Elmes, Melissa Ridley.
Carolynn Van Dyke, ed. Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 233-47.
Compares the birds of PF to birds in medieval scientific texts, in sources or analogues (especially Alan de Lille's "De planctu Naturae"), and in the observable environment. Chaucer fills PF with birds known in England, classifying them by diet but…
Olson, Mary.
Enarratio 14 (2010, for 2007): 118-38.
Surveys classical uses and techniques of ekphrasis and explores how Chaucer uses it in HF to comment on the shifting nature of communication. In descriptions of the House of Fame, House of Rumor, and especially the House of Glass (Aeneas and Dido),…
An iconographic analysis suggesting that the illustration of Chaucer reading to the court of Richard II benefited the Lancastrian campaign to recognize "English as the national language of England" (exemplified by Chaucer as supreme "user and…
Suggests that saints' lives, "in which demons converse with saints," provide a context and structural pattern that informs the dialogue between the Summoner and the devil. The tale inverts the usual threefold pattern of the saint's victory over the…
Matthews, David.
Studies in Medievalism 09 (1997): 5-25.
Uses the Hoccleve portrait of Chaucer as a focal point for examining the nineteenth-century image of Chaucer. Viewed at first as the one "modern" author of his time, Chaucer becomes, through the work of the Chaucer Society and the edition of Skeat,…
Focuses on RvT and argues that newly discovered documents allow scholars to move beyond Chaucer's individual blame and address structural issues and concerns with language describing and depicting sexual assault in late medieval texts.
Harvey, Elizabeth D.
Edelgard E. DuBruck, ed. New Images of Women (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), pp. 47-60.
Harvey examines "tongue" as metonymy for voice: women were often victims of the wagging tongue. To be "rolled" on "many a tongue" describes both erotic and discursive powerlessness in LGW and TC. Descended from the Ovidian ironic palinode in…
Logan, Harry M.
Language and Style 20.3 (1987): 207-13.
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.…
Bowers, John M.
Andrew James Johnston, Ethan Knapp, and Margitta Rouse, eds. The Art of Vision: Ekphrasis in Medieval Literature and Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015), pp. 55–76.
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, Jill.
R. F. Yeager and Charlotte C. Morse, eds. Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V. A. Kolve (Asheville, N.C.: Pegasus Press, 2001), pp. 237-54; 3 b&w figs.
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…
Yeager, R. F., and Charlotte C. Morse, eds.
Asheville, N.C. : Pegasus Press, 2001.
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…
Hadbawnik, David.
David Hadbawnik, ed. Postmodern Poetics and Queer Medievalisms: Time Mechanics (Boston: De Gruyter, 2022), pp. 179-204.
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…
Nakayasu, Minako.
Peter Petré, H. Cuyckens, and Frauke D'Hoedt, eds. Sociocultural Dimensions of Lexis and Text in the History of English (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2018), pp. 125-50.
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…
Johnston, Andrew James.
Martin Baisch and Jutta Eming, ed. Hybriditat und Spiel: Der Europaische Liebes- und Abenteuerroman von der Antike zur Friihen Neuzeit (Berlin: Akademie, 2013), pp. 163-73.
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…
Nakayasu, Minako.
Juan Camilo Conde Silvestre and Javier Calle Martın, eds. Approaches to Middle English: Variation, Contact and Change (New York: Peter Lang, 2015), pp. 243-59.
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…
Nagucka, Ruta.
Jacek Fisiak, ed. Middle English Miscellany: From Vocabulary to Linguistic Variation (Poznan: Motivex, 1996.), pp. 233-44.
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…
Goldie, Matthew Boyd.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 40 (2018): 379-87.
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…
Scott, Anne.
Albrecht Classen, ed. Travel, Time, and Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time: Explorations of World Perceptions and Processes of Identity Formation (Boston, Mass.: De Gruyter, 2018), pp. 379-423.
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…
Reece, Paula J., ed.
Logan, Iowa: Perfection Learning, 2002.
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…
