Fisher, Sheila, and Janet E. Halley, eds.
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989.
Twelve essays by various hands that stand "at the intersection of Anglo-American empirical historicism and French theories of textuality." Historical women were real in ways that are absent from writings. Essays are grouped under three headings:…
Ortego, James N., II.
Fifteenth-Century Studies 35 (2010): 80-104.
Reviews several late medieval texts to demonstrate the "devolution of knighthood" before Shakespeare's time. Comments on the GP description of the Knight, on MerT, and on Th.
Boyd, David Lorenzo.
Peter S. Baker and Nicholas Howe, eds. Words and Works: Studies in Medieval English Language and Literature in Honour of Fred C. Robinson (Toronto, Buffalo, and New York: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 243-60.
In medieval tradition, sodomy was associated with misinterpretation. When seen in this light, Absolon's sodomizing of Nicholas in MilT both reinforces heteronormativity and decries the system upon which it is based. The Miller's reference to "Goddes…
Finlayson, John.
Studia Neophilologica 58 (1986): 47-57.
Though the first two sections of HF abound in expressions of personal experience--"I saw," "I heard"--the pattern of use and the shaping force of art and science undermine the trustworthiness of appearance. The switch to third-person narrative in…
Petrina, Alessandra.
Giovanni Iamartino, Maria Luisa Maggioni, and Roberta Facchinetti, eds. Thou sittest at another boke: English Studies in Honour of Domenico Pezzini (Milan: Polimetrica, 2008), pp. 223-35.
RvT differs from its sources and analogues by developing the relationship between sight, desire, and reason, ultimately questioning the function of vision, the most important of the senses.
Adler, Gillian.
Dissertation Abstracts International A77.10 (2016): n.p.
Argues that Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy" provides Chaucer with a means of understanding time as a unified and simultaneous whole, and that he deploys this understanding in the dream visions, and especially TC.
Dobbs, Elizabeth Ann
Chaucer Review 32 (1998): 400-22.
TC contains a series of images of windows both open and closed, which are added to (or changed from) Chaucer's sources and which provide a commentary on the relationships between the lovers. Views out of windows are limited views, or "fictions,"…
Akbari, Suzanne Conklin.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.
Tracks developments in the theory and practice of personification allegory in medieval literature (especially the "Roman de la Rose," works by Dante, and works by Chaucer) in relation to optical theory and epistemology. As confidence in the…
Carruthers, Mary J.
Robert R. Edwards, ed. Art and Context in Late Medieval English Narrative: Essays in Honor of Robert Worth Frank, Jr (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 93-106.
Carruthers explores the role of memory, one of the five divisions of classical rhetoric, in composing and understanding medieval poetry. Works such as "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and Chaucer's KnT are "memory-friendly" because images…
The Prioress's worldly graces and associations with Mary are well-suited to her esteemed position of religious and social power. Frank speculates that Chaucer chose PrT for its associations with the "cult of Notre Dame du Puy."
Stanbury, Sarah.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
Argues in detail that the "Gawain"-poet develops a "visually focused descriptive poetic" in his works and, by way of conclusion, asks whether such a poetic is unusual in late-medieval English literature, going on to treat works by Chaucer, "Sir…
Scala, Elizabeth.
Word & Image 26.4 (2010): 381–92.
Shows that the Nun's Priest is often illustrated in manuscripts and books, even though he is not described in the GP, arguing that the illustrations are informed by the Host's comments on the Priest and by the description of the protagonist of NPT,…
The deceptive nature of physical sight in FranT is based on the medieval theory of optics, whereby one's vision--buttressed by "proper" control of the will--aided one in knowing God, while "improper" control made one susceptible to the dangers of…
Gaylord, Alan Theodore.
Dissertation Abstracts International 20.09 (1960). Princeton University Dissertation, 1958. 592 pp. Full text available at ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global.
Surveys the intellectual and social backgrounds of medieval understandings of nobility and "gentilesse," and analyzes noble birth and noble action in TC and CT, especially the ironies of failed "noble potential" in TC, the framing noble ideals of the…
O'Brien, Timothy D.
College Literature 28.2: 178-96, 2001.
The Wife of Bath, the Prioress, and the wife in ShT represent themselves as victims of violence to make themselves attractive to men. In doing so, they draw on texts, such as medieval saints' lives and romances, that depict violence as central to the…
When an angry God of Love accuses the narrator of a breach of faith, Alceste rebukes the god for believing false counselors. This action reflects the political situation of Chaucer's time. The Lord's Appellant had attacked Richard II's corrupt…
Conversions in TC are modeled ironically on those of St. Paul and St. Augustine. Like Paul, Troilus cannot escape his fate; he can only accept and serve. Like Augustine, Criseyde vainly tries to master the narrative that is out of her control.
Loomis, Laura Hibbard.
Speculum 33.2 (1958): 242-55.
Identifies the "tregetoures" of FranT 4.1141, not as jugglers or magicians, but as the "actors, craftsmen, 'artisans mécaniques'" who produced spectacular entertainments such as the ones recorded by chroniclers to have taken place at the Royal…
Loomis, Laura Hibbard
Jerome Taylor and Alan H. Nelson, eds. Medieval English Drama: Essays Critical and Contextual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 98-115.
Describes the verbal and visual records of Parisian court entertainments which have parallels with Chaucer's description of visual spectacle putatively produced by magicians ("tregetours") in FranT 5.1139-51,
Murton, Megan.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 38 (2016): 75-107.
Describes Chaucer's self-conscious exploration of time in Mars, arguing that in form and content the poem presents an ambivalent, "permeable, and even unstable" view of secularity but also implies the "palpably absent" other of transcendence. More…
Farrell, Thomas J.
Chaucer Review 52.4 (2017): 396-425.
Traces the use of the minuscule "a" in the Latin quotations of the Ellesmere manuscript to support the argument that these annotations derive from the ways Chaucer imagines the form of CT.
Gross, Gregory Walter.
Dissertation Abstracts International 55 (1995): 1945A.
Secrecy about sex cuts across genres and develops its own forms of rhetoric, as seen in works from Petrarch's "Secretum" through the "Roman de Silence," Margery Kempe, and PardPT.
Sharrock, Roger.
Essays in Criticism 8 (1958): 123-37.
Responds to criticism of TC, especially that of C. S. Lewis on courtly love, and examines the poem's emphases on human vulnerability and limitations, reinforced by recurrent colloquialisms, juxtapositions of the sublime and the risible, and concern…
Explores the thematic implications of several verbal ambiguities or double meanings in KnT: "array" (dress and predicament), "hert" (heart and hart), "wele" (joy and wheel), nuances of "turne," "boone" (reward and bone), and "righte way" in…
