A Comparative Study of Two Images in Ovid's Amatory Poems and Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde.”
Analyzes how Chaucer’'s uses of sailing and door/gates imagery in TC resonate with similar imagery in Ovid's "Amores" and "Ars amatoria," reflecting a differing view of history and producing a different tone. In English, with an abstract in English and in Chinese.
"Go Little Book": The Matter of Troy and the Ecology of the Medieval Codex.
Uses two of the "modes of existence" theorized by Bruno Latour--technological and fictional--to examine medieval manuscripts, arguing that the "affordances and ecologies" of codices as technology encouraged the "proliferation" of fictional beings in the matter of Troy. Examines Chaucer's "litel book," addressed in TC, as a "sentient artifact" and as a "remediation" of its source in Boccaccio's "Filostrato" and ancient tradition.
Mixing Medievalism and Molecular Biology in the Age of COVID-19.
Discusses in dialogue format a hybrid "general education honors course focusing on the description, understanding, and classification of animals over time," including comments on the use of PF in this course and syllabi for it from 2019 and 2021.
Birds, Birds, Birds: A Comparative Study of Medieval Persian and English Poetry, Especially Attar's "Conference of Birds"” "The Owl and the Nightingale," Chaucer's "The Parliament of Fowls" and "The Canterbury Tales."
Comparative analysis of the "correspondences" and the "disparities of ideas" in these works while revealing their "individual intentions." Originally presented as Baeten’s Ph.D. dissertation, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, 2019.
Chaucer's "Legend of Dido": Negotiating Worldviews through Narrative Fiction.
Analyzes the "Legend of Dido" in LGW to reveal how narrative serves as a "cognitive tool for shaping worldviews" held within cultural communities. Discusses the "cognitive-cultural underpinnings" and strategies Chaucer uses to tell a fragmentary version of the Dido and Aeneas narrative. Examines how Chaucer’s "epistemic stance" influences the expression of selected social-cultural categories in the story.
"Charitable and trewe': Multiplicity, Prudence, and Pity in the Prologue of Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women.”
Examines LGW as a poetic work that invites criticism as a function of how it is structured. Looks in depth at Alceste and her efforts in the poem, reappraising how she achieves success with the God of Love.
Valerius Flaccus: “Argonautica,” Book 7.
The introduction to this edition of Valerius includes a section on "The Later Middle Ages: Benoit, Guido, Chaucer, and Boccaccio," discussing whether or not "medieval writers were familiar with Valerius Flaccus." Demonstrates that, although Chaucer is the only one of the four who "seems to make explicit reference" to the classical writer, the evidence that he knew the "Argonautica" 'is not convincing," despite the references to “Valerye” at LGWP, G 280, and “Argonautycon” at LGW, 1457.
La leyenda de Dido, de Geoffrey Chaucer: Hipotextos y pluralidad de voces.
Analyzes how the "Legend of Dido" differs from Virgil's "Aeneid" and Ovid's "Heroides," VII. Claims that Chaucer's narrator is more self-referential and that the plurality of voices of the narrator, along with the characters' voices, results in a growing complexity that problematizes the interpretation of the legend. This “multivocality” anticipates techniques used in CT.
La "llave del recuerdo" y los anómalos relatos de metamorfosis en "The Legend of Good Women" de Geoffrey Chaucer.
Studies Chaucer's engagement with Ovidian sources to consider how LGW is a "narrative of metamorphosis." Argues that the metamorphosis is due to the creative process of “"vernacularization of the classical authority,”"which establishes a shared cultural memory in the vernacular.
Of a Leaden Hue: Chaucerian Non-Mysticism.
Studies aspects of "mystical non-mysticism" in Chaucer's poetry. Explores the "nomenclative impotentiality" of the narrator's "non-self-naming" in HF, 1873–82, and his "unknowing" elsewhere in the poem. Comments on the Black Knight's tearless sorrow in BD as "paramystical," and argues that in Chaucer's works "the Canon's Yeoman figures most clearly the dark relation between Chaucer's poetry and the labor of mystical becoming."
Chaucer's "Ebrayk Josephus" and "The House of Fame."
Investigates the reference to the "Judeo-Roman historian Josephus" in HF, 1429–36, exploring how his authority varies in the Middle Ages "depending on the extent to which he is understood as a Christian or a Jew," and showing how, in Chaucer's poem, "classical reception . . . is enmeshed in the intersecting discourses of race and authority." Explicates the imagery and diction associated with Josephusin HF, probes Chaucer's "own thoughts" about Jews, and integrates traditional classical reception with critical race studies.
Vernacular Transformations of the Latin Inheritance: Chaucer's "House of Fame."
Argues that in its adaptations of poetic traditions (particularly representations of the four elements and "ars grammatica") and in dealing "explicitly with the problematics of language and poetry," HF is "almost an anti-'ars-poetica'.” In it, Chaucer "is demonstrating what happens in a world of fallen language when 'auctoritas' is no longer authoritative, and readers can become re-writers."
The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science.
Combines a biography of Benedictine astronomer John Westwyk with contextualizing information about medieval science, technology, education, and innovation, particularly in the monastic settings of St. Albans Abbey and its Tynemouth Priory. Credits Westwyk with writing Equat and describes his contributions to Richard of Wallingford's legacy, explaining much about medieval mathematics, numerals, time-keeping, optics, mapmaking, navigation, and scientific instruments. Draws examples from CT and observes relations between Equat and Astr, characterizing Westwyk as one who “saw himself as an astronomical apprentice” to Chaucer. Originally published by Allen Lane in 2020 as The Light Ages: A Medieval Journey of Discovery.
Medieval Studies and Medievalism: Choosing Good Texts for ESL and General Education Students in Taiwan.
Offers pedagogical justification for using Brian Helgeland’s movie "A Knight’s Tale" in multicultural teaching, with attention to the movie's brief mention of BD and discussion of the poem's usefulness in broadening student awareness.
"What me is": Insomnia Cures, Saintly Miracles, and Chaucer's "Book of the Duchess" as Illness Narrative.
Interprets BD as an early example of "illness narrative." BD's structuring concern with sickness and healing, centered upon insomnia detached from the courtly discourse of lovesickness, reflects the preoccupations of late medieval natural philosophy and medicine. Adduces analogues for BD’s portrayal of healing and personal narrative, including the healing of insomnia, in hagiographic miracle collections. The "salutary potential of narrative” revealed in BD resonates with modern sociological perspectives on illness.
Il sonno dei poeti genera capolavori: Una riflessione sul sonno in Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio e su "The Book of the Duchess" di Chaucer.
Examines the "topos of the dream" in Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio and compares the dream vision in BD. Points to similarities with mystical and shamanic experiences toward ecstasy that go beyond the similarities and differences in the medieval literary tradition of the oneiric state.
Remaking Boethius: The English Language Translation Tradition of "The Consolation of Philosophy."
Compiles extensive, authoritative information about each of the English translations of Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy" from Alfred the Great to H. R. James (1897)--complete translations (including Bo), partial versions, abridgments, selections, versions spurious or lost, etc. Individual sections include a biography of the translator, particulars of the translation (influences, audiences, and links with earlier translations), samples, and a bibliography (manuscripts, editions, and secondary sources). The section on Chaucer’s Bo is augmented by a separate section on “An Early Adaptation of Chaucer's translation . . .” that addresses "The Boke of Coumfort of Bois" (after c. 1450).
Chaucerian Guilt and the "Treatise on the Astrolabe."
Examines the trauma of sexual violence, focusing on Chaucer's rape of Cecily Chaumpaigne, contextualizing the study of trauma through contemporary theorists Cathy Caruth and Ruth Leys along with Astr. Considers "the relationship between Chaucer's 'raptus,' various legal and cultural referents, and the materiality of sexual violence for modern readers.” Addresses the role of modern readers and the guilt these readers might feel based on their "constructed intimacy with the figure of Father Chaucer."
Erasure and Afterlife in Chaucer's "Retraction."
Examines Ret as both an act of penance and an artistic act. Argues that the request for erasure causes the literary event to become embedded in memory, and is, therefore, an impossible request.
The Parson's Treatise and the Pictorial Cycle of Vices and Virtues in Cambridge University Library MS Gg.4.27.
Discusses the Virtues and Vices miniatures that accompany ParsT in Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.4.27, as they relate to Chaucer's text, in the "context ofmtheir wider medieval iconographic tradition" and the "imagery of affective meditation." Comments on the effects of the mutilation of the manuscript, its interplay of text and image, and individual iconographic details,arguing generally that the images increase the effectiveness of the text as a tool of meditation.
John Gower’s Alchemical Afterlife in Elias Ashmole's "Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum" (1652).
Explores the reception of John Gower as an alchemist in the sixteenth century, including description of Elias Ashmole's notion that Gower was Chaucer's "master" and "mentor" in alchemical science.
Confessing Something New: The Twenty-First Canon of the Fourth Lateran Council and English Literature.
Surveys the cultural impact of "Omnis utriusque sexus," and shows how Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve used "confessional discourse" to help construct subjectivities in their works. Comments on ParsT as the "best known confessional manual in Middle English," and explains how in CYPT the Canon's Yeoman's "subjectivity is located at the intersection of confessional discourse and that of alchemy, creating a tension from which he cannot escape."
History and Literature in the "Nun's Priest’s Tale": The Return of the Repressed.
Argues that "the discarded historical event" of the Peasants' Revolt "surfaces" in NPT "not to record the cracks and crevices in the dwindling feudal system, but to participate in the bestialization and grotesquing of the 1381 insurgents and the trivialization of their rising and their cause."
The Narrative Tactics of Chaucer’s Monk.
Using Michel de Certeau's idea of the tactic, argues that the Monk represents the monastic estate, and that he uses tragedies to attack the Host, representative of the city, and the Knight, representative of the nobility. Explores the Monk's own relationship to patience and fortune, suggesting that his tragic method positions him as most able to guard against fortune.
Inszeniertes Scheitern: Geoffrey Chaucer's "Tale of Sir Thopas."
Shows not only that Th is a send-up of the tail-rhyme romance and its conventions, but that the poem's metadiscursive horizon of expectation, established by means of the characterization of Chaucer the Pilgrim, resonates in the tale and reveals Chaucer's skills as a versifier, romancer, and poet.