Browse Items (16035 total)

Reprint of essay that first appeared in Florilegium 10 (1988-91): 83-92. See entry there.

Early dissertations on Chaucer by women illustrate the limitations faced by early female academics. Critical neglect of Maria Koellreutter's 1908 dissertation on Chaucer suggests little recent social progress.

Martin defends the "eclectic approach" she adopted in her book, "Chaucer's Women: Nuns, Wives, and Amazons" (University of Iowa Press, 1990), a critical posture that borrows from a variety of critical approaches.

The tradition of involucrum explains the Second Nun's preoccupation with the name Cecilie, associates the Prioress and the Monk with Abelard, associates the Wife of Bath with Bathsheba, and relates the Clerk's references to Petrarch and "Poo" to…

The walled-garden images in KnT, MerT, the GP sketch of the Prioress, WBT, FrT, and BD illustrate that walls not only provide safety but also exclude women from the knowledge needed to progress from virginity to motherhood and to "wise womanhood." …

The Wife of Bath's preference for experience, marriage, and governance contrasts with the displays of innocence, chastity, and submissiveness by the Prioress and Second Nun. The triumphs of the Wife and of the "lusty bacheler" are losses, while "the…

Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of polyphony illuminates MLH, MLP, and MLT, in which Custance's religious voice contrasts with the Man of Law's many ambivalent voices, including his "rhetorical, epic, and legal registers." While Custance is a stock figure,…

The Wife of Bath's argument against Jerome's stance on virginity resembles Jerome's argument against Jovinian; Dorigen in FranT contemplates suicide, recommended by Jerome over the loss of chastity. Chaucer's use of Jerome illustrates Bakhtinian…

"Stone" is an allegorical figure of Christ in both the Old and New Testaments, illuminating the three kinds of stones in SNT and CYT: "those of the pagans, of the alchemists and of the Christians." Chaucer presents the "extremities of human faith"…

Blaunche's description in BD centers on her eyes, whereas Alisoun's in MilT centers on her bottom. These descriptions show the relationship between each character's essential and physical selves, suggesting that both characters "locate their virtue…

Attitudes toward earthly and heavenly love in Chaucer's TC and Gower's Confessio Amantis, Chaucer's and Gower's references to each other, and the presence of phrasal similarities in the two works suggest that Chaucer's ending to TC "is to be…

The persistent and untrue story of a "quarrel" between Gower and Chaucer can be explained by the notion of rape. Gower's use of the Philomela legend in Confessio Amantis and Chaucer's use of it in TC suggest that in their "interaction with one…

Chaucer's Criseyde in TC and Malory's Elaine and Guenivere in Morte d'Arthur are "modern" in their struggles. Each author illuminates his "diogesis" by narrative use(s) of the heroine(s); both authors "counter reductive views" by providing…

To attain equality, woman have historically had to resist hierarchy, to quest liminality, and to exercise holy disobedience. Women in earlier Christianity, especially in the Romanesque period, exercised that disobedience; but in the paradigm shift…

Discusses Chaucer's women and their relations with pilgrimage and learning. The Wife of Bath rebels against her husband's book of wicked wives. The Prioress tells of a boy's eschewing his primer in order to sing a hymn he does not understand from…

The Wife of Bath tells us that she acquired forbidden learning through forbidden sex with university students, breaking the barriers of both literacy and celibacy, as reflected in her challenge to Pauline epistles and Jerome's Vulgate.

Refers briefly to the Wife of Bath while discussing a document about a female English pilgrim, Isolde Parewastell, who journeyed to Jerusalem from England and who requested that the pope grant her the right to a chantry in England because of her…

Discusses canonical doctrine about sexual relations in marriage as it was understood between the twelfth and mid-fourteenth centuries--an era in which scientific jurisprudence came of age. Makowski focuses on the concept of conjugal debt, referring…

A festschrift for the sixtieth birthday of Ando, with six essays on Chaucer, seven on Shakespeare, and other essays on medieval and Renaissance topics. For essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Chaucer to Shakespeare under Alternative Title.

Describes the methods and goals of a volume projected as a supplement to the author's Complete Concordance to the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Hildeshiem: Olms-Weidmann, 1991).

A seventeenth-century account makes it possible to reconstruct portions of a manuscript of CT, once owned by Selden and now lost, here designated *Se2. Beadle hypothesizes that *Se2 presented a longer version of CkP than now available.

Published in 1767-69, Schiebeler's thirty-six-page adaptation of John Campbell's article in Biographia Britannia is the earliest known German essay on Chaucer, a product of Enlightenment thought.

Examines Chaucer's use of "thoughte" in HF to translate Boethius's "mens" and Dante's "mente," arguing that the personal, experiential epistemology implicit in Chaucer's word undermines the transcendental visions of his predecessors and anticipates…

Explores the performative rather than formal aspects of tragedy in Chaucer, surveying contemporary use of the term and Chaucer's projections of his narrative personae as tragedians in TC, LGW (Philomene), MkT, and PhyT. Notes the incompatibility of…

Surveys background to Chaucer's idea of nature; identifies his uses of nature as a personification of divine ordinance, as in PF; and argues that Chaucer anticipates modern naturalism when he does not personify nature, as in KnT.