Hagen, Susan K.
Jean E. Jost, ed. Chaucer's Humor: Critical Essays (New York and London: Garland, 1994), pp. 127-43.
Compares the narrative strategy of MerT with the techniques of standup comedy. The narrator of MerT holds up for ridicule the socially sanctioned convention of marriage between young women and old men, while at the same time affirming conventional…
Hira, Toshinori.
Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities (Nagasaki University) 10 (1969): 39-50.
Describes Chaucer's "view of the merits and demerits of the established faith," commenting on contemporary religious concerns and on tensions between human and divine love in the depictions of several ecclesiastical characters included in CT.…
Holley, Linda Tarte.
Houston, Tex.: Rice University Press, 1990.
Explores Chaucer's use of "the physics of measurement," an aspect of the science of optics (new in Chaucer's day), which measured "motion and relationships among objects inside a framed space." Chaucer's "verbal structures often move as the eye…
Hoffman, Richard L.
Classica et Mediaevalia 30 (1969): 552-77.
Defends Mel as a meaningful allegory, considering in turn Chaucer's use of the name "Sophia," his reference to wounded feet, and the "extended account" of Christ's passion which indicate framing attention to the Crucifixion. Then tabulates "three…
A "palimpsestic" reading of MerT reveals the irony with which the Merchant treats January and with which Chaucer treats the Merchant, enriching and complicating the "Tale's" identification between the Merchant and January.
Argues that in MerT "January's love of May reflects, in heightened colors," the Merchant's own "commercial love of the world's goods." Explores the possessive nature of January's love of May, focusing on the Merchant's metaphors and references to…
Considers evidence that January's knife-image ("Ne hurte hymselven with his owene knyf"; MerT 5.1840) when commenting on sexual relations with his wife may have indicated to some members of a medieval audience that he was "a sexual pervert of the…
Stillwell, Gardiner.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 57 (1958): 192-96.
Examines the syntax, rhetoric, and emphases of GP 1.280 in comparison with similar locutions elsewhere in Chaucer (especially ShT) to argue that it means, emphatically, " If he [the Merchant] was in debt, the spectator would certainly never know it!"
Wentersdorf, Karl P.
Studies in Philology 63 (1966): 604-29.
Anatomizes motifs in the sources and analogues of the pear tree episode in MerT, focusing on several modern Irish analogues that have details of characterization which parallel those in MerT and have an intervention by male and female fairies.…
In light of the mythological tradition of Janus and connections between January and Adam, January's self-deception in MerT is less bitter than funny. In general, the Tale "is one of the great literary celebrations of marriage, albeit a comic one."
Rudat, Wolfgang E. H.
Explicator 35, iv (1977): 25-26.
The botanical-physical sense of May's appraisal of January's sexual "playing" as "nat...worth a bene" (E 1854) indicates that January has not impregnated May. May's expectancy of impregnation by Damian is frustrated when January interrupts…
Keiser, George R.
Studies in Short Fiction 15 (1978): 191-92.
The use of the word "glad" (E2412) and its repetition (E2416) makes clear the moral point of the tale: happiness in marriage is possible for men, but only if they follow January's example of ignoring reality.
Argues that MerT should be read in light of MerP (for which there is strong manuscript evidence) and that the two are unified by a "cool, controlled, acidulous" tone and a "persistent interest in sexual activity . . . that frequently borders on the…
Cahn, Kenneth S.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 2 (1980): 81-119.
Demonstrates that the Merchant engages neither in usury nor in illegal speculation. Selling "sheeldes" (imaginary coins "of accounts" employed in Flanders) is simply a means of "borrowing" English sterling through foreign exchange. The Merchant is…
Martindale, Wight, Jr.
Chaucer Review 26 (1992): 309-16.
Fourteenth-century business practices, financial transactions,and fluctuating currency rates illuminate the characters of the ShT monk (a cloth merchant) and the GP Merchant, who probably would have chosen to travel in April, when the relative values…
Mann, Jill.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23: 71-107, 2001.
Recent editors have privileged the Hengwrt (Hg) manuscript by attributing metrical and morphosyntactic features of Ellesmere (El) to editorial intervention rather than to scribal error. Mann traces the development of the "myth of the El editor,"…
Pearsall, Derek.
Tim William Machan, ed. Medieval Literature: Texts and Interpretation. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies,no. 79. (Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1991), pp. 41-57.
Most Chaucer criticism fails to mention that Chaucer's poetry is written in verse. The way we read that verse and respond to its musicality, whether in our heads or when reading aloud, is an important part of our interpretation of and response to…
Li, Xingzhong.
Dissertation Abstracts International 57 (1997): 3948A
Surveys the history of approaches to Chaucer's meter and critiques individual approaches. Proposes principles of Chaucer's tetrameter and pentameter, focusing on syntactic inversions and phrase boundaries. Chaucer's verse developed from rough…
Owen, Charles A., Jr.
Modern Language Notes 72.3 (1957): 164-65.
Accepts that the manuscript of Equat is Chaucer's own draft, with revisions, and suggests that evidence from TC indicates that "Chaucer did not wait till he had finished his work to have parts of it copied out fair by his scribe."
Stanley, E. G.
Notes and Queries 234 (1989): 11-23, 151-62.
Reviews scholarship on meter and suggests that the verse of Chaucer's followers is more interestingly variant in context than is sometimes thought; emphasizes the central role of Hoccleve, some of whose work is available in holograph.
Solopova, Elizabeth.
Norman Blake and Peter Robinson, eds. The Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers, Volume II (London: King's College, Office for Humanities Communications, 1997), pp. 143-64.
The metrical and stylistic habits reflected in the variants of WBP manuscripts Hengwrt, Ellesmere, Gg, Ha4, CP, and Dd indicate scribal rather than authorial origins. In comparison with Hengwrt, Ellesmere does not reflect a consistent effort to…
Cole, Kristin Lynn.
Clíodhna Carney and Frances McCormack, eds. Chaucer's Poetry: Words, Authority and Ethics (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013), pp. 92-106.
Questions the idea that Chaucer's relationship with the alliterative verse of his contemporaries, such as the "Gawain"-poet and Langland, was antagonistic. Instead, suggests that the alliterative and the London poets participate in a shared metrical…
Though we cannot recover the facts of Chaucer's versification,his lines in CT are basically iambic pentameter. Of the first hundred lines of GP in the Ellesmere MS., eighty may be so scanned with little difficulty.
