Fisher, John H.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 5 (1983): 3-15.
Noting increasing sophistication of Chaucer criticism in the twentieth century, Fisher moves beyond historical criticism toward reader-response theories and the thesis that Chaucer is indeed prescient, a poet for all times as in ClT.
Simpson, James
Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), pp. 251-69.
Changes in literary practice in the late fifteenth century helped modify reception of Chaucer's works. Remembered as a personal figure to be reckoned with by Hoccleve and Lydgate, Chaucer--like his works--was later objectified in the "philological"…
Holton, Amanda.
Stephen Hamrick, ed. Tottel's Songes and Sonettes in Context (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 87-110.
Surveys Chaucer's influence on "Tottel's Miscellany," commenting on various allusions and the inclusion of Chaucer's Truth in the collection (although "deliberately anonymized"), and exploring more thoroughly how he is "strongly resisted," i.e., how…
Finlayson, John.
Studia Neophilologica 60 (1988): 171-74.
The unmistakably sexual connotations of the source passages in "The Romance of the Rose" for the table manners and motto of Chaucer's Prioress help confirm "the impression that there 'is' a deliberate tension directed between the ideal of spiritual…
The passage on the Prioress's table manners (GP 127-36), borrowed from Romance of the Rose, contains biblical echoes from Matthew 23.25-27 concerning the "clean cup of salvation" and from Proverbs 30.20 concerning an adulterous woman who wipes her…
Chaucer and his fellow pilgrims saw Madame Eglentyne as the Virgin's handmaiden, reflecting in her foibles and virtues the Queen of Heaven, whose "amor vincit omnia" (love conquers all). Support for the existence of the Marian echoes includes the…
Hawkins, Sherman.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 63 (1964): 599-624.
Explores the Augustinian "figurative implications" of PrT, identifying a "clear symbolic pattern" evident in interpreting it Scripturally—the "childishness" of the teller and her protagonist, the literalness of the Jews, echoes of the liturgy of…
Since PrT is set in Islamic "Asia," the anti-Semitism of PrT makes little historical sense, since medieval Muslims accepted Judaism in ways Christianity did not. Chaucer's knowledge of Jews and Muslims has been underestimated, even suppressed, a…
McGowan, Joseph P.
Chaucer Review 38 : 199-202, 2003.
The Prioress's ambiguous motto--"love conquers all"--is only half of a quotation from Virgil. The remainder--"and we must give in to it"--does not lessen the equivocal nature of the portrait.
Chaucer's Prioress is said to be a miniature of CT. Just as Madame Eglantine is a religious with fairly secular characters, so CT shows all kinds of people, with their sublime and indecent faces, their beauty, and their ugliness.
Quinn, William A.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23: 109-41, 2001.
Explores ABC as a prayer, especially in its relations with Psalm 118 and 119 and the rosary, and in light of the possibility that it was presented to Duchess Blanche for inclusion in her devotional primer. Quinn confronts several formal features and…
Mustanoja, Tauno F.
Beryl Rowland, ed. Companion to Chaucer Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 65-94.
Chaucer's meters are of mixed Romance and native origin, but the details of scansion--whether the verse is accentual or syllabic and the pronunciation of final "e"--are still in dispute.
Fox, Allan B.
Language and Style 10 (1977): 27-41.
Although Heywood's comic debates are dismissed as negligible in metrical skill, once we realize that Chaucer's line is a non-pentameter, more dependent on alliterative accentual native verse than most metrists allow, then we can see that the debates…
Robinson, Ian.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.
Explores what can and cannot be known about the meter and rhythm of Chaucer's verse and that of his contemporaries and followers, arguing that Chaucer employed a lively "balanced parameter" that is not heavily restricted by regularity and that should…
Fujiki considers comic "misapplication of proverbs" in TC (Pandarus), MilT (John), MerT (January), and SumT (the friar), suggesting that Chaucer capitalized on his audience's expectation of proverbs to characterize some users as foolish.
Hendrickson, Rhoda Miller Martin.
Dissertation Abstracts International 42 (1981): 1140A-41A.
Proverbs appear conventionally in most of Chaucer's early works, usually to lament changes in fortune. In the short poems, For, Buk, and Scog, however, Chaucer's proverbs become personal. In TC and CT proverbs spoken by characters (especially…
Everhart, Deborah.
Carmina Philosophiae 1 (1992): 35-52.
Everhart considers Chaucer's translation strategies in Bo and identifies his unusual one-to-one substitution of "hap" for Latin "casus" in that work. Multiple connotations of "hap" in TC imply a different, playful rhetoric of translation that in turn…
Chaucer's interest in future contingencies (a problem raised by Aristotle) in part shapes the narratives in TC and NPT. The musings of Troilus and Criseyde about the future rely on Boethian principles (among others). Chauntecleer's theory--that…
Lunz, Elisabeth.
Essays in Literature (Macomb, Ill.) 4 (1977): 3-10.
Because Dame Prudence in Mel embodies the qualities her name implies--reason, intellect, circumspection, providence, docility, and caution--she is a model of medieval female virtue.
Reviews Prudence's "allegorical reading practices" and argues that Mel is based on the "relationship between the literary mode of moralizing allegory and contingent reading practices."
Tripp, Raymond P. Jr.
Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 24 (1970): 51-59.
Contends that Chaucer's adaptation in HF of Virgil's "Aeneid" "anticipates his development away from medieval conventions toward modem, psychological people."
Watson, Nicholas.
Religion and Literature 37.2 (2005): 99-114.
Chaucer's religion is important even in his secular tales, a reflection of his public stance as a lay penitent, a member of the "mediocriter boni," a category of the religious to be distinguished from the contemplative path of the "perfecti." Reads…
