Mitchell, Jerome.
Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987.
Catalogues romance and Chaucerian sources (BD, HF, TC, and especially CT) for Scott's work, showing analogues, parallels, and likenesses. Extensively indexed.
Explores Sir Walter Scott's knowledge of Chaucer and the novelist's use of themes and techniques reminiscent of those in BD and the apocryphal "Flower and the Leaf." Alluding to these works in "The Antiquary," Scott emphasizes their concerns with…
Burnley, David.
Geoffrey Lester, ed. Chaucer in Perspective: Middle English Essays in Honour of Norman Blake (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), pp. 28-46.
Reassesses details of Chaucer's Scog and of Scogan's Moral Balade in light of their historical context, intertextual relations, manuscript variants, and scribal graffiti, arguing that Scogan's poem reflects familiarity with several of Chaucer's…
Tobias, Sheila, and Lynne S. Abel.
English Education 22 (1990): 165-78.
Reports on a 1988 pedagogical experiment designed to explore differences between scientific and humanistic study and the implications of such differences for the teaching of poetry. Poetic language is a "code" not unlike mathematics, although it…
Grennen, Joseph E.
Chaucer Review 6.2 (1971): 81-93.
Argues that ClT reveals the teller's "professional, speculative turn of mind" in contrast with the Wife of Bath's "rigorous sort of pragmatism," commenting on the Clerk's "academic terminology," his academic "awkwardness," and Walter's trial of…
Grennen, Joseph E.
Annuale Mediaevale 8 (1967): 38-45.
Interprets the eagle's descent on the narrator in HF in light of medieval medical theory, contending that it is "actually an apoplectic seizure in 'visionary' form—a 'stroke'." Also, the eagle's oration on sound evinces Chaucer's familiarity with…
Rezunyk, Jessica.
Dissertation Abstracts International A77.06 (2015): n.p.
Uses HF, among other texts, to demonstrate a versatile permeability between "science and the humanities" in the medieval period, in contrast to current more isolated approaches to these disciplines.
Courtenay, William J.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Chapters on the fourteenth-century educational framework, schools of the religious orders, higher education, patronage of ideas, English ties with Continental education, English scholasticism, Oxford after the plague, and "Piety and Learning in the…
Roney, Lois Yvonne.
Dissertation Abstracts International 39 (1979): 5498A.
KnT is a scholastic romance whose primary subject is universal human nature conceived in varying combinations of will and intellect, and its overriding concern is human freedom. From its position as the first Canterbury tale, one might infer that…
Wilson, William S.
Chaucer Review 1.3 (1967): 181-84.
Suggests that the three books of HF reflect the three medieval "linguistic arts," or trivium, focusing on how book 3 reflects the techniques of logic or dialectic, depicting the pros and cons of fame and "refining it into a philosophic idea." The…
Evans, Ruth.
Frank Grady, ed. The Cambridge Companion to "The Canterbury Tales" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 238-43.
Discusses public-facing writing about Chaucer and his texts and argues that "this writing's engagement with contemporary politics speaks to our and our students' experiences, and is already changing the direction of both classroom practice and…
Website designed for students, teachers, and school districts, with emphasis on preparation for college study; includes a search engine. Its Learning Guides includes numerous pages that pertain to Chaucer and his works, each with multiple internal…
Utley, Francis Lee.
MacEdward Leach, ed. Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Albert Croll Baugh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961), pp. 109-36.
Anatomizes and analyzes "some eighty-three scenes" in TC that "reveal" in the poem "the role of dialogue, the role of visual scene and image, the role of structural contrast, and the role of tempo and movement" and create "skillful ordering" and…
No criticism has dealt satisfactorily with Chaucer's versification. This is because prosody cannot be studied in isolation. It must consider the literary and linguistic effects as well as the specific form and the mode of performance.
Scala, Elizabeth.
Medieval Feminist Forum 30: 27-37, 2000.
Assesses "gossip" about an emotional or sexual relationship between Rickert and John Matthews Manly, co-editors of "The Text of the Canterbury Tales" (1940).
Reads HF as an example of how a literary work constructs "discursive scale," making us self-conscious about how we read and interpret, when we read closely, and when we distance ourselves and see the text in relation to genres and systems, history,…
Uses HF, which sets "archival totality" in an uncertain relation to the experience of reading, to introduce a discussion of how in our reading "discursive systems, rather than particular texts, become objects of knowledge." Aims to theorize a…
Traces the figure of the "sursanure" in FranT, demonstrating that this superficially healed wound is an apt metaphor for Chaucer/s soft or "sunken" sources.
Adamson, Peter.
Medieval Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 495-501.
Comments on Chaucer's and Langland's engagements with philosophical debates of their age, especially determinism and voluntarism. Includes discussion of the tensions between KnT and MilT as Chaucer's poetic expression of philosophical concerns.
Strohm, Paul.
Paul Strohm, with an appendix by A.J. Prescott. Hochon's Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 75-94. Also in Barbara Hanawalt, ed. Chaucer's England: Literature in Historical Context (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. 21-40.
Discusses the tenuous nature of Henry's early success in usurping Richard's crown and his program of enlisting writers in support of his cause. The last stanza of Purse reflects the political assumptions that underpinned Henry's claims to the…
Critics' inability to sympathize with Troilus in TC results from their failure to recognize the "medieval practical reasoning that informs Troilus's deliberations and ultimately humanizes him." His philosophising "reflects a withdrawal from the…
Wadiak, Walter.
Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016.
Traces the evolution of the romance to the start of the sixteenth century, and its repositioning from an aristocratic genre to one that was embraced by the common audience. Claims this move marks a shift from violence in its early stages to one of…
Bryant, Brantley L., et al.
Myra Seaman, Eileen A. Joy, and Nicola Masciandaro, eds. Dark Chaucer: An Assortment (Brooklyn, N. Y.: Punctum Books, 2012), pp. 13-27.
Explores the contrast between Theseus and Saturn in KnT as a metaphor for the lives of modern academic Chaucerians.
