of medieval poems not explicitly apocalyptic in nature and concluding that Thomas Wimbledon's "Sermon" (1388) exhibits personal and universal eschatological elements, Emmerson and Herzman examine such…
Frank, Robert Worth,Jr.
Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 143-58.
Although Chaucer's "tales of pathos"--MLT, ClT, PhyT, PrT, and MkT--do not constitute a genre, they share characteristics: lack of comedy, absence of irony, little complexity, abstract settings, and characters "motivated by a single virtue." Each…
Pearsall, Derek.
Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 125-42.
Treats setting, tone, and structure of the six comedies in CT: MilT, RvT, ShT, MerT, FrT, and SumT. Discusses the first four as fabliaux, the last two as "masterpieces of satirical anecdote" that do not deal with sex and marriage.
Burrow, J. A.
Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 109-24.
Discusses the five "romances" in CT. WBT, ostensibly an Arthurian romance, is actually a "fairy tale, told by a woman and dominated by women"; Th is an "outright burlesque" of contemporary English roamnces; SqT, unfinished, does not offer the…
Partridge, Stephen.
Norman Blake and Peter Robinson, eds. The 'Canterbury Tales' Project Occasional Papers, Volume I (Oxford: Office for Humanities Communication Publications, 1993), pp. 85-94.
Critiques the inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and inconclusiveness of the Manly-Rickert description (Chicago, 1940) of the glosses in manuscripts of CT. Compares glossarial manuscript groups to the textual groups identified by Manly and Rickert,…
Review article covering six recent books: B. Boyd's Variorum edition of PrT; R. Jordan's Chaucer's Poetics and the Modern Reader; L. Kendrick's Chaucerian Play; L. Koff's Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling; C. Lindahl's Earnest Games; and L.…
Olson, Paul.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986.
CT reflects the social, political, economic, and intellectual milieu of the late fourteenth century: the tales arise from Chaucer's deep concern about contemporary crises and his conviction that the "parlement"--all levels of society engaged in…
Arabic literature--characteristically framed, open-ended, "eye-witness," first-person narrative, often including a journey--prefigures Boccaccio's "Decameron," Gower's "Confessio Amantis," and Chaucer's CT. Petrus Alfonsi's twelfth-century…
Green, Richard Firth
Notes and Queries 241 (1996): 259-61.
Challenges E. Talbot Donaldson's emendation of the Hengwrt reading "wight" (WBP 117); "wright" is acceptable Middle English syntax, makes good sense as it stands, and accords well with contemporary notions of God's perfect design of the sexual…
Frese, Dolores Warwick.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 28 (2006): 249-56.
Frese reads water, dressing, and "suckling" imagery in Boccaccio, Petrarch, and ClT as vestiges of Dante's concern in "De vulgari eloquentia" with using "vernacular" language for "literature of lasting value."
Herzog, Michael B.
Chaucer Review 22 (1988): 269-81.
The issues raised by the narrative style of BD, particularly in the use of its ambivalent first-person narrator, suggest Chaucer's early interest in an art that maintains a tension between convention and innovation.
Rooney, Anne.
Review of English Studies 38 (1987): 299-314.
Reviews scholarship and examines the hunt in BD in the context of other portrayals of the hunt in medieval literature. Because of its portrayal of sudden and shocking death, the "ubi sunt" tradition is an appropriate context: the poem ends with the…
Hamaguchi, Keiko.
Tosa Women's Junior College Journal 3 (1996): 19-35.
Argues that BD satisfies the principal features of the consolatio, while recognizing the poem's dream-vision characteristics. Examines dialogue, the frame, the role of narrator-dreamer as narrator-therapist who leads the Black Knight to Blanche--a…
BD is considerably more complex than some critics have believed: it is a "philosophical vision," not a "dream of folly" (Zimbardo); an "autobiography by dream" (Shoaf); a "literary sampler," or a "Boethian apocalypse" (Cherniss). It is not…
Cruxes in BD--how it can function both universally and individually, why it was composed some years after Blanche's death--can be better understood by placing the poem in the context of tomb sculpture. At the time Chaucer was writing,Henry Yevele…
Rooney, Anne.
Anne Rooney. Hunting in Middle English Literature (Woodbridge, Suffolk;
Surveys critical assessments of the hunting episode in BD, explicates details of the episode, and reads it as a representation of worldly bliss. The episode and the allusion to the hunt near the end of the poem frame the Black Knight's account of…
Zimbardo, Rose A.
Chaucer Review 18 (1984): 329-46.
BD is a rendering of the archetypal Fool (the poet) and the King (the Black Knight), wherein consolation for death is provided by the Fool, a pattern also in "Solomon and Marcolf."
Edwards, Robert (R.)
New Literary History 13 (1982): 189-204.
Chaucer's concern is in part with forms of subjective experience, expressed in a dialectic between images and "nothing" in a series of lateral movements of the aesthetic imagination. At the end the poet converts retrospection to anticipation, as he…
The textual tradition shows that the major and perhaps sole manuscript used by Thynne lacked lines 31-96. The borrowings from the French alleged by Helen Phillips for this passage are commonplaces. No reliable evidence proves that Chaucer composed…
Robertson, D. W.,Jr.
Beryl Rowland, ed. Companion to Chaucer Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 403-13.
Earlier critics, led by Kittredge, read the poem as a consolation for John of Gaunt, embodied as the Black Knight;the dreamer is naive and childish. Recently, however, Robertson has denied the view of "courtly love" some see in the work. Instead,…
Differentiates the lover's malady in BD from the traditional love-sickness found in its analogues, identifying the malady as a form of head melancholy curable by a good night's sleep, the narrator's only physician. The comic version of the tale of…
