Cast as a dialogue between Chaucer and Nohara, the article reconsiders the discrepancy between "nyne and twenty" (GP 24) and the number of pilgrims in CT.
Middle English "beere" could mean "bear," "bier," or "pillow." The first of these is impossible in the context of TC 2.1638, but both other meanings are probably there: Pandarus ironically foreshadows Troilus's death, and he also foresees the hero…
Explores the sexual connotations of "deth" (death) in TC (3.63 and 1577), both instances helping to characterize Pandarus as unscrupulous and the latter encouraging us to see incestuous relations between Pandarus and Criseyde.
Ikegami, Tadahiro.
Hisao Turu, ed. Reading Chaucer's Book of the Duchess. Medieval English Literature Symposium Series, no. 5 (Tokyo: Gaku Shobo Press, 1991), pp. 119-41 (in Japanese).
Examines how BD was influenced by the conventions of French and Latin literature. Concludes that the poet found novelty in classical authors and created his own imaginary love poem.
Addesses "Chaucer's interest in and exploration of the problem of determining value . . . . The question is central to Chaucer's own concerns with the ethical and artistic value of his poetry throughout 'The Canterbury Tales'," with particular focus…
Brewer, Derek.
Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986): pp. 227-42.
Discusses "orality" and "literacy," "familiar" and "learned" elements of Chaucer's style, including formulas, sententiousness, "repetition with variation," metonymy, hyperbole, and imagery.
Surveys the interrelated astrological, mythographical, and allegorical traditions of Mars in the Middle Ages, and focuses on the myth of his adultery with Venus and its representations in the plots and allusions of Chaucer's Complaint of Mars, KnT,…
Explores Chaucer's depiction in CT of human vitality "in an unending variety of circumstances," framed by the "revelatory power of symbolism" latent in his details and styles. Separates Chaucer's techniques from Dante's allegory and from modern…
ManT asserts a "repressive poetics" that challenges fiction-making in CT--especially in KnT--and at the same time rejects the validity of penitential self-examination offered by the Parson.
Jordan, Robert M.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1987.
Advising Chaucerians to abandon literary interpretation in favor of poetics, Jordan catalogues the genres, modes, and discursive forms of a particular Chaucerian text, first pointing out their incompatibility and then noting the failure of univocal…
Patton, Celeste A.
Dissertation Abstracts International 56 (1995): 545A.
In medieval literature, the human (especially the female) body is treated ambivalently--as ideal, as erotic, and as grotesque, as with Chaucer's Pardoner ("feminized male grotesque") and characters in BD, LGW, KnT, MLT, PrT, ClT, and SNT.
Børch derives a poetics of reading Chaucer from Chaucer's own poetry, arguing that he frustrates "intertextual" approaches by being consistently evasive. Attention to style and content clarifies how the poetry shapes readers' responses. BD and HF…
Pearsall, Derek.
David Aers, ed. Medieval Literature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), pp. 123-47.
Studies the hermeneutical "reflection of contemporary historical actuality" in Chaucer criticism. Although various critical schools--epistemologists, phenomenologists,Marxists and Russian Formalists (Medvedev, Bakhtin), etc.--recognize the…
Machan, Tim William.
Philological Quarterly 73 (1994): 299-316.
A clear-text, eclectic edition provides convenience and coherence for the reader by presenting a text (such as Chaucer's) as the artist's completed product. But current interest in "versioning"--seeing the text as a process by comparing versions and…
Carney, Clíodhna, and Frances McCormack, eds.
Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013.
Eleven essays about Chaucer and his works that form, in the words of its editors, a "general" rather than a "thematically unified" collection. Threads that run through multiple chapters include rhetoric, ethics, and poetic form. For individual…
Traces developments in Chaucer's "attitude to love" as reflected in his narrative personae in BD, LGWP, PF, HF, and TC, assessing this attitude in light of the courtly, Chartrian, and neo-Platonic standards of works by Alain de Lille, Jean de Meun,…
Fruoco, Jonathan.
Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020
Argues that Chaucer's work "contributed to the birth of English polyphonic verse," a claim supported through discussions of Mikhail Bakhtin and the growth of scholasticism, debate, and music. Connects Chaucer's verse, including BD, HF, TC, and CT, to…
Badendyck, J. Lawrence.
English Record 21 (1970): 113-25.
Challenges the notion that the descriptions of the pilgrims in GP are drawn from real-life models and compares and contrasts Chaucer's techniques with those of Guillaume de Lorris in "Roman de la Rose" and William Langland's in "Piers Plowman."…
McVeigh, Terrence A.
Classical Folia 29 (1975): 54-58.
Tradition relates the sin of simony to leprosy and sodomy, as evidenced by John Wyclif's "Tractatus De Simonia." The physical abnormalities of the Pardoner and Summoner in CT can thus be seen as symbolic of their simony.
Johnston, Andrew James.
Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 91.2 (2015): 5–20
Analyzes how KnT and SqT engage with the Orientalist discourses buttressing contemporary humanist Italian discussions of visual art, especially in terms of the subjects of classicism and of optics.
Fleming, Kevin Sean.
Dissertation Abstracts International 60: 4419A, 1999.
The pagan prayers of Chaucerian characters are granted twice as often as the Christian ones. Pagan deities function as poetic machinery; the Christian God, as source of divine truth. Throughout his oeuvre, the poet treats prayer in accordance with…
Ebner, Dean.
Huttar, Charles A., ed. Imagination and Spirit: Essays in Literature and the Christian Faith Presented to Clyde S. Kilby (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdman's, 1971), pp. 87-100.
Reads the Knight's interruption of the Monk (7.2767ff.) as evidence of his "anxiety" about the view of Fortune implicit in the fall of princes tradition. The GP description of the Knight indicates his "preference for worldly wealth and fame that…
