Browse Items (16108 total)

Hoad challenges critical discussions of specific words and syntactical emphases in Chaucer on the grounds that modern linguistic intuition is unreliable, comparison of medieval uses is often flawed, and medieval commentary can be misleading.…

Outlines the basics of Middle English orthography and pronunciation, and Chaucer's vocabulary and literary models for students. Claims that learning to read Middle English, and understanding concepts of manuscript study, editing, and translation,…

LGWP may be viewed as the poet's last of four experiments in the dream-vision form and as a self-contained dream poem rather than a simple prologue. Chaucer affirms the visionary's initial views and attitudes but mocks the authority of its central…

Argues that parts 1-5 of CT represent a "wholesale revision that Chaucer was engaged in at the time of his death," while parts 6-10 "represent an earlier stage of composition." Suggests that Chaucer "introduced dramatic interplay between narrator,…

Scrutinizes Chaucer's use of Latin, demonstrating that his intratextual and extratextual Latin terms, phrases, and sentences are "formulas" and "quotations," not his own inventions. Twomey briefly surveys the development of Anglo-Latin and its…

Chaucer as a court poet adapts himself to the pattern of sentiments of the court audience. He views the bourgeois pragmatism from the aristocratic standpoint. However, in his fabliaux he could deliberately make fun of the attitude of the…

Audio recording (on CD) of a lecture about the "inextricability" of religious and secular law in Chaucer's age as reflected in PardT, ParsT, and especially MLT. Heinzelman contrasts material and spiritual wealth in PardT and ParsT and explores the…

Manuscript evidence shows that fifteenth-century female readers of LGW were urban and either household servants or daughters of the gentry, whereas the implied female audience of fourteenth-century manuscripts consisted of members of the nobility,…

Palmer argues that LGW is not merely a collection of tales retold from Ovid; it is also the story of the narrator's problematic relationship to the God of Love.

Chaucer's LGW testifies to the disparate views of women prevalent in the Middle Ages. A complex medieval notion of Woman informs the structure of the poem: in the prologue, Chaucer praises conventional ideas of female virtue, while in the legends…

Assesses the anatomical deficiencies of Emelye of KnT and Cecilia of SNT as samples of one medieval model of lesbian sexuality.

Verse translations of all of Chaucer's poetry, with the exceptions of CT, TC, and Rom, based on Skeat's edition and arranged in his chronology. Each translation follows Chaucer's verse form and is preceded by a one-page foreword that comments on…

TC shows Chaucer's ambivalence about the language of courtly love; he uses it denotatively with romantic meaning yet reveals its duplicity through Troilus's idealism, Diomede's cynicism, Pandarus's manipulativeness, and Criseyde's combined sincerity…

Provides a detailed account of Chaucer's life, with consideration of how his personality and experience contributed to his literary characteristics. In Japanese.

Links the use of "ferthyng" and the lisping of the Friar in GP 1.255 and 1.264 with the friar of SumT and his use of "ferthyng" (3.1967), suggesting that if that latter had a lisp like the former, his pronunciation may have inspired the "crude…

Surveys the sources of Chaucer's lists and examines them for the effects they create, for the rhetorical ends they accomplish in undermining or leavening the direction of a tale or poem, as in TC, Anel, FrT, Rom, WBT, PardT, MkT, MkPT, MerT, Mel,…

Analyzes Chaucer's notion of tragedy in TC against the background of classical and medieval conceptualizations of the genre and Chaucer's own rewriting of sources.

Chaucer self-consciously makes the reader aware of the achievement of the writer, of the reader as reader, and of the intelligent response he is asking the reader to make. All three point to Chaucer's fascination with the power of language as a key…

Looking at BD, HF, and PF, Robinson examines Chaucer's relations to his masters and his dilemma in connecting books and imagination with actual life, in creating puzzles for the demands he felt "of the poetry of the poem." Chaucer's dreamscapes are…

Hewitt studies BD, HF, and PF with reference to Chartrian allegorists and the "Roman de la Rose," using theories of Heidegger, Derrida, and Lacan.

Explores Chaucer's literary self-consciousness by tabulating and analyzing his wide-ranging and complex variety of literary terms, including terms that describe the process of writing and the impact of literature, as well as terms of genre, rhetoric,…

Examines the topoi of "game" versus "ernest" and "authority" versus "experience" in Chaucer's works, considering the influence of medieval rhetorical tradition on the poet's imagination.

Chaucer involves his readers in a romancelike quest of introspection. By way of infinite regression, they encounter first the text, then a reading character, and finally themselves. The process encourages both Socratic self-knowledge and pleasurable…

Briefly surveys the practice of drawing lots in ancient history, the Bible, medieval literature, and Chaucer's works, focusing on the GP "lottery" to select who will tell the first tale.

The introductory lines in question (Th-MelL *2143-54), if analyzed syntactically, lexically, and rhetorically, indicate that the "litel tretys" is Mel itself, rather than CT generally or the source of Mel.