Browse Items (15542 total)

Considers Chaucer's two tales set in ancient Rome--PhyT and SNT--maintaining that each is "particularly concerned with political corruption"; "the depravity of those who wield the state's power has quite undermined it." Hirsh notes a possible…

Chaucer transcended and transgressed the commonly accepted conventions of "romance": Th parodies the genre, while BD elevates its status by associating romance with classical works. Th, KnT, SqT, FranT, and WBT reflect a variety of approaches to…

A Japanese prose translation of Rom, based on The Riverside Chaucer. Includes notes.

Traces backgrounds to the coral beads held by the Prioress (GP 1.158-59), both as an amulet against evil and a charm for earthly love, also found in John Donne's "Sonnet. The Token," lines 10-12.

Demonstrates the need for a reexamination of the physical description and linguistic analysis of University of Glasgow, MS Hunter 409 (MS V.3.7) of Rom. Manuscript study reveals the "canard" that a northerner translated Fragment B. Refutes the…

Examines exegetical interpretations of and allusions to the story of Ruth. Chaucer's allusion to Ruth in LGWP expresses alienation and belatedness and asserts poetic privilege and the interpretive creativity of marginality.

Examines Chaucer's use of "sad" in his works. The manuscript reading in ROM A211 makes it clear that he probably did not bear in mind the modern meaning of "sorrowful" or "mourning."

Compares Scog and Henry Scogan's "Moral Ballade," arguing that the two works reflect aspects of Ricardian and Lancastrian culture, respectively--Chaucer serves in a "benignly neglectful court culture," and Scogan heralds an "age of politicized…

Mooney surveys the manuscripts and life records of Adam Pinkhurst, identified as the scribe addressed in Chaucer's Adam and as the scribe of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts, among others. Includes a chronology of manuscripts Pinkhurst is known…

Pushes back on assumptions that have been made about Adam Pinkhurst and homes in on narratives constructed by scholars such as Linne Mooney. By analyzing idiomatic and vernacular trends, responds to the cult of Pinkhurst as "Chaucer's Scribe" by…

In TC, Diomede, rather than Troilus, functions as the second Hector, and Diomede is the only hero who escapes the cycle of Theban and Trojan violence. At a dangerous time in English history, Chaucer desires a healing ideology for England; his turn…

Although SNT has been considered a straightforward account of St. Cecilia, apocalyptic techniques make it more complex. Engaging apocalyptic imagination, Chaucer focuses on "eschatology, renovation, and the collapse of time."

Although Chaucer was not a "painterly" poet, he was, like most other serious writers of the time, an iconographic poet. Examines a number of medieval images appropriate to Chaucer's life of Saint Cecilia and includes twenty reproductions in black…

Contends that in SNT Cecilia's "sense of incongruity between inner self and social definition" is directed to a pious lay audience. Argues that the Second Nun's use of the word "bisynesse obfuscates" what the tale has to convey to her lay audience

Commerce in automatons, mechanical contrivances, and other marvels or mirabilia in late-medieval Europe diminished the wonder of such objects and encouraged scepticism. Chaucer's FranT and SqT rationalize the marvels they present in ways that…

Although the narrator's intention in LGW is to praise his heroines for their "trouthe in love," his naiveté leads to an ironic representation of feminine ideals and, ultimately, an underlying antifeminism.

Chaucer's "doubleness" in critical tradition results from combinations of self-deprecation and extravagant claims to poetic authority in his works. In 1592, Robert Greene depicted Chaucer as short, whereas the frontispiece of Speght's 1598 edition…

Suggests that Chaucer's self-characterization in Pr-ThL 7.695-97 derives from Dante's "Purgatorio" 19.52 and that the one follows the other in using the "dual first-person singular" and in separating Poet and Pilgrim as a narrative technique.

Re-examines the narrator's eight-year sickness in BD, surveying previous commentary, and arguing that, unlike in Chaucer's French sources, the illness is insomnia rather than love-sickness and that God rather than a paramour is his only physician. As…

Discusses the nuances of "sely" as it is applied recurrently to carpenter John in MilT and aids in characterization and comedy.

Surveys Chaucer's treatments of widows, which reveal an "awareness of their excluded social status and how it affects their assertions as individuals." Focuses on Dido and Cleopatra of LGW, the Wife of Bath, and, especially, Criseyde.

Contends that the source of the allusion to Semiramis in MLT (2.359) is ancient historians and perhaps Boccaccio's "De Claris Mulieribus," not Dante's "Inferno."

Chaucer's "open-endedness" and "lack of an ending" relate to the fact that he was writing in a "time of crisis" (the Black Death, the corruption of the church). He sought to confront conditions of his time through pluralism, and his lack of closure…

Discusses the many frustrated or incomplete endings in the tales of CT, and argues that "Chaucer's formal work with endings demonstrates all the many ways that things might remain unresolved." Traces endings from several different tales, including…

Challenges "dramatic" criticism of CT, arguing that "realistic illusion" is not sustained but rather "undermined" in ways that call attention to aesthetic concerns, limiting the kinds of psychological projections that some critics have imposed upon…