Browse Items (16087 total)

Describes the nature and legacy of the dream vision genre and assesses Chaucer's four dream poems (BD, HF, PF, and LGW), exploring the dynamics of courtliness and learning, experience and authority, endings and implications,…

Assesses the conventionality and originality of PF in form or genre, matter, and rhetorical style, arguing that the poem is a "delicately ironical fantasy on the theme of love," both courtly and natural, presented largely through a "series of…

Archibald surveys Italian, French, and English literary instances of love compared to heaven, hell, paradise, or purgatory, commenting on Chaucer's uses in CT (WBT, KnT, and especially MerT) and LGW and exploring the more sustained use of this set of…

Comic irony was used by Chaucer throughout CT, even in the tales generally considered to be serious or pious. ManT, SumT, FranT, PhyT, MLT, PrT, SNT, and ClT all display Chaucer's ironic point of view, although the reader's appreciaiton of this…

Argues that Chaucer's claim in LGW that St. Augustine "hath gret compassioun / Of this Lucresse" is neither ironic nor misinformed, but is an accurate account of Augustine's position. Situating Augustine's comments about Lucretia within the broader…

Attributes Chaucer's assertion of St. Augustine's "gret compassioun" for Lucrece as a rape victim (LGW, 1691) to the poets' unmediated first-hand knowledge of Book I of the "City of God," clarifying Augustine's sympathy for rape victims, arguing that…

Comprehensive from 1900-80 and fully cross-referenced.

Evaluates twenty of Chaucer's standalone lyric poems, considering their prosodic features, poetic qualities, and representations of various "aspects of experience."

Explicates Virginia's death by reference to patristic definitions of virginity as the desired ideal veiled in substance, a state inevitably transgressed by the gaze. By extension, the ideal that virginity implies is destroyed by its articulation. …

A teaching edition that includes BD, HF, PF, TC, LGWP-F and the legend of Cleopatra, CT (without Mel or ParsT), and eight short lyrics (Ros, Adam, Gent, Truth, Sted, Scog, Buk, and Purse), with bottom-of-page notes and glosses, and a glossarial…

Comprises seven essays (three by Stevens; four by Hoy) that discuss eight portions of CT (GP, KnT, PrT and ClT, CYPT, FranT, PardPT, NPT), with brief notes, bibliography, and an index. Recurrent concern with unity, narrative skill, aesthetic order…

In the GP sketch and in MLPT, Chaucer characterizes his Man of Law as one who does not recognize Divine design behind the pattern of natural events, eternal law behind natural law. The Man of Law errs in focusing on temporal events, failing to…

Discusses GP 313-20 with particular reference to the meaning of "fee simple," suggesting that it implies sharp practice by the man of Law and that the portrayal of him is critical.

Previous criticism often finds an unresolved tension between tale and teller in MLT and in the tale itself, leading a critic like Edward A. Block to declare the work "poor art." However, the admitted tensions within the tale between a feeling of…

The Man of Law's allusion to the story of the nine daughters of Pierus, as presented in Ovid's "Metamorphoses" 5, is viewed as literary criticism that emphasizes the fact that the Man of Law is reluctant to be compared to the daughters--who lost…

Skilled in the law and both learned and adept in poetry, the Man of Law crafts a tale of sin, free will, and providence. Though Custance is steadfast, her will is free and consequential, the foundation of true judgment. MLT proposes a concept of…

MLT reflects the occupation of its teller both in its concern for "legal particularities" and in its vision of the beauty and order of the law, in such terms as "prudence" and forms of "govern." Constance's own name suggests "justitia."

Reads the Man of Law's materials in CT as an unfolding characterization of the lawyer, commenting on the relationship of tale to teller, the narrator's use of law and legalistic rhetoric, and the relation of MLT to other rhyme royal tales in CT. The…

Explores the implications of illegality in Chaucer's GP description of the Sergeant at Law as a "purchasour."

Reads MLT as a satire on its narrator whose volatile comments on the action of the poem contrast sharply with Constance's own patient acceptance, and characterize him as "anti-Boethian, anti-humanistic, [and] anti-religious," a man interested in…

MLT extends the concerns with wooing and governance that are developed in Part 1 of CT, especially when considered in light of the extended version of CkT found in Bodley MS 686, which is edited and appended to this essay.

Resists impulses to denigrate the artistry of MLT and argues that the rhetorical passages--including several of the narrator's apostrophes--achieve "genuinely intense emotion" rather than mere sentimentality.

Use of sources and analogues in the classroom can provide baffled students a point of entry into the complexities of MLT and allow them to appreciate the importance of redaction in medieval literature. In particular, examining Chaucer's feminization…

The portrait of the Man in Black of BD reflects a traditional "imago pietatis," the Man of Sorrows. So, to a lesser degree, do the Falcon of SqT and Criseyde.

The characterization of Chaucer in Helgeland's film reinforces the film's concerns with authority and masculinity, ultimately revealing that "canonical authority" is "anachronistic."