Bennett, J. A. W.
J. A. W. Bennett. The Humane Medievalist (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura; Wolfeboro, N.H.: Boydell & Brewer, 1982), pp. 135-72.
Part 1 traces the classical and medieval tradition of the "know thyself" motif and Chaucer's uses in MkT, ClT, TC, and Rom.
Explores the possibilities for a "woman's language" through Bakhtinian theories of discourse. Through dialogic, double-voiced discourse, Chaucer's Griselda and Shakespeare's Viola each break into and subvert the dominant patriarchal discourse in…
Boggel, Sandra.
Thomas Honegger, ed. Riddles, Knights and Cross-dressing Saints: Essays on Medieval English Language and Literature (Bern: Lang, 2004), pp. 193-222
Metacomnmunicative markers are more frequent in Middle English religious texts than in Early Modern English religious texts. Boggel focues on such structural and directional markers as "you must remember this" or "let us first examine." Examples…
Cheney, Patrick.
Patrick Cheney and Frederick A. de Armas, eds. European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), pp. 231-67.
Argues that in his references to Tityrus in the "Februarie" eclogue of "The Shepheardes Calender" Spenser represents a "Chaucerian" model of a career path for poets, one that emphasizes novelty and poses a third alternative to the classical Virgilian…
Lerer, Seth.
Mark C. Amodio, ed. Oral Poetics in Middle English Poetry (New York and London: Garland, 1994), pp. 181-205.
Th and Mel pose an oral-literate opposition. Th is a parody of rambling orality, more concerned with its narrator than with its protagonist; constant interruptions and stereotypical devices direct the audience's attention away from the story. In…
Dahlberg, Mary Margaret.
Dissertation Abstracts International 58 (1997): 155A.
Free indirect discourse appears in TC and in works by John Lyly and George Gascoigne primarily for dramatic effects. Multiple voices in free indirect discourse may also mimic, distance, and achieve irony, as in many novels of the nineteenth and…
Whaley, Diana.
Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade and John Frankis, ed. Language Usage and Description: Studies Presented to N. E. Osselton on the Occasion of His Retirement (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991), pp. 5-16.
The phrase "Nowelis Flood" near the end of MilT has commonly been taken as a malapropism, an instance of the carpenter's complacent ignorance. Whaley tests this assumption against the evidence of manuscript readings, meter, and literary contexts;…
NPT's "my lord" (VII, 3445), generally taken as referring to a bishop or archbishop (by J. H. Fisher to Jesus or God) may refer to St. Paul, thus resembling the conclusion of a homily for the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul in the 15th-century…
Explores Criseyde's "Boethian pragmatism" and her agency in TC, considering how they conflict with social gender-based social constraints and the constraints of the romance genre. The "incompatibility of Boethian philosophy and the romance genre…
Biggins, Dennis.
Beryl Rowland, ed. Chaucer and Middle English Studies in honour of Rossell Hope Robbins (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974), pp. 249-54.
Interprets various details in WBP and in the GP description of the Wife of Bath to determine whether she is a five-time widow or still wedded to Jankyn, finding the evidence to be inconclusive, perhaps richly ambiguous.
Moll, Richard J.
Notes and Queries 254 (2008): 192-94.
An eight-line poem reminiscent of Chaucer's For in both theme and word choices survives in three copies (transcribed here), each in a different hand, written upside down on the final folio of this heraldic manuscript.
Gower's reputation as "moral" rests on his mid-1380's stance as a reformer, a classicist, and a clear and consistent portrayer of good and evil. By citing him in TC, Chaucer encourages moral interpretation of the hero's attitude at the end of the…
Benson, C. David.
Chaucer Review 13 (1979): 308-15.
Guido's "Historia Destructionis Troiae" uses an objective historical tone, mixed with outbursts of personal lamentation. From this Chaucer developed his narrator, a philosophical historian who is affected as a man by his own story, to accent in TC…
Pearman, Tory Vandeventer.
Joshua R. Eyler, ed. Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 25-37.
Explores a "gendered model of disability" in MerT, where the carnivalesque grotesqueness of May's performed pregnancy replaces January's blindness and impotence as a kind of disability.
Coot, Alexander.
English Studies 91 (2010): 26-41.
In TC and KnT, Chaucer "revises Augustinian and Boethian formulations of "contemptus mundi," pointing out that any ethical system which seeks to address the topic of earthly desires must also address the human subject's endless appetite for desire as…
Bott, Robin.
Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose, eds. Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 189-211.
Death is preferred to rape in both PhyT and "Titus Andonicus" because both works take for granted the notion that rape results in pollution or disease. In this way, the works contribute to negative views of women and their bodies in Western…
Tsur, Reuven.
Journal of Pragmatics 12 (1988): 711-24.
Discusses poetic metaphor, especially water imagery, with relation to conceptualization strategies (rapid versus delayed conceptualization) and how psychoanalysis might deal with the issues raised. Delayed conceptualization may provide more adequate…
James, Sarah.
Review of English Studies 65, no. 270 (2014): 421-37.
Observes parallels between the failed sight of Katherine's guide Adrian and that of January in MerT. Argues that Capgrave's use of such problems of vision highlights the human tendency to rely on "oculi carnis" rather than "oculi mentis."
Bishop, Louise M.
Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44 : 231-46, 2002.
Augustine's glossing of God's corporeality (especially pertaining to Exodus 33) underlies the comments on the limitations of human knowledge in MilP. Confusion about the nature of flesh and about orifices hints at the ultimate ineffability of God's…
Hansen, Elaine Tuttle.
Peter G. Beidler, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer: "The Wife of Bath." (Boston and New York: Bedford-St. Martin's, 1996), pp. 273-89.
The Wife of Bath's reference to being beaten by Jankyn and the rape in WBT indicate the violent nature of sex, yet the text glosses over this violence, making it seem normal. Although Chaucer's position as poet may have inclined him to identify with…
Chaucer's use of the Vulgate parables influenced the frame structure of CT, provided a number of images, and strongly affected PardT. Wheeler tallies allusions to and quotations from the parables throughout CT.
Scott-Macnab, David.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 104 (2005): 373-85.
As used to describe the Monk in GP, the term pricking should not be understood in a sexual sense; review of sources, the OED, and the MED indicates that the term means "hard galloping."
