Reale, Nancy M.
Kathleen A. Bishop, ed. "The Canterbury Tales" Revisited--21st Century Interpretations (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 256-80.
Chaucer's CT, particularly GP, offers "as its 'utilitarian' value or 'worth' exemplary lessons on constructing social identity in the context of an emergent market system." This "bold step paved the way for modern ways of understanding the self,"…
Rowland, Beryl, ed.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Twenty-two essays by noted Chaucerians on a range of topics: individual works, biography, backgrounds, source study, genre, etc. The essays survey fundamental critical issues and bibliography. For individual essays, search for Companion to Chaucer…
Aertsen, Henk, and Alasdair A. MacDonald, eds.
Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1990.
Nine original essays on Middle English romance offer the undergraduate reader a range of critical approaches and methodologies. The essays discuss widely studied romances such as Sir Orfeo, Sir Launfal, and particularly, Sir Gawain and the Green…
Alonso García, Manuel José.
Armando López Castro and María Luzdivina Cuesta Torre, eds. Actas del XI congreso internacional de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval: Universidad de León, 20 al 24 de septiembre de 2005. 2 vols. (León: Secretariado de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Léon, 2007), vol. 1, pp. 163-82.
Compares Chaucer's PrT with Alfonso X's "Cantigas de Santa Maria" (no. 6),analyzing them in detail (from plot to prosody), and providing parallel editions of the two texts. In Spanish.
Nykiel, Joanna.
Journal of English Linguistics 38 (2010): 143-66.
Studies the occurrence of "extra" (doubled or mismatched) prepositions in Middle English relative and interrogative clauses and the persistence of the phenomenon in modern English. "Noncategorical" (gradient) constraints such as "preposition…
Williams, Jeni.
Robert Penhallurick, ed. Debating Dialect: Essays on the Philosophy of Dialect Study (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), pp. 46-65.
Assesses linguistic features of RvT, not as evidence of rustic regional gullibility, but as factors in the Tale's response to the depiction of space in MilT. The dialect of John and Aleyn is part of an "ideological attack" in which the clerks are set…
Boyd, David Lorenzo.
South Atlantic Quarterly 91 (1992): 945-64.
The placement of Chaucer's PF in MS Bodley 638, MS Laud Misc. 416, and MS Digby 181 suggests that the poem can be interpreted, respectively, as suggesting the value of courtly love, stressing the importance of "proper governance," and illustrating an…
Phillips, Noelle.
Yearbook of Langland Studies 28 (2014): 65-104.
Explores the "compositional choices" made in the compilation of the texts included in San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 114, and maintains that TC (among others) was copied early and incorporated into this larger collection in response to a…
Focusing on the MerE-SqH, argues that what has been seen as evidence of authorial revision in the manuscripts may simply be reflecting problem areas encountered by the scribes, including problems in accessing exemplars and linking passages, which…
Rasmussen, Mark David.
Dissertation Abstracts International 54 (1993): 171A.
Poets have used the complaint to express their own poetic and social situations. In BD, the nonaristocratic poet must work within a courtly mode; in TC, he expresses the "need for a sympathetic audience."
Lavezzo, Kathy.
Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker, with the assistance of William Green, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 434-56.
Lavezzo considers the "complexities of medieval identity formation by surveying the depiction of Jews and Saracens in English" between Bede and the late fifteenth century. Includes comments on MLT and its presentation of Britain as a medieval "global…
Explores how "complex irony in Chaucer has the effect of affirming both sides in a conflict or both terms in an opposition," discussing the device in TC, KnT, NPT, PardPT, and the end of the CT. Includes discussion of Boethius's "Consolation of…
Bello-Piñón, Nuria, and Dolores Elvira Méndez-Souto.
Isabel Moskowich-Spiegel and Begoña Crespo-García, eds. Bells Chiming from the Past: Cultural and Linguistic Studies on Early English. Costerus New Series, no. 174 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 169-78.
The authors present statistical summaries of complex predicates in Astr and Equat and hypothesize about why such scientific texts contain a relatively low percentage of these predicates.
Chaucer's illustrates the reciprocity of hearing and speaking by demonstrating how perfectly the characters of TC understand each other's indirectly spoken meanings. The reader's complicity in this implit communication is stressed particularly in…
Fedewa, Kate.
Dissertation Abstracts International A74.11 (2014): n.p.
Explores the "means and purposes" of Latin literary education in late medieval England, examining the "subject position" imagined for school children in pedagogical materials. Also comments on how Chaucer and Langland evoke a "grammatical nostalgia"…
Uses Morris Halle and Seymour Jay Keyser's metrical theory to describe "English decasyllabic verse of the later Middle Ages" and explore why Chaucer's iambic pentameter was not followed more closely by poets such as Hoccleve, Lydgate, Dunbar, and…
Barnbrook, Geoff.
Gerhard Leitner, ed. New Directions in English Language Corpora: Methodology, Results, Software Developments (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992), pp. 277-87.
Explores the potential for "training" a computer to identify spelling variants in Middle English texts, using Robinson's edition (1957) of CT as a basis for analysis. Describes a methodology, results, and perceived shortcomings.
O'Hara, Robert,and Peter Robinson.
Norman Blake and Peter Robinson, eds. The 'Canterbury Tales' Project Occasional Papers, Volume I (Oxford: Office for Humanities Communication Publications, 1993), pp. 53-74.
Discusses the application of computer-assisted cladistic analysis to manuscript stemmatics and describes the use of "Collate" software, designed to analyze and refine generalizations produced by cladistics. The essay details how texts of the Old…
Robinson, Peter
Pieter van Reenan and Margot van Mulken, eds., with the assistance of Janet Dyk. Studies in Stemmatology (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1996), pp. 71-103.
Describes the value of cladistic analysis in generating multiple, flexible stemmata for texts, arguing that stemmata are useful for indicating what can be used as a best text for editing, not for establishing the text itself. Analyzes variants in…
Discusses meter, rhythm, and textual problems in Chaucer's iambic pentameter, analyzing them using text-analysis computer applications: Oxford Concordance Program and WordSmith Tools. Texts of GP and WBP from the Hengwrt manuscript are transcribed…
Lancashire, Ian, ed.
Toronto: Centre for Computing in the Humanities, University of Toronto, 1993.
Ten essays from a 1992 conference on the application of computer technology to the study of Chaucer's language, his style, and manuscripts of his works. Includes a summary titled "Afterwords" by Patricia J. Eberle (pp. 189-93), which comments on…
Dilligan, Robert J., and Karen Lynn.
College English 34 (1973): 1103-4 and 1113-23.
Describes an eight-step "algorithm" for enabling computers to aid in the recognition and cataloging of prosodic traits, and explores the utility of such practice by discussing the data from a computer-assisted scansion of a 1000-line sample of…
