Browse Items (16110 total)

Part 1 describes the Canterbury pilgrims that qualify as "gentils" by birth, education, or accomplishment (Knight, Prioress, Monk, Squire, Franklin, Merchant, Guildsmen, Sergeant of Law, Physician, Parson, and Nun's Priest), explaining details of…

Offers historical context for and commentary on the characterizations of the pilgrims in the CT who may be considered "gentry," both those of traditional gentle birth and those on the rise as a class of new gentry.

Explores the "gift economy" and commercial culture of CT, and applies gift theory and economic anthropology to medieval literary criticism. Examines "gender of the gift," exchange of women, and gifts in GP. Chapter 6 focuses on the Franklin's gifts…

Identifies satiric elements in the description of the Guildsmen in GP--stylistic jibes and social critique, including the association of them with the Cook, who is later identifiable as the historic Roger de Ware, of ill repute.

Reads Scog as a playful, comic version of a "moral ballade" or "balade of bon conseyl" that shares similarities with French models, portions of TC, and several of Chaucer's other lyrics. Comments on the unity of the poem, its possible occasion or…

Contrasts the sorrows of the Dreamer and of Alcyone with that of the Man in Black in BD, arguing that the first two serve to elevate the intensity of the latter. Then examines the epideitic praise of Blanche/White as a form of personification that…

Explores the female protagonists of the legends in LGW and Chaucer's adaptations of his sources in these legends to sketch Chaucer's "psychograph of the Good Woman," emphasizing rejection of authority and active pursuit of love and sex, "a human…

Suggests that Branch I b of "Le Roman de Renart" provides "a partial parallel or inspiratory background" to the exchange in FrT between the summoner and the devil in disguise.

Carlson examines motifs of shame and covering in the two disrobing scenes in ClT, arguing that Griselda's request for a smock to cover herself before she leaves Walter indicates that she has "shown a self that cannot be shamed by Walter, by poverty…

Comments on previous scholarship that seeks to clarify the GP description of the Guildsmen (1.361-78) and describes the possible political, economic, and religious affiliations among individuals of such professions as Chaucer assigns to them. Shows…

Augustine and Jerome influenced the medieval Church's use of hierarchy to evaluate a woman's spiritual standing. Chaucer, however, refuses to be bound by the limitations of theological stereotypes. He shows that women often neither choose nor get…

Reads KnT as an example of Chaucer's "deliberative mode," whereby the reader is compelled to perceive or decide a choice. KnT deliberates whether conquest or consent is the proper source of monarchical dominion. Through pointed occupatio and the…

Ingham uses Freud's meditations on Tasso's knight Tancred as a model for how literary texts mediate between the repetitive and the representational aspects of trauma. Chaucer's TC resonates with trauma in the work's historical context, in the…

Discusses uses of solar metaphor in Chaucer by way of Ovid and Machaut, focusing on LGWP and NPT.

The decade of residence over Aldgate, the gateway to the teeming life of medieval London, supplied Chaucer with the buoyancy and liveliness that characterize HF.

Clarifies the nature and functions of the historical present tense in English, and examines Chaucer's "discourse pragmatic" uses of it in KnT, particularly alternations of "present and past tenses in discourse" where the narrator "dynamically…

Explores the "stylistic rationale" for Chaucer's uses of the historical present tense, identifying the fundamental "connotation of continuing action" of the grammatical form, and assessing its rhetorical, semantic, and tonal effects in various…

Examines how Chaucer uses "ordinary structures of narrative inference to create the mirage of subjective depth" in his development of characters in TC. Refers to Chaucer's unique "experiment" with characterization in TC as the "subjectivity-effect."

Describes the multiple puns on "prick" in Tho, denotative and connotative.

Explores Chaucer's stylistic virtuosity in his references to horses and riding, commenting on appropriateness, suggestive naming and coloring, metaphoric and imagistic implications, and comic effects. Includes comments on horses in TC, LGW, and CT.

Examines the Host as the "unifying feature of the whole pilgrimage fiction." Chaucer's "revisions" of the character and function of the Host increase his "realism" and serve as a structural device.

Chaucer's characters are not psychologically consistent but (like the Host, or Pardoner) are illusions based on familiar voices and attitudes to engage the audience in moral concerns, as in MerT, PardT.

Characterizes the Host as a "delightful traveling companion," summarizing details of his GP description and of his interactions with the other pilgrims in the links between the tales. He is "sometimes pompous, often impudent, and always forceful," a…

Allegorical reading of the CT Host as an image of Christ, a figure of the Eucharist associated with joy, heroism, and omnipotence. The Host is a guide of others and the only pilgrim not in need of penance. His name, his language, and his leadership…

Each of the three modes of authority--textual, experiential, visionary--complicated by the fictive dream-vision form, "fails to be authoritative because each demonstrates the lack of finality and absoluteness presumed to be characteristic of…