Newman, Francis X., ed.
Binghamton, N.Y. : Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1986.
Five essays dealing with the peasants' revolt, peasant resistance, the plague, and social conscience. For three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Social Unrest in the Middle Ages under Alternative Title.
Cherniavsky, Michael, and Arthur J. Slavin, eds.
Waltham, Mass.: Xerox College Publishing, 1972.
Textbook anthology for use in history classrooms, combining classical, medieval, and Renaissance sources with modern assessments of the status, activities, and treatments of people of lower classes. In a section called "Ideal Types in Traditional…
Boyd, David Lorenzo.
Huntington Library Quarterly 58 (1996): 81-97.
The unique ending of CkT in MS Bodley 686 (ca. 1420-1440) reaffirms the preservation of traditional social systems and the obedience that they entail in the face of rising violence and the fear of political and social instability.
Sampson, Gloria Marie Paulik.
DAI 31.02 (1970): 747A.
Studies the "3500 second-person pronouns" in CT, using a socio-linguistic model that attends to "Social, Kinship, and Ideational Domains" to account for patterns of usage.
Mazzon, Gabriella.
Dieter Kastovsky and Arthur Mettinger, eds. The History of English in a Social Context: A Contribution to Historical Sociolinguistics. Trends in Linguistics; Studies and Monographs, no. 129. (Berlin and New York: Gruyter, 2000), pp. 135-68.
Mazzon demonstrates a "clear correlation between discourse strategies and pronoun use and switching" in CT. You and thou forms indicate "politeness" as well as social status, gender, and characterization.
Knoetze, Retha.
English Academy Review 34, no. 1 (2017): 85-98.
Assesses KnT in light of conventions of the romance genre and Boccaccio's "Teseida," arguing that the tale engages tensions "between a traditional communal feudal ideology and a newer more individualist and commercial outlook present in Chaucer's…
Dennis, Erin N.
Bruce E. Brandt and Michael S. Nagy, eds. Proceedings of the 14th Northern Plains Conference on Earlier British Literature, April 7-8, 2006 (Brookings, S.Dak.: English Department, South Dakota State University, 2006), pp. 107-23.
Dennis explores how WBP and WBT affirm and challenge the patriarchal assumptions of medieval literary and social traditions.
Peck, Russell A.
Francis X. Newman, ed. Social Unrest in the Middle Ages (Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1986), pp. 113-48.
Chaucer's work and alliterative poetry such as "Jack Upland" and the "Plowman's Tale" "shared a common audience." John Ball's letters, like Wycliffe's writings, invoked the mythic simplicity of the early Christian church, appealing urgently to…
Lightsey, Scott.
R. F. Yeager and Brian W. Gastle, eds. Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower (New York: Modern Language Association,
2011), pp. 36-41.
Compares and contrasts the uses of estates literature in works by Gower, Chaucer, and William Langland, explaining the didacticism of Gower, Chaucer's "playful 'show--don't tell'" in GP, and Langland's allusive allegorizing.
Strohm, Paul.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Using a variety of contemporary texts, including statutes, poll taxes, and political treatises as well as fictional narratives, Strohm studies the structure of late-medieval social relations to provide an interpretative context for events in…
Chaucer works with a poetic genre; within it, however, he directs his attention to a specific occasion, probably Richard II's difficulties with royal prerogative in 1387.
Taylor reads ShT and Mel as an opposed pair. In ShT, puns indicate the failure of human attempts at community; in Mel, doublets encourage and iterate a linguistic and aesthetic community. Civil society comes into order in and through Mel, which…
Breuer, Heidi, and Jeff Schoneman.
Kathleen A. Bishop, ed. Standing in the Shadow of the Master? Chaucerian Influences and Interpretations (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), pp. 287-314.
Teachers and students need to address explicitly the relevance of literary discourses to cultural practices--an approach best cultivated in a dialogic environment.
Olson, Glending.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 117 (2018): 185–211.
Proposes using a more philosophical reading of RvT to enhance understanding of Chaucer's "academic knowledge and his relationship with Ralph Strode." An academic joke in RvT relies on snubness and whiteness as stock examples of inseparable and…
Fleming, John V.
Leigh A. Arrathoon, ed. Chaucer and the Craft of Fiction (Rochester, Mich.: Solaris Press, 1986), pp. 1-21.
TC 3.638 is a "translation" of the Virgilian rainstorm in bk. 4 of the "Aeneid" and of the emanations of Genius's aphrodisiac candle ("Roman de la Rose" 20638-48), and as such is symptomatic of Chaucer's tendency to follow Jean de Meun in providing a…
Morrison, Susan Signe.
Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 11, no. 2 (2020): 118-27.
Draws on debates about slow cinema to suggest how ClT evokes a "slow eco-aesthetics" with an ethical impact. Based on the notion that medieval pilgrimage texts evoke a slow aesthetic, the strategies of slowness and patience in the tale of Patient…
Morrison, Susan Signe.
Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 10, no. 1 (2019): 40-59.
Contemplates similarities and analogies between reading and walking and between medieval and modern pilgrimage narratives, commenting on ecopoetics, biopoetics, and topopoetics, and on relations between design and contingency, human and nonhuman…
North, Richard.
In Michael D. J, Bintley, Martin Locker, Victoria Symon, and Mary Wellesley, eds. Stasis in the Medieval West? Questioning Change and Continuity (Cham: Springer, 2017), pp. 205-30.
Compares Arveragus's sending of Dorigen to her tryst with Aurelius with the analogous scene in Bocaccio's "Filocolo" and argues that in FranT the husband is concerned with public honor, a reflection of the Franklin's own outlook that Arveragus is a…
