Browse Items (16035 total)

Analyzes the function of the medievalist and medieval literary critic.

Applies to Chaucer's CT Dell Hymes's model of analyzing speech acts, SPEAKING (Situations, Participants, Ends, Act Sequence, Key, Instrumentalities, Norms, Genres), exemplifying the utility of the model, its relationships to more traditional literary…

Twelve essays by Donaldson, eight of them previously printed, with a comprehensive index. For the four newly published essays, search for Speaking of Chaucer under Alternative Title.

Eight essays by various authors suggest that looking carefully at the ways characters speak in medieval texts gives information about the social networks of medieval society and reveals artistic skills of writers who considered speech significant.…

Explores Chaucer's uses of ekphrasis as "expressions of an increasingly anxious desire to allow literary images to speak for themselves" in KnT, BD, and HF.

Mann explores Nicholas's verbal manipulation of John in MilT, the portrait of Alison, and the body language of the kiss scene (and some analogous fabliaux), arguing that language, imagination, and physical reality are in many ways inseparable or…

Twenty-six essays on topics from Marie de France's "Guigemar" to Edward Burne-Jones's "Miracle of the Merciful Knight," with recurrent emphasis on the intersection between visual and verbal traditions. Includes a bibliography of Kolve's publications…

Focuses on the concept of manipulation in language and magic in FranT.

Describes the "inbetweenedness" of language in Caroline Bergvall's poetic/performative “trilogy--"Meddle English" (2011), "Drift" (2014), and "Alisoun Sings" (2019)--including discussion of her uses of forms of "Chaucer's Middle English, as well as…

Describes factors involved in English language spatio-temporal systems, i.e., the uses of pronouns, demonstratives, adverbs, verb tenses, and modals that indicate proximity and distance between speakers in space and time. Draws evidence from Astr and…

Focuses on "generic links" between MLPT and "the ancient novel/Greek romance," especially multiple adventures as a plot device and the motif of incestuous desire that is both "rife" in the plot of MLT and a "conspicuous absence." Shows how incest…

Conducts a "systematic analysis of the synchronic spatio-temporal systems" in Astr, taking "deixis into consideration," defining terms, and analyzing the interactions of "pronouns, demonstratives, adverbs, tense forms, and modals," along with…

Assesses the spatial prepositions in Astr, arguing that the availability of the instrument to the audience of Astr made it possible for Chaucer to use imprecise indicators of space, that the prepositions used are "semantically transparent," and that…

Theorizes how "fundamental ways of apprehending space in the past can differ from our own," focusing on local, everyday spaces, their boundaries, and their contents, and exemplifying medieval notions with details and descriptions from Chaucer's…

Explores what Chaucer's romances "say about . . . individuality and identity," interpreting spaces, movements, and characters' perception of them in KnT for how they "delimit" behaviors even though these limitations are disrupted by individual…

Places Troilus's Hymn to Love, based on Boethius, in the context of Neoplatonic metaphysics, cosmology, and theories of love (pp. 78-79).

A pedagogical anthology of twelve short stories, each accompanied by exercises to improve reading comprehension. Includes PardT in modern English (pp. 23-28), excluding the sermon on the tavern vices, followed by questions about plot and vocabulary…

Tabulates Chaucer's allusions to Spanish people and places; explores ways to account for these political, social, and cultural references and what they can tell us about medieval Spanish/English relations.

Argues that Chaucer's Ret was influenced by the prologue to Don Juan Manuel's "El Conde Lucanor," citing parallels not only in attitude and sentiment but also in structure, syntax, and grammar. Uses discourse analysis to compare linguistic features.

Although hedged in by bookish tradition, Chaucer "continually stretches the boundaries as he sets himself up as a legitimate auctor." Jensen assesses several of Chaucer's "self-authorising" interventions in the proems of TC, in WBP, and in Ret,…

Examines a series of English literary texts in which "the portrayal of landscape does both elegiac and political work." Includes CT, which "represents a new sphere of civic and economic movement within established space."

Following Foucault, Root examines the theory that patristic tradition and ecclesiastical practice eventually permitted confessional self-representation, as seen especially in WBT, Livre du voir dit, and Libro di buen Amor.

Examines how the confessional mandate of the Fourth Lateran Council provoked the rise of vernacular penitential manuals, and their impact on literary characters from Chaucer, Machaut, and the Libro de buen amor.

The action of TC takes place in both naturalistic and schematic space. This opposition is reinforced by the creation of an intrusive narrator and a fictional audience. Schematic space functions as a principle of limitation, reinforcing the…

Considers ParsT in light of Lollard concern with the use of English, the themes and drama of MLE and ParsP, and the inclusion of ParsT in MS Longleat 29. Longleat indicates that lay readers used ParsT for private devotional purposes, although the…