Chaucer prepares for Arcite's Samsonlike vow to cut his hair by drawing on the traditions of Samson as a fool for love and by reworking and adding details to the story of Boccaccio's "Teseida." Samson was commonly paired with Hercules as biblical…
Linkinen, Tom.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015.
Includes a chapter, "Sharing Laughter" (pp. 205-32), that identifies examples from late medieval art and literature where laughter constitutes "moral censorship" of same-sex desire or actions, then focuses on the Pardoner; his relation with the…
Psychoanalytic reading of PF that identifies a reversal of the "logical sequence of origin, wish, and desire." This reversal "represses consciousness" and disguises the presence of the "Chaucerian ego" of the poem that is recognizable in the…
Jackson, Gabriel, composer.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Item not seen. WorldCat records indicate that this vocal score for unaccompanied mixed voices is printed with the text of the Antiphon to the Virgin Mary, "Salve Regina," in Latin by Herman Contractus (attributed), "interspersed with English words by…
Treats the Old Man of PardT as the "total opposite" of the three revelers: he "embodies or manifests . . . in some manner Christian goodness." He first offers to the revelers a merciful "way to salvation," but when they "flatly reject" it, he justly…
Discussing the use of relics as a site of "institutional control," Malo argues that in works such as CT, writers "use relics as tools" for affirmation or critique of the Church's position as dispenser of grace and healing.
In giving the tale of Constance the form and narrative structure of a saint's life while omitting conventional motivations or explanations, Chaucer has made the Man of Law an inept narrator and has invested the tale with irony and humor.
Winstead, Karen A.
Helen Cooper and Robert R. Edwards, eds. Oxford History of Poetry in English. Volume 2, Medieval Poetry, 1100–1400 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 227-42.
Traces the writing of saints' legends in poetry in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, highlighting the innovative approaches taken by a number of poets, including Chaucer in SNT.
Winstead, Karen A.
Chaucer Yearbook 2 (1995): 137-54.
Addresses medieval writers' uses of saints' lives in Middle English romances of persecuted laywomen. "Le Bone Florence of Rome," "The King of Tars," "Emare," and MLT exemplify the influence of, and variations from, early pious romances. The…
Sherman, Gail Berkeley.
Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell, eds. Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 136-60.
By allowing the pilgrims no comment on the hagiographic discourse of the faceless, feminine "Second Nonne," and by allowing the Prioress to identify with the Word and the bearer of the Word, CT interrogates the doctrines on which it rests:…
Voss, Paul J.
Journal of Markets and Morality 21 (2018): 331-49.
Clarifies the life and tradition of St. Omobono as a "merchant saint" and "patron of businesspeople and entrepreneurs," incorporating discussion of "early literary representation of the merchant character in Chaucer and Shakespeare." Includes…
Pratt, Robert A.
Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 5 (1963): 316-2.
Discusses medieval manuscripts that combine materials from Walter Map's "Valerius," the "golden book" of Theophrastus, and excerpts from Jerome's "Adversus Jovinianum," focusing on the seven manuscripts that include the latter two, and showing how…
Grennen, Joseph E.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 65 (1966): 466-81.
Demonstrates the "relationship in theme and imagery" between SNPT and CYPT and the "controlling design that links them artistically." Posits that SNT may have been based on a Gnostic version of the Cecilia legend, an alchemical allegory of the…
Winstead, Karen A., ed. and trans.
Karen A. Winstead. Chaste Passions: Medieval English Virgin Martyr Legends (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 49-60.
A translation into Modern English of SNT, based on The Riverside Chaucer (3rd ed.). Includes a short introduction and select bibliography.
Johnston, Andrew James.
Poetica: Zeitschrift für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft 41 (2009): 381-407.
Argues that in "Pericles" Shakespeare links Catholicism to English literary history "for the purposes of a complex investigation into the politics of literary history." Allusions to incest in the play, and allusions to Gower and to Chaucer's…
Suhamy, Henri.
Mythes, Croyances et Religions dans le Monde Anglo-Saxon 6 (1988): 119-23.
Examines whether NPT manifests a superficial or an intrinsic religiosity and treats NPT--a tale appropriate to the teller--as a religious allegory with Chauntecler as Man or Adam, Pertelote as Eve, and the fox as Devil.
Read as symptoms of a "childlike" individual "dealing with a number of psychosexual developmental issues," the Prioress's personal habits and narrative performance register anxiety not only about boundaries of the individual human body but also about…
Fradenburg, L. O. Aranye.
Holly A. Crocker and D. Vance Smith, eds. Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debates (New York; Routledge, 2014.), pp. 455-69.
Examines the "logic of sacrifice" that motivates actions in KnT, arguing that previous criticism "has done insufficient justice to the vile enjoyment and identificatory power" of KnT.
Fradenburg, Louise O.
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27 (1997): 47-75.
The logic of sacrifice (in particular, the sacrifice of the subject, Arcite) that permeates KnT produces a "jouissance," which the discourse of charity attempts to disguise.
Fradenburg, L. O. Aranye.
Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
Fradenburg theorizes a new combination of historicism and Lacanian psychoanalysis and explores the medieval idea of sacrifice and its role in cultural production. Linking ethics and desire, sacrifice is a way of pursuing and prolonging desire, even…
King, Laura Severt.
Dissertation Abstracts International 54 (1994): 3757A.
Among the handful of converted whores, Mary Magdalene is best known in late medieval writing through the homily "De maria Magdalena" (which Chaucer translated) and the Digby play. These works reveal remarkably literal physicality in which carnal…
Epstein, Robert.
Robert Epstein and William Robins, eds. Sacred and Profane in Chaucer and Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honour of John V. Fleming (Buffalo, N. Y.: University of Toronto Press, 2010), pp. 129-45.
Epstein argues for a nuanced understanding of money in SumT, reading its significations in light of the thirteenth-century Franciscan treatise "Sacrum commercium," medieval commercial practice, and deliberations on quality and quantity among the…
Heffernan, Thomas J.
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Using a new critical method, Heffernan examines the characteristics of the saint's life, sacred biography as historical narrative, important works and collections in the tradition, medieval attitudes toward virginity and chastity,rhetoric and the…
Jeffrey, David Lyle.
David Lyle Jeffrey, ed. Chaucer and Scriptural Tradition (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1984), pp. 207-28.
The Aeneas story as cliche is appropriate for the poem's subject: fame. The fame of Aeneas was important in Christian historiography, but ambivalent because of his betrayal of Dido. Biblical language and allusion rather than "the story of Troy or…
