Selvin, Rhoda Hurwitt.
Studia Neophilologica 37 (1965): 146-60.
Comments on the varieties of love in PF, describing how the initiating concern with heavenly love in the summary of Scipio's dream is recalled and reinforced through the structure and details of the poem, conveying the need for "caritas," "common…
Kelly, Henry Ansgar.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 13 (1991): 121-40.
Provides historical evidence that if Pandarus was guilty of incest with Criseyde, he was also guilty of cuckolding Troilus. Similarly, if Gaunt had cuckolded Chaucer, he would not have been able to able to marry Chaucer's wife's sister, Katherine…
Burton, T. L., and John F. Plummer, eds.
Provo, Utah : Chaucer Studio Press, 2005.
Eighteen essays by various authors; a professional biography of Emerson Brown, Jr.; and a list of his academic publications. For individuial essays, search for Seyd in Forme and Reverence under Alternative Title.
Turner, Marie.
In The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. https://opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu, 2017. Relocated 2025 at https://opencanterburytales.lsusites.org/
Describes the generic features of the fabliau, and explores how and what extent the MerT fulfills and overturns these features in its plot, diction, biblical allusion, and courtly conventions, also commenting on interpolations in two manuscripts.…
Adamson, Matthew, trans.
Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Traces the history of the search for appropriate terminology for sexual matters and of concepts of physiology; medicine and the art of love in the troubadours, Andreas Capellanus, and "Roman de la Rose"; freedom; guilt; and disease. Mentions Trotula…
Pugh theorizes "the compulsory nature of queerness in creating heterosexuals," exploring how a number of masculine characters in Middle English literature are "rendered queerly normative due to external forces that reimagine their masculinity as…
WBPT can be seen as Alison's "therapeutic" attempts to "educate the public at large" about domestic violence and rape. Although she succumbs at times to the rhetoric of "the woman as commodity" and misunderstands herself as "unrapeable," Alison…
Campbell, Emma.
Comparative Literature 55: 191-216, 2003.
Campbell applies Judith Butler's theories of performative gender identity and "cultural translation" to ClT and its sources in Petrarch and Boccaccio. In Chaucer's version, authority is translated to the vernacular and to oral discourse, challenging…
Paglia, Camille.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990.
Expansive commentary on western art and literature, including the assertion (pp. 171-72) that Edmund Spenser established English literary tradition by "abandoning Chaucer and eradicating his influence," particularly his "populism."
Shows that double entendre "invests the entire narrative action" of RvT, explicating individual puns and demonstrating the prevalence of the sexual implications of flour, milling, and grinding throughout the tale and in later works by John Heywood…
Delany, Sheila.
Minnesota Review, New Series 5 (1975): 104-15.
The Wife of Bath turned the sexual economics of her time to her advantage. Margery Kempe could not so capitulate. Religion became her way of asserting ownership of herself.
Hopkins, Amanda, Robert Allen Rouse, and Cory James Rushton, eds.
Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 2014.
Collection of essays explores British medieval sexuality and sexual expression in literature. Examines fabliaux and romances of Chaucer, Gower, and Malory; alchemical texts; and satirical poetry of William Dunbar. The Introduction (pp. 1-11)…
Stockton discusses the "critique of cynical reason" in CT as part of a larger psychoanalytical discussion of the role of comedy in the formation of the foundations of civilizations.
Bahr, Arthur.
Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh, eds. Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the "Canterbury Tales" (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), pp. 230-38.
Shows that the BBC television adaptation of PardPT concentrates more on sexual predation than on death, and argues that this eliminates both the sexual and the contextual queerness of Chaucer's original, which requires of its audience "rigorously…
Karras, Ruth Mazo.
Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler, eds. Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), pp. 201-16.
Karras surveys depictions of female commercialized sex in the English late Middle Ages. It is difficult, she suggests, to separate kinds and degrees of prostitution, because prostitution was regarded as an "extreme case" of the general sinfulness of…
Tavormina, M. Teresa, ed.
Tempe: ACMRS (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies), 2006.
Edition and comprehensive study of Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.14.52, which was produced by the Hammond scribe. Includes five essays by various authors on physical features of the manuscript, an edition in ten sections by various editors,…
Surveys depictions of sexual activities and attitudes toward them in the literature of medieval Europe. Includes a brief life of Chaucer and recurrent comments on his works (see the Index), with a summary description of sexuality and scatology in…
Payer, Pierre J.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984.
In the development of sexual codes in the Penitentials, treatment of a wide variety of sexual behavior became more and more sophisticated in reaction to actual practice.
Kraishan, Majed R.
Dissertation Abstracts International C81.04 (2014): n.p.
Argues that "by subverting traditional literary genres, and inventing new ones, Chaucer provided alternative life-views," reframing traditional views of eroticism in CT (KnT, MilT, RvT, WBPT, PhyT, ShT) and TC.
Argues that Chaucer combines earthly and spiritual love in TC "into one general view of love, one in which the two notions are not mutually exclusive," reading Troilus's ascent through the spheres as a kind of reward or salvation for loving well.
Cornelius, Michael G.
Blake Hobby, ed. Human Sexuality (New York: Bloom's Literary Criticism, 2009), pp. 95-104.
Introduces MilT as a fabliau, contrasts it with KnT, and comments on the "punishment" received by each of the major characters, including Alisoun, who is victimized by being a wife and through whom Chaucer critiques marriage.
Archibald, Elizabeth.
Journal of Medieval Latin 11 (2001): 27-49.
Archibald surveys accounts of Oedipus and of Semiramis in classical and medieval texts, focusing on their concern or lack of concern with incest. Recurrent mention of Dante, Boccaccio, Christine de Pizan, and Chaucer-in particular TC, MLT, PF, and…
