Etymological puns reveal MkT, NPT, and SNT to be a trilogy concerned with the common themes of marriage, sexuality, and decline of the church. The tales dramatize a confrontation among the three pilgrims in which the Priest discloses the Monk's…
Sanders, Barry.
David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance, eds. Literacy and Orality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 111-28.
In GP, Chaucer poses himself as a "liar," capable of impossible feats of memory; in tales such as MilT, he capitalizes on the oral genre of joking. As a liar and a joker, the literate Chaucer manipulates oral expectations, compelling his audience to…
Uhlman, Diana Rae.
Dissertation Abstracts International 52 (1992): 2564A.
Freed from the false dichotomy of oral/writen literature, these three works are seen as history created through the fusion of oral and written sources (Bede), literary use of oral performance conventions (CT frame), and credible combinations of…
Wicher, Andrzej.
REALB: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature (Tubingen) 7 (1990): 19-60.
Considers Chaucer's tales of marriage in light of patterns of the supernatural marriages in folktales, identifying MLT and SNT as tales that transcend marital opposition through allegory, and viewing ClT, MerT, FranT, and SqT as tales in which the…
Dobbs, Elizabeth [Ann]
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 14 (1992): 31-52.
Analyzes the tale-telling contract in the context of late-medieval English legal terminology. Explores Chaucer's use of legal diction and situation to establish both the telling of the tales as a form of pleading and the Host's role as judge until…
Henderson, Jeff.
Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association 18 (1992): 1-14.
William Blake's criticism of GP can best be appreciated by considering his painting, Sir Jeffrey Chaucer and the Nine and Twenty Pilgrims on Their Journey to Canterbury, and his smaller engraving of the same subject. Blake's images, though…
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…
Clogan, Paul M.
Medievalia et Humanistica 18 (1992): 129-55.
KnT participates in the Roman Antique tradition by expressing a political ideology found in other medieval retellings of classical stories. The Tale argues for harmonizing passion and wisdom through marriage and rewrites Theban history to conceal…
KnT--a romance like none other in English--is clearly designed to set forth the Knight's "declaration of intent." An attempt to "order existence," KnT eschews both the "cosmic harmony" of the traditional romance and the "imminent defeat" of the epic…
Challenges the claim that Chaucer is sympathetic to women, demonstrating that he silences Emelye's literary past in KnT and seeks to contain feminine gender through adjustments of Boccaccio's Teseida; the tension between order and chaos in KnT…
In response to Edward Said's charge that modern academic criticism is compliant and depoliticized, Heyns argues that an astute critical reading renders KnT a "distant mirror" capable of showing us as much of contemporary reality as the daily…
Chaucer weaves heraldic allusions into the portraits of Lygurge and Emetreus, the two kings who support Palamon and Arcite in the tournament. These allusions indicate the contemporaneity of KnT.
La Farge, Catherine.
John Simons, ed. From Medieval to Medievalism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), pp. 69-81.
Emelye and Griselda represent humankind. Theseus and Walter are figures of Boethian Providence, figures who implicate its inscrutability if not its caprice. By obscuring the boundaries of literary genres, Chaucer challenges traditional social,…
Tomasch, Sylvia.
Mark L. Greenberg and Lance Schachterle, eds. Literature and Technology (Bethlehem, Penn.: Lehigh University Press, 1992), pp. 66-98.
Theseus's attempts to impose order upon his world reveal Chaucer's familiarity with medieval cartographical constructs as well as their underlying intellectual visions and political motives. This is most apparent in the construction of Theseus's…
The use of "gnof" to describe John the carpenter is appropriate because it suggests "churl" and "numbskull" and further emphasizes the "ease with which John is hoodwinked."
Donaldson, Kara Virginia.
Philological Quarterly 71 (1992): 139-53.
Absolon appropriates the language of courtly love, thereby rendering himself deaf to Alisoun's realistic language and setting himself up as a glossator of Alisoun's body/text. When Alisoun disrupts his gloss by exposing "hir hole" (i.e., her…
The carpenter's comments on his knave's report of Nicholas's condition must be seen in terms of the vigorous promotion of the connection between the working class and a severely circumscribed knowledge of the rudiments of faith.
Friedman, John B.
Yearbook of English Studies 22 (1992): 162-80.
In MilT, Nicholas's character and action may allude to medieval tales about a diabolical angel-imposter associated parodically with the Annunciation. John's final humiliation may echo tales of Ham and his sexual humiliation of his father, Noah.
Hanna, Ralph, III.
South Atlantic Quarterly 91 (1992): 793-812.
The "peasant voice" of Chaucer's Miller resembles the voices of John Shirley and Wat Tyler as represented in aristocratic accounts of the times. Chaucer's narrator criticizes the Miller's narrative voice, reinforcing chroniclers' depictions of…
Johnston, Alexandra F.
Records of Early English Drama Newsletter 13:2 (1988), 13-20.
Allusions in MilT and WBP help date the mystery plays. Despite the paucity of archival records, Chaucer's allusions clarify contemporary familiarity with the plays and their production.
Walsh, Elizabeth.
Studies in Scottish Literature 26 (1991): 156-63.
Applying the work of Bakhtin and Jameson to MilT and other texts, Walsh points out that many medieval texts concerning peasants represent the evolving socioeconomic threat to established society.
Beidler, Peter G.
Chaucer Review 26 (1992): 283-92.
Chaucer likely knew "Een bispel van .ij. clerken," a fourteenth-century Flemish analogue that provides more similarities to RvT than either "Le meunier et des II clers" or "De Gombert et des deux clers." Beidler includes a translation of the Flemish…
Ellis, Deborah S.
Chaucer Review 27 (1992): 150-61.
Both in the GP portrait of the Reeve and in RvPT, Chaucer draws on medieval devil iconography and folklore, deepening the sinister character of this pilgrim and helping to explain his particular hair style, his thinness, his home in the North, and…
