Browse Items (16110 total)

Tabulates and analyzes the scribal variants of modal auxiliaries in CT, commenting on the implications for understanding late-medieval English usage.

Considers Chaucer's repeated engagement with a passage from Boethius's "Consolation" in Bo, several shorter works, PF, and TC, leading to an argument that Chaucer ultimately suggests that some limits of translation are insurmountable.

In Chaucer's works, the wide spectrum of Venus's portrayals, from mythographical Venus to planetary Venus, represents "some profound human problems in the relations of men and women" and contributes "significantly to the rich variety" with which…

Surveys and analyzes Chaucer's phonological, lexical, grammatical, and discourse ambiguities.

Chaucer puts the allegorized Latin epic to various uses in five works: HF, TC, KnT, MilT (as comic and unsuccesful rebellion against the hierarchies of KnT), and LGW

Putter compares Chaucer's techniques to the "close control" of syllable counting by alliterative poets. Although the metrical goals of these poets differ from those of Chaucer, the means whereby alliterative poets achieve control are similar to…

Combines "generative" metrical analysis with statistical sampling, synchronic and diachronic comparisons, and attention to the history of metrical criticism to proclaim Chaucer the "father of English poetry's metrical artistry." Describes native…

Describes Chaucer's metrical line as a "series of five iambs" and the beginning of "modern English verse," and provides examples from across Chaucer's corpus of dominant practices, variations in feet and line-lengths, rhyme patterns, and stanzas.…

Explores women in Chaucer's LGW, HF, SqT, and Anel who are "cynically seduced and heartlessly betrayed, the innocent victims of masculine duplicity," and concludes that Chaucer's attitudes toward women and love differed radically from those of his…

Kanno examines instances of "mesure" and its synonyms in Chaucer's works, comparing those meanings with the virtue of moderation in Confucianism. The meanings range from "calculation" to "moderation." Generally, Chaucer's distinction between good and…

Outlines the "kinds of ambiguities in Chaucer's verbal and narrative technique" based in his commitment to epistemological "indeterminacy." Then examines MLT and its changes to its source in Nicholas Trevet to show that the "theme of the limitation…

Traces broad similarities between FrT and the Robin Hood ballads to suggest that Chaucer knew early forms of the ballads and adapted them for comic effect.

Passages from ShT and MLT suggest that men have a right to beat their wives; furthermore, MilT and passages from Mel and WBT (in the wife's marriage to Jankin) seem to suggest masochism in female characters. MkP suggests that women are naturally…

Concludes that the three female voices of Dorigen, Griselda, and the Wife of Bath ironically expose Chaucer's hierarchical idea of women.

Considers three of the CT that contain 'virago' figures and focus on an encounter between East and West at the heart of the tales. Chaucer's attitude to the set of viragos is enigmatic. By discrediting the reliability of his narrators, he blurs the…

Argues that Chaucer favors the popular idea that Brittonic literature and history are primarily oral. By doing so, Chaucer distances his contemporary England, with its reliance on Latin textual and cultural authority, from the political reality of…

Although ParsT relies heavily on Raymond de Penaforte's "Summa de poenitentia et matrimonio," Chaucer extracts one chapter from the treatise and substitutes a "tree of life" for Raymond's pilgrimage metaphor. By indicating that one can live a life of…

Crocker investigates how the visibility and invisibility of gender in Chaucer are linked to performativity and cultural privilege, especially for men. Discusses the figurative tradition of engendering sight as background to how Prudence in Mel is the…

Medieval universities taught "perspectiva," or optics, important in literary realism. Chaucer's use of light, vision, and space parallels passages in optical texts and becomes thematic in CT, fragments G and A. Jean de Meun, Dante, and Boccaccio…

(In Japanese).

Comparison of Romance vocabulary, direct discourse, the first person (singular or plural), finite verb forms, and other grammatical elements such as independent and dependent clauses inKnT and WBT shows that "Chaucer did indeed use the language of…

Using the image of a volume of collected leaves, Chaucer explores the "twin problems of rivalry and rehearsal" in his sequence of MilP (the narrator's apology), MLP (the Man of Law's comments on Chaucer's writings), and WBPT (the tearing of Jankyn's…

Explores vows and vow-breaking in CT, arguing that ManT brings to tragic crescendo a concern with the transgression of marital vows and presents consequences as horrific as any in Greek drama.

Explores Chaucer's "literary voice" as a self-conscious reflection of late-fourteenth-century vernacularizing.

Although the Knight's Yeoman may be a "forster" (1.117) before all else, the skills he would possess in that role "would find ready application on military campaign," which helps to explain the Knight's choice of his Yeoman, rather than another…