LaBarge, Elizabeth.
Once and Future Classroom 15, no. 1 (2019): 107-15.
Offers evidence (including quotations from students) that teaching CT in a bilingual (English/Spanish) high school helps students to "feel part of the conversation in college" and "to reflect on their own lives and cultures." Moreover, such students…
Introducing small readers' theatre productions of scenes from Chaucer into the classroom reinforces the sounds of Middle English for students, allows them to get personally involved in the class, focuses their attention more closely on Chaucer's…
Clifton, Nicole.
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 25, no. 2 (2018): 123-43.
Describes an "upper-division Chaucer course that teaches Chaucerian English as a foreign language," aiming "to ensure that students learn to read Chaucer's language comfortably on their own." Provides sample lesson plans and assignments.
Reflects on the importance of incorporating the "professional and popular" representations of CT to enhance classroom teaching of Chaucer. Films, including Brian Helgeland's "A Knight's Tale," Jonathan Myerson's animated "Canterbury Tales" trilogy,…
Ashton, Gail, and Louise Sylvester, eds.
New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Nine essays on pedagogical topics by various authors, with web resources, suggestions for further reading, and index. The introduction (by Ashton) emphasizes the need for teachers to facilitate active learning. For individual essays, search for…
Clifton, Nicole.
Literature Compass 5.1 (2008): 158-64.
Pedagogical portfolio (containing material such as bibliography, sample syllabi, and discussion questions) for study of Middle English romances, including several works by Chaucer.
Waymack, Anna.
Medieval Feminist Forum 53.1 (2017): 150-75.
Contemplates the pedagogical issues involved in confronting rape in Chaucer’s life and works, with emphasis on the life-records that pertain to Cecily Chaumpaigne--especially their ambiguities--and attention to the experiences of modern students and…
Advocates a pedagogical approach that encourages students to regard "what happens to Troilus" as the central concern of TC, leading them to discover that the poem expresses a generally approving view of passionate love modified by the frustration of…
Brown, Peter,and Andrew Butcher.
Literature and History 13 (1987): 1-13.
Teaching CT at the undergraduate level both as literature and as social and political history challenges student responses, questions the idea of Chaucerian character, and raises methodological problems.
Steiner, Emily, and Lynn Ransom, eds.
Philadelphia: The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, University of Pennsylvania Libraries, 2015.
Presents essays that explore ways that manuscript evidence is used to understand "literary, geographic, scientific, devotional, and hagiographical knowledge" in the later Middle Ages. For an essay that pertains to Chaucer, search for Taxonomies of…
Hardwick, Paul.
Paul Hardwick, ed. The Playful Middle Ages: Meanings of Play and Plays of Meaning: Essays in Memory of Elaine C. Block (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2010), pp. 81-91.
Explores relations between vernacularity and scatology in MilT and "Til Eulenspiegel," commenting on how use of the "kultour" in MilT plays upon the Knight's earlier reference to a plough and undermines clerical discourse in which the plough is a…
Ellis, Jeremy R.
Secaucus, N.J.: Carol Publishing, 1996.
A discursive lexicon of "dirty" language, sexual and scatological, including a brief section (pp. 8-14) on Chaucer’s vocabulary, listing sample words and describing several scenes and examples from MilT, WBP, and elsewhere. Reprinted under the title…
Schotland, Sara Deutch.
Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge, eds. Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Explorations of a Fundamental Ethical Discourse (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), pp. 525-41.
Canacee's kindness toward the formel eagle shows Chaucer's sympathy for women and appreciation of female friendship. The formel, like other females in Chaucer, has been abused by men--and warns Canacee against them. In creating a painted mew for the…
Baswell, Christopher (C.)
Charlotte Cook Morse, Penelope Reed Doob, and Marjorie Curry Woods, eds. The Uses of Manuscripts in Literary Studies: Essays in Memory of Judson Boyce Allen (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992), pp. 121-60.
Medieval habits of reading characteristically produce "a voicing and an inscription of that voicing" (123), allowing for a fluidity of margin and text, reader and author. Geffrey's position as author and glossed text in LGWP and the Wife's position…
Matlock, Wendy A.
Carolynn Van Dyke, ed. Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 217-31.
Explores anthropomorphism and the "connaturality" of human and nonhuman animals in PF and Lydgate's "Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep," noting the comments of medieval and modern philosophers on the traditional animal-human binary. Lydgate's…
Raybin, David.
Frank Grady, ed. The Cambridge Companion to "The Canterbury Tales" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 244-49.
Reviews personal experiences of helping secondary teachers learn how to approach and teach Chaucer. Offers both a summary of the necessity of this kind of outreach and the results of these types of interactions.
Wright, Constance S., and Julia Bolton Holloway, eds.
New York : AMS Press, 2000.
Ten essays, two fictional narratives, and one lecture on Apuleius, his legacy, and the traditions of folly. Reprints Holloway's "The Asse to the Harpe: Boethian Music in Chaucer." For two new essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Tales Within…
Bowden, Betsy.
William K. Finley and Joseph Rosenblum, eds. Chaucer Illustrated: Five Hundred Years of the Canterbury Tales in Pictures (New Castle, Del. : Oak Knoll; London: British Library, 2003), pp. 121-90.
Reproduces and assesses various eighteenth-century depictions of CT or the Canterbury pilgrims, including Thomas Stothard's illustrations for Bell's British Poets (1782-83), the set of pilgrim portraits (here associated with John Vanderbank) in John…
Kamali, Elizabeth Papp.
Speculum 96.2 (2021): 367-417.
Explores how medieval English law dealt with doubt and ambiguity, particularly in cases where the identity of the accused was uncertain Examines various legal cases, including the infamous case of the "Green Children" of Woolpit, and argues that…
Includes (pp. 256-76) KnT in a modern prose version from Eleanor Farjeon's "Tales of Chaucer" (1930), here "slightly cut" and titled "Palamon and Arcite." Includes a b&w illus. of Emelye walking below the prison tower.
Owen, Charles A.,Jr.
Leigh A. Arrathoon, ed. Chaucer and the Craft of Fiction (Rochester, Mich.: Solaris Press, 1986), pp. 179-94.
Portraying himself as a participant in a supposedly actual pilgrimage, Chaucer freed his characters from his control and avoided predetermining the meaning of their tales.
An anthology compiled to promote reading among young readers in Eritrea. Includes international tales, ancient to modern, in modern English adaptation, including ClT (here titled "The Scholar's Tale: The Test of a Good Wife."
Psychological analysis of six of the Canterbury pilgrims (Knight, Man of Law, Narrator [in Mel], Pardoner, Clerk, and Second Nun, followed by "six recreations" in prose that attempt to project the characters as modern storytellers.
Schibanoff, Susan.
Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart, eds. Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 83-106. Reprinted in Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson, eds. Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature (Routledge, 1994), pp. 221-45.
Discusses the "well-established 'topos' of manuscript literature that women readers alone are offended by antifeminist texts" and examines Chaucer's defense of himself in portraying Criseyde's guilt. Asserts that Chaucer's Wife of Bath, being…
Contrasts WBT to popular romance narratives of the period, arguing that notions of "sentence"--i.e., of "meaning that is inscribed into a narrative by its author"--force high cultural glossing onto popular texts that may not be best suited to such…
