McDuffie, Isaac
Ph.D. Dissertation. Louisiana State University, 2017.
Fully accessible at https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/4182/; accessed February 5, 2025.
Argues that Chaucer's works "reflect an increasing awareness of the fragility of the author's implied voice and the dangers of misprision in a listening reception," largely an effect of the rise of English as a written language and tensions between…
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."
Prendergast, Thomas A.
Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline, eds. Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400-1602 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), pp. 258-69
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…
Brown, W[illia]m J.
University of Colorado Studies. Series in Language and Literature 10 (1966): 15-22.
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…
Describes grammatical and metrical conditions that restrict or encourage pronunciation of final -e at the end of lines in Chaucer's verse. Introduces double-consonant rhymes as a previously unnoticed factor in these concerns, explores their…
Barnes, Geraldine.
Geraldine Barnes, John Gunn, Sonya Jensen, and Lee Jobling, eds. Words and Wordsmiths: A Volume for H. L. Rogers (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1989), pp. 4-12.
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…
Benson, C. David.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
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…
Phillips, Helen, and Nick Havely, eds.
London and New York: Longman, 1997
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…
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…
Quinn, William A., ed.
New York and London : Garland, 1999.
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…
Galantic, Elizabeth Joyce.
Dissertation Abstracts International 43 (1983):2996-2997A.
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,…
Berry, Reginald.
University of Toronto Quarterly 43 (1974): 285-97.
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…
Dane, Joseph A.
Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 11 (1981): 71-82.
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…
Brownlee, Kevin.
Kevin Brownlee and Marina S. Brownlee, eds. New Perspectives: Studies in Honor of Stephen G. Nichols (New York: Peter Lang, 2022), pp. 277-88.
Argues that both Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun--and their "respective 'poetics'"--are "at issue" in BD 321–34 (where the "Roman de la Rose" is named), and in GP 725–46 ("Chaucer's Apology"). These evince Chaucer's deep, sophisticated, and…
Singh, Devani.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Focuses "on fifteenth-century manuscripts of Chaucer, and . . . how these volumes were read, used, valued, and transformed" in the early modern period, reflecting "conventions which circulated in print and . . . convey prevailing preoccupations about…
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…
