Plunkett, Michael.
Dissertation Abstracts International A80.03 (2018): n.p.
Suggests that in "Cymbeline," "The Tempest," and "The Taming of the Shrew," Shakespeare sets his work in conversation with the dream visions BD and HF, thereby allowing Shakespeare to claim a place in the Chaucerian line of English canon and to…
Mann, Jill.
Piero Boitani, ed. The European Tragedy of Troilus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 219-42. First published in Cambridge Quarterly 18 (1989): 109-28.
Chaucer's dialogue, poetic "stage directions," and expansion of the wooing scene make his TC more "Shakespearean," or dramatic, than Shakespeare's treatment of the story. Chaucer's heroine is brilliantly drawn to show her inner movement from true…
Argues that Shakespeare's adaptations relied not only on understanding and knowing Chaucerian texts, but on his "memory of Chaucer " and Chaucerian ideas and practices, particularly his mingling of "sources and authorities" in TC.
Parallels between Mary and Constance exist not only in details but also in narrative strategy, since both women are subject to the complexities and contradictions of the exemplary mode. In addition, Constance is presented through metaphors of death,…
Reed, Teresa P.
Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003.
Examines allusions to the Virgin Mary in connection to five literary characters: Chaucer's Constance and Wife of Bath, the medical woman of the English "Trotula," Saint Margaret of Antioch, and the "Pearl" maiden. Chapter 1 focuses on parallels…
Selvin, Rhoda Hurwitt.
Studia Neophilologica 37 (1965): 146-60.
Comments on the varieties of love in PF, describing how the initiating concern with heavenly love in the summary of Scipio's dream is recalled and reinforced through the structure and details of the poem, conveying the need for "caritas," "common…
Kelly, Henry Ansgar.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 13 (1991): 121-40.
Provides historical evidence that if Pandarus was guilty of incest with Criseyde, he was also guilty of cuckolding Troilus. Similarly, if Gaunt had cuckolded Chaucer, he would not have been able to able to marry Chaucer's wife's sister, Katherine…
Burton, T. L., and John F. Plummer, eds.
Provo, Utah : Chaucer Studio Press, 2005.
Eighteen essays by various authors; a professional biography of Emerson Brown, Jr.; and a list of his academic publications. For individuial essays, search for Seyd in Forme and Reverence under Alternative Title.
Turner, Marie.
In The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. https://opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu, 2017.
Describes the generic features of the fabliau, and explores how and what extent the MerT fulfills and overturns these features in its plot, diction, biblical allusion, and courtly conventions, also commenting on interpolations in two manuscripts.…
Adamson, Matthew, trans.
Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Traces the history of the search for appropriate terminology for sexual matters and of concepts of physiology; medicine and the art of love in the troubadours, Andreas Capellanus, and "Roman de la Rose"; freedom; guilt; and disease. Mentions Trotula…
Pugh theorizes "the compulsory nature of queerness in creating heterosexuals," exploring how a number of masculine characters in Middle English literature are "rendered queerly normative due to external forces that reimagine their masculinity as…
WBPT can be seen as Alison's "therapeutic" attempts to "educate the public at large" about domestic violence and rape. Although she succumbs at times to the rhetoric of "the woman as commodity" and misunderstands herself as "unrapeable," Alison…
Campbell, Emma.
Comparative Literature 55: 191-216, 2003.
Campbell applies Judith Butler's theories of performative gender identity and "cultural translation" to ClT and its sources in Petrarch and Boccaccio. In Chaucer's version, authority is translated to the vernacular and to oral discourse, challenging…
Paglia, Camille.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990.
Expansive commentary on western art and literature, including the assertion (pp. 171-72) that Edmund Spenser established English literary tradition by "abandoning Chaucer and eradicating his influence," particularly his "populism."
Shows that double entendre "invests the entire narrative action" of RvT, explicating individual puns and demonstrating the prevalence of the sexual implications of flour, milling, and grinding throughout the tale and in later works by John Heywood…
Delany, Sheila.
Minnesota Review, New Series 5 (1975): 104-15.
The Wife of Bath turned the sexual economics of her time to her advantage. Margery Kempe could not so capitulate. Religion became her way of asserting ownership of herself.
Hopkins, Amanda, Robert Allen Rouse, and Cory James Rushton, eds.
Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 2014.
Collection of essays explores British medieval sexuality and sexual expression in literature. Examines fabliaux and romances of Chaucer, Gower, and Malory; alchemical texts; and satirical poetry of William Dunbar. The Introduction (pp. 1-11)…
Stockton discusses the "critique of cynical reason" in CT as part of a larger psychoanalytical discussion of the role of comedy in the formation of the foundations of civilizations.
Bahr, Arthur.
Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh, eds. Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the "Canterbury Tales" (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), pp. 230-38.
Shows that the BBC television adaptation of PardPT concentrates more on sexual predation than on death, and argues that this eliminates both the sexual and the contextual queerness of Chaucer's original, which requires of its audience "rigorously…
Karras, Ruth Mazo.
Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler, eds. Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), pp. 201-16.
Karras surveys depictions of female commercialized sex in the English late Middle Ages. It is difficult, she suggests, to separate kinds and degrees of prostitution, because prostitution was regarded as an "extreme case" of the general sinfulness of…
Tavormina, M. Teresa, ed.
Tempe: ACMRS (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies), 2006.
Edition and comprehensive study of Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.14.52, which was produced by the Hammond scribe. Includes five essays by various authors on physical features of the manuscript, an edition in ten sections by various editors,…
Surveys depictions of sexual activities and attitudes toward them in the literature of medieval Europe. Includes a brief life of Chaucer and recurrent comments on his works (see the Index), with a summary description of sexuality and scatology in…
Payer, Pierre J.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984.
In the development of sexual codes in the Penitentials, treatment of a wide variety of sexual behavior became more and more sophisticated in reaction to actual practice.
