Kennedy, William J.
Patrick Cheney and Lauren Silberman, eds. Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), pp. 45-62.
Kennedy examines how Spenser fused aspects of Chaucer's Thopas and SqT with features of Ariosto's Innkeeper's Tale (Orlando Furioso 28) in creating his Squire of Dames, found in books 3 and 4 of Faerie Queene.
Steinberg, Glenn A.
English Literary Renaissance 35.1 (2005): 331ı51
Spenser's adoption of Chaucerian humility should be understood in light of Elizabethan debates about Chaucer. Although Chaucer is universally listed as preeminent among English poets, his detractors find him lacking in moral or stylistic weight,…
Maley, Willy.
Studies in Philology 91 (1994): 417-31.
Spenser's Irish English was modeled both on Chaucer's language and on an archaic dialect of English that survived in Elizabethan Ireland. The "Old English peasantry" in Spenser's Ireland spoke a form of English similar to Chaucer's.
Galbraith, Steven K.
Spenser Studies 21 (2006): 21-49.
Contrasts the absence of Spenser's portrait in the first folio edition of The Faerie Queen with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Chaucer folios, which were printed throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
King, John N.
Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, ed. Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation. Harvard English Studies, no. 14 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 369-98.
Connects Spenser's "association of pastoral with a Protestant gospel ethos" in "Shepheardes Calendar" with the Renaissance construction of medieval anticlerical satire as proto-Protestant. The spurious attribution of the "Plowman's Tale" to Chaucer…
Rudat, Wolfgang E. H.
Classical and Modern Literature 3.2 (1983): 89-98.
Explores the allusion to Virgil's "Georgics" in "Faerie Queene" 1.1.50-53, arguing that Spenser "desexualizes the Vergilian model by removing [its] generative principle" (90) and thereby re-makes the Classical/Christian topos that underlies Chaucer's…
McCabe views Spenser's alleged completion of Chaucer in "The Legend of Friendship" as a move to represent himself as a "Bonfont" rather than a "Malfont" poet.
Martin, Ellen E.
Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 17 (1987): 83-109.
BD is an "open-ended legend of imagination in which grief is accepted rather than eradicated...(Its) main theme is the reanimation of imagination." It proceeds by "structures of inconsequence that draw attention away from theme to poetic method." …
Reads Spenser's imitation of SqT in "Faerie Queene," Book IV, in light of MLE, which introduces SqT in early editions. The sequence alters the Squire's characterization and helps to frame SqT “as the product of an active, metafictional revision."…
Higgins, Anne.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 89 (1990): 17-36.
Spenser's indebtedness to Chaucer is several times acknowledged in "The Faerie Queene," but only in a curious, ambiguous way, "reducing rather than elevating Chaucer's reputation." Chaucer, for example, was hardly the poet of "warlike numbers" that…
Bender, John B.
Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1972.
Studies the "embodying [of] visual experience in poetic language," comparing Spenser's uses of various devices with those of other poets, Chaucer among them. Contrasts the "embellished and incrusted imagery" in Spenser's characterizations with…
Blake, Norman, and Jacob Thaisen.
Special issue, Nordic Journal of English Studies 3.1 (2004): 93-107.
Evaluating two CT manuscripts--Christ Church, Oxford, MS 152 (single exemplar) and British Library MS Harley 7334 (two exemplars)--the authors contend that analysis of spelling can be used to determine changes in exemplars in textual study. Because…
Assesses graphic representations of selected features of spoken language to show the "dialectical homogeneity" of the Ellesmere manuscript (London), Cambridge Gg 4.27 (East Midland with Northern elements), and British Library Additional 5140 (East…
Smith, J. J.
J.J. Smith, ed. The English of Chaucer and His Contemporaries: Essays by M.L. Samuels and J.J. Smith (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), pp. 96-113.
Working from an "archetypal" corpus of Gower's spelling forms,Smith explores the continuity and dissolution of these forms in manuscript tradition, as well as the relation of the corpus to the progress of Standard Written English and to practice in…
Ransom, Daniel J.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 118 (2019): 517-43.
Observes that the glossary of Speght’s 1598 edition of Chaucer’s works lists "yape" for "jape"/"iape," meaning “trick,” “joke,” or sexual activity, but the 1602 edition does not; historical and contemporary word lists do not include "yape" unless…
Pace, George B.
Studies in Bibliography 21 (1968): 225-35.
Shows that the first printed version of ABC (in Thomas Speght's 1602 edition of Chaucer's works) is essentially a copy of the version found in Cambridge University Library MS Gg.4.27. Also considers Speght's treatment of his source, the "significance…
Examines how the form and ideology of Thomas Speght's Renaissance editions of Chaucer contribute to the monumentalization of the man and his works. Speght's critical apparatus, his expansion of Chaucer's corpus, and even the size and title pages of…
The principle of contraries provides a method for relating pairs of tales. ManT and ParsT offer paradigms for improper and proper use of speech. The Manciple uses and misglosses the tale of Phoebus and the Crow, while the Parson speaks the truth…
Pugh, Tison.
Allison Gulley, ed. Teaching Rape in the Medieval Literature Classroom: Approaches to Difficult Texts (Amsterdam: Arc Humanities, 2018), pp. 77-90.
Maintains that attention to speech and silence is crucial to literary analysis and to understanding medieval notions of gender difference, exemplifying how the speech/silence binary can be explored in complex ways to help analyze rape as a plot…
Seaman, Myra.
Dissertation Abstracts International 59 (1998): 1156A.
Medieval romance generally assumes that action is inherently a masculine activity and speech feminine, with both supporting patriarchy. Various English romances examine these assumptions (sometimes ambiguously). WBT employs them to subvert not only…
Blake, N. F.
Yearbook of English Studies 25 (1995): 6-21.
Surveys interrelations between speech and writing in the history of English, drawing on KnT and RvT to illustrate features of late-medieval lexis and syntax. Features of KnT may reflect "oral residue," while dialect features of RvT are better seen…
