Spearing, A. C.
Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2005.
Spearing counters the assumption that all medieval narration implies a narrator. Medieval literature is permeated with subjectivity, but it is often "subjectless subjectivity," better compared to painting than to oral storytelling. Similar to…
Burns, Sister Mary Florence.
Dissertation Abstracts International 22.04 (1961): 1154.
Studies the Collation Text and the Printer's Copy of Tyrwhitt's edition of CT, identifying his reliance on two manuscript witnesses--British Library Harley 7335 and Cambridge University Library Dd.4.24--and establishing "his fidelity to the…
Daniels, Richard.
James J. Paxson, Lawrence M. Clopper, and Sylvia Tomasch, eds. The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer and the Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 111-23.
In MilT, Chaucer transformed a bawdy joke into pleasing narrative art, producing in the sexual scenes moments when a reader might feel jouissance. Includes some notes toward a materialist reading of the Tale as a representation of the poetic and…
Spearing, A. C.
Marianne Børch, ed. Text and Voice: The Rhetoric of Authority in the Middle Ages (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2004), pp. 21-45.
Critiques "dramatic" or Kittredgean readings of the prologues in CT, especially those "newly oiled by Lacan," and considers the prologues in light of the French dit--loosely defined as "speech imitated in clerkly writing" or the "illusion of speech…
Wellesley, Mary.
Julia Boffey and Christiania Whitehead, eds. Middle English Lyrics: New Readings of Short Poems (Cambridge: Brewer, 2018), pp. 122-38.
Analyzes the form and presentation of John Lydgate’'s "Fifteen Joys and Sorrows of Mary," reading it as a bridge between the experiences of poetry and devotion, i.e., for the ways it "relishes the devotional and imaginative possibilities offered by…
Kallstrom, Martha Ann.
Dissertation Abstracts International 50 (1990): 3945A.
The deserted woman, deriving from classical sources through medieval tradition, embodied the conflict of "amor" and "pietas." Appearing in allusion, exempla, and the poems HF, LGW, MLT, FranT, Anel, and TC, the deserted woman demonstrates for…
Simpson, James.
Helen M. Hickey, Anne McKendry, and Melissa Raine, eds. Contemporary Chaucer across the Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), pp. 218-33.
Proposes as an epistemological and hermeneutical concept that "literary cognition is fundamentally a matter of re-cognition," exploring recognition as cognition in literary texts and in the apprehension of literary texts. Examines Virgil’s "Aeneid"…
The Pardoner masks his questionable oral and sexual potency by conspicuously exhibiting his "bulles" and using them to assert power. These documents remain valid despite their dissonance with the spiritual nature of the Pardoner. PardT demonstrates…
Introduces the theory and practice of editing literary works, with contextual materials to help readers understand why and how to edit various kinds of texts and produce various kinds of editions. Includes readings from various theorists and…
Machan, Tim William.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994.
Machan identifies and defines specific cultural and textual factors particular to Middle English works. He argues that textual criticism, in its evolutionary approach, is consonant with source-and-analogue criticism. Today's standard texts develop…
Fifteenth-century readers of Chaucer shaped the Chaucerian canon and cult of authorship by appropriating both the language and the rhetorical strategy of ClT, wherein the Clerk simultaneously recognizes the authority of Petrarch and appropriates to…
Da Rold, Orietta.
Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker, with the assistance of William Green, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 33-56.
Surveys textual practices in Old and Middle English literary culture, focusing on authorial anxieties about scribes, and comparing what is known and surmised about the texts of Ælfric's "Catholic Homilies" and Chaucer's CT.
Examines the differing ways Hoccleve, Lydgate, and Henryson responded to and imitated Chaucer, observing their sensitivity to his metatextual concerns and his sense of literary history. These three authors do not comprise a single and unified…
Ogura, Michiko, ed.
Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006.
Sixteen essays by various authors on linguistic topics in Old and Middle English, including a survey of the teaching of medieval English in Korea. The papers were presented at the first international conference of the Society of Historical English…
Pearsall, Derek.
Robert F. Yeager, ed. Fifteenth-Century Studies: Recent Essays (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1984), pp. 121-36.
Argues that manuscripts ignored by editors "often deserve far more than the total neglect" they receive, drawing examples from manuscripts of Chaucer and Langland, including a number of cruces from manuscripts of Chaucer's CT and TC. Comments on…
Laird, Edgar S.
M. Teresa Tavormina, ed. Sex, Aging, and Death in a Medieval Medical Compendium: Trinity College Cambridge MS R.14.52, Its Text, Language, and Scribe (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008), vol. 2, pp. 607-80.
Laird edits and describes portions of Trinity College Cambridge MS R.14.52 that pertain to scientific instruments, including several sections from Chaucer's Astr (conclusions 2.37,40,39,and 38).
Scattergood, John,and Julia Boffey,eds.
Dublin: Four Courts, 1997.
Ten essays initially presented at the first three conferences of the Early Book Society: Durham, 1989; Trinity College, Dublin, 1991; and Sheffield, 1993. The essays consider texts and books produced between the late fourteenth and early sixteenth…
Treharne, Elaine, and Claude Willan.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2020.
Introduces the study of text technologies, explaining concepts, providing history, and offering case studies. Among the latter is a brief study of the Kelmscott Chaucer as a text that "was created specifically to have a particular aura" in various…
Børch, Marianne, ed.
Odense : University Press of Southern Denmark, 2004.
Ten essays by various authors on medieval verbal and visual rhetoric, with recurrent attention to authority, glossing, and vernacularity. For three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Text and Voice under Alternative Title.
Emmerson, Richard K.
Martin Stevens and Daniel Woodward, eds. The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library; Tokyo: Yushodo, 1995), pp. 143-70.
The twenty-three portraits in the Ellesmere manuscript are not closely related to Chaucer's text. Only eight of the portraits show "striking features" described in GP, and even these eight show details not derived from the text.
Hahn, Thomas,and Richard W. Kaeuper.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 5 (1983): 67-101.
FrT reflects hostility, especially among the lower classes, against widespread corruption and double standards among archdeacons and summoners, as surviving documents of the period amply and graphically suggest.
Ballestra, Gianfranca, and Leslie-Anne Crowley, eds.
Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2000.
Proceedings from a seminar on Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's short story, "The Wife of Bath," in which a modern character (a Jane Austen fan) travels to Bath and meets a woman, Alice, whose life recalls Chaucer's character in several ways. The story is…
Borowitz, Albert.
Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2005.
Traces the development of the traditional story of Herostratos, the arsonist of Diana's temple in Ephesus, and comments (pp. 23-24) that, in light of its inconsistencies with the traditional account, Chaucer's reference (HF 1844) to one who set fire…
