Steiner, Wendy.
Rosemary Feal, ed. Profession 2008 (New York: Modern Language Association, 2008), pp. 24-32.
Personal narrative about Steiner's composition of an opera inspired by WBT, intended for production as a full-length animated film. Includes sketches and storyboards by John Kindness.
Brown, Carole Koepke.
Dissertation Abstracts International 47 (1987): 3030A.
That theme relates to numerical structures is apparent not only in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" but also in FranT,where each of the three parts reveals a pattern of A ("a major trouthe"), B (complaint), and C (helpful human intervention). Thus,…
Robinson, Peter.
Norman Blake and Peter Robinson, eds. The Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers, Volume II (London: King's College, Office for Humanities Communications, 1997), pp. 69-132.
Analyzes textual variants of WBP, using the data and computer analysis available on Robinson's "The Wife of Bath's Prologue on CD-ROM". Corroborates Manly and Rickert's A, B, C, and D groupings and their affiliations, suggests two more (E, F) that…
Swinford, Dean.
Modern Philology 111 (2013): 1–22.
Focuses on HF, 584–92, clarifying the meaning and implications of "stellifye," arguing that the narrator's fear of stellification reflects Chaucer's concerns about social and poetic ascent, and describing how the allusion to Ganymede evokes a…
Schreyer, Kurt.
Comparative Drama 55 (2021): 185-210.
Identifies narrative, linguistic, and thematic similarities between Chaucer's KnT, MilT, and RvT and Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus," and argues that the brutal treatment of Lavinia in Shakespeare's play resonates with the aspects of courtly love…
Benson, C. David.
Jenny Adams and Nancy Mason Bradbury, eds. Medieval Women and Their Objects (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), pp. 267-87.
Discusses SNT as Chaucer's only hagiographical work to evaluate the medieval perception of art. Contrasts the medieval devotion to earthly relics in relation to St. Cecilia's desire to shed the physical and enter the spiritual, while paralleling her…
Using available electronic transcriptions of manuscripts of WBP and MilT tests the reliability of a statistical model ("interpolated, modified Kneser-Ney smoothed 3-gram backoff model") for determining various linguistic and scribal features of the…
Ellis, Mark Spencer.
Linda Cookson and Bryan Loughrey, ed. Critical Essays on The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale (Harlow: Longman, 1990), pp. 29-45.
Argues that PardPT challenges modern readers' "conventional notions about character and events" and "undermines some fundamental assumptions about social morality." Anonymity, loaded rhymes, and, above all, a consistent lack of decision-making and…
Stanley, E. G.
Arno Esch, ed. Chaucer und Seine Zeit: Symposion für Walter F. Schirmer (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1968), pp. 121-48.
Examines Chaucer's stanzaic and metrical dexterity in TC, discussing how and with what effects he bridges stanza breaks and how he creates emphasis through repetitions, rhyme pairs, caesuras, enjambment, narratorial disavowals, and shifting of climax…
Fein, Susanna.
Susanna Fein and David Raybin, eds. Chaucer: Visual Approaches (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), pp. 89-114.
Argues that PardT and ShT, juxtaposed but not linked in the Ellesmere manuscript, implicitly embed Crucifixion imagery toward a critique of materialist values. By positioning the "human incapacity to 'see' spiritually against glimmering signs of…
Bishop, Kathleen A., ed.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010.
Thirteen essays by various authors, most of them concerned with the influence of Chaucer's work or his reception. For individual essays, search for Standing in the Shadow of the Master? under Alternative Title.
Dyer, Christopher.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Bridging the social and economic histories of medieval England, Dyer examines the inequalities of English society as inherent rather than as economically shaped among the upper classes, townsmen, and peasants. GP offers criticism of a simplistic…
Minnis, Alastair.
Ursula Schaefer, ed. The Beginnings of Standardization: Language and Culture in Fourteenth-Century England (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 43-60.
Minnis discusses the impact of Aristotelian social and political theory on the rise of a growing lay culture in France and England. Considers similarities among several "discourses of secular power" - including Chaucer's KnT and Gower's advice to…
Trahern, Joseph B.,Jr., ed.
Knoxville, Tenn. : University of Tennessee Press, 1989.
Eight articles on standardization of English, three of specific interest to Chaucerians. Includes bibliography of Fisher's work through 1987. For the three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Standardizing English under Alternative Title.
Blake, N. F.
Joseph B. Trahern, Jr., ed. Standardizing English: Essays in the History of Language Change, in Honor of John Hurt Fisher (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), pp. 57-81.
Illustrates the difficulties editors face in dealing with literary representations of regional or non-standard dialects, citing scribal variations of northern features of RvT before examining at greater length examples of dialects in Shakespeare's…
Blake, N. F.
Masahiko Kanno, Gregory K. Jember, and Yoshiyuki Nakao, eds. A Love of Words: English Philological Studies in Honour of Akira Wada (Tokyo: Eihosha, 1998), pp. 3-24.
Blake examines the spelling variants of terminal -n and -m in a variety of words in WBP to show that fro/from was relatively erratic. Similar analysis indicates that final -e was obsolescent as a plural marker and in weak adjectives. Blake suggests…
Shoaf, R[ichard] A[llen].
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 78 (1979): 313-24.
The poet in BD takes the role of confessor and "medicus animae" to the Black Knight, whose shrift and repentance return him to the duties of everyday living. The hunt, which sets the scene, is an allegorical image of the process of confession…
Schauber, Ellen,and Ellen Spolsky.
New Literary History 12 (1981): 397-413.
Readers resolve conflicts by readjusting genre expectations. NPT is a beast fable "told in the rhetoric of epic. The homely moral of the tale is comically inconsistent with the implications of high seriousness in the language."
Peverley, Sarah.
Gail Ashton, ed. Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 48-57.
Describes the dramatic adaptations of selections from CT presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company in November 2005, exploring how the adaptations and their staging at times modify and at times convey the "key elements" of Chaucer's work,…
Although Charles d'Orleans first described an actual Valentine's Day lottery, it was apparently Chaucer who, in PF and Mars, first associated Saint Valentine's Day with love, both in its ornithological simplicity and in its human complexity. His…
Peck, Russell A.
Mediaevalia 7 (1984 for 1981): 91-131.
Biblical Pauline notions of pilgrimage recur throughout CT, evident in imagery drawn from Paul's letters, although often in "parody and travesty": old men and new men, doctrine amidst enigma, iconography of wells, vessels, widows, musical…
Haskell, Ann S.
Rossell Hope Robbins, ed. Chaucer at Albany (New York: Franklin, 1975), pp. 105-24.
Chaucer's allusions to saints were used to evoke different associations on different occasions. Two allusions to St. Nicholas offer striking contrasts in different contests.
