Browse Items (16345 total)

Focuses on two texts that feature violence against women to examine how the violated woman functions as a tool for political change. Both Chaucer and Gower foreground the suffering that men experience in response to the violated female body, leading…

Considers FranT as a Breton lay that recalls, not ancient history, but Chaucer's recent memories of his own stays in France, tying the tale to the marital situation of Joan of Kent.

Argues that FranT should be added to "the Chaucerian pandemic canon" for its depiction of pandemic trauma and recovery.

Highlights the utility of proverbs and offers them as a solution to the problem of knowledge in SqT. Emphasizes that proverbs provide new insights for late medieval textual cultures as a microgenre that transcends social and economic boundaries in…

Examines the "workings of empathy" in SqT to situate it in "premodern critical race studies, reading the "falcon-Canacee-lap" formulation as "a homo-affective assemblage, an animal human thing that blurs the borders of body, object, and species,"…

Challenges the limitations of traditional source-and-analogue study, exploring resonances between SqT and the "Kitab al-Manazir" of Ibn al-Haytham /Alhacen to which it alludes (see SqT, 232–45), including discussion of mediating sources in Latin…

Compares and contrasts SqT and the analogous Middle Dutch "Roman van Walewein," focusing on their eastern settings, treatments of marvel, and other romance conventions. Considers Chaucer's possible knowledge of Middle Dutch and "Van Walewein,"…

Considers the role of spectacle in SqT, comparing the poetic strategies for inscribing spectacle to Richard Maidstone's approach in "Concordia."

Examines May of MerT as a version of the motif of the healing woman, familiar "across medieval literary genres from romance to hagiography." The fabliau setting of the tale, however, inverts a range of "courtly and religious hierarchies" as May…

Offers "folkloric analysis" of several motifs--slaughtered wives, lost and restored children, and incest--in ClT and in "The Winter's Tale" (and other Shakespearean plays), arguing that such analysis allows us "to see these texts in connection with…

Examines the frequent mention of Griselda's face in ClT, as compared to his sources, and simultaneously argues that Chaucer's version highlights Griselda's interiority and how she maintains her patience.

"Traces the theme of patience in Middle English verse exempla amid the proliferation of exemplary works in late medieval England to examine the sociality of feeling within narratives of individual virtue," including a chapter pertaining to ClT.

Combines personal appreciation and critical analysis of the Wife of Bath as a character; Chaucer's art in creating her and WBPT; and the voluminous historical reception and impact of the Wife from early scribal glosses to international modern…

Uses Pauline "theo-poetics of circumcision" to explore circumcision and "uncircumcision" as hermeneutic tropes, focusing on allegoresis and amplification, and analyzing queerly Augustine's Boy with a Long Foreskin" (from "De Genesi ad litteram");…

Explores "the socioeconomic significance of the ugly, monstrous figures in the Gawain romances" and in WBT, arguing that Chaucer "bifurcates" the "ugly antagonist" of the romances into the "crude, social-climbing Wife . . . and the loathly lady of…

Discusses briefly the Wife of Bath's use of mercantile language to help launch an assessment of such language in women's writing from Margery Kempe and the Paston women to Aphra Behn.

Studies "representations of women's desire and . . . its intersections with eroticism, pleasure, and power" in WBPT, Robert Henrysons' "Testament of Cresseid," "The Book of Margery Kempe," and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."

Collects selections from western poets, from Homer forward, including WBP, 587–608, translated by Carey, with a brief introduction that characterizes the Wife as having a "good claim to be the first feminist in literature."

Assesses the "temporally heterogeneous portrayals of an emerging sense" of "Engelond" in the scenes of Saxon conversion in the Constance narratives of Trevet's "Cronicles," Gower's "Confessio Amantis," and MLT. These scenes are "sites where the power…

Argues that "repetition should be included among the family resemblances that trigger the imaginative response that signals 'romance'." " Includes discussion of MLT and the analogous accounts in Nicholas Trevet's "Chronicles" and John Gower's…

Includes comments on how study of Chaucer's and Gower's Constance narratives have affected the study and understanding of Trevet's "Cronicles."

Explicates details in the GP description of the Cook, CkPT, and ManP, exploring their physical and moral implications for characterization, "food safety" in Chaucer's London, and hygiene among its victuallers--cooks, innkeepers, and manciples.

Assesses the social and economic dynamics of CkT and the GP descriptions of the Cook and the guildsmen, arguing that the tale "indicts both the laterally mobile prodigal apprentice and the decadent hypocrisy" of his master "through the linked…

Examines "the North as a regional concept in the literature of medieval England," considering a range of texts from Bede's "Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum" to the Towneley plays. Chapter 4, "Chaucer's Northern Consciousness in the 'Reeve's…

Responds to two essays concerned with sexual consent in medieval literature, including Leah Schwebel, "Chaucer and the Fantasy of Retroactive Consent." SAC 44 (2022): 337–45. Suggests that we might read RvT "as an incel revenge fantasy."