Wolfe, Matthew Clarke.
Dissertation Abstracts International 57 (1996): 2499A.
Argues that Gg is the earliest surviving effort to create a corpus of Chaucer's poetry and that codicological analysis of the manuscript reveals much about the reception of Chaucer in the fifteenth century.
Carlson, Cindy L.,and Angela Jane Weisl,eds.
New York : St. Martin's Press, 1999.
Eleven essays by various authors and an introduction by the editors. Topics include depictions of virginity, widowhood, and their intersections in medieval romance, hagiography, and drama, with recurrent references to other literary genres and…
McAvoy, Elizabeth Herbert, and Teresa Walters, eds.
Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002.
Seventeen essays by various authors. The book is divided into three sections: Sexual/Textual Consumption; Monstrous Bodies; and Consuming Genders, Races, and Nations. Includes an introduction by the editors, a select bibliography, and an index. For…
Kerr, John.
Bruce E. Brandt and Michael S. Nagy, eds. Proceedings of the 14th Northern Plains Conference on Earlier British Literature, April 7-8, 2006 (Brookings, S.Dak.: English Department, South Dakota State University, 2006), pp. 77-93.
Kerr argues that the sixth canto of Dante's Inferno was the model for Chaucer's use of gluttony and alimentary metaphors in PF, particularly the latter's concern with literary transmission and the birds' debate.
Roman, Christopher.
Carolynn Van Dyke, ed. Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 143-55.
Animals figure prominently in BD but are more than mere symbols. Ceyx's dead body is also an "unnatural animal." The birds, horse, whelp, and hart invite, but also resist, interpretation. The juxtaposition of death and animalistic vitality evokes…
Hickey, Helen M., Anne McKendry, and Melissa Raine, eds.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018.
Fourteen essays by various authors and an introduction by the editors, all inspired by or in response to the critical studies of Stephanie Trigg. The introduction describes the "affective" criticism underlying Trigg’s "Congenial Souls," "Shame and…
Rowland, Beryl.
English: The Journal of the English Association 22 (1973): 3-10.
Surveys major works of Chaucer criticism, focusing on works published between ca.1960-1970 and identifying trends. The bibliography lists some 40 works.
Bloomfield, Morton W.
Donald M. Rose, ed. New Perspectives in Chaucer Criticism (Norman Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1981), pp. 23-36.
We need an "over-all metaphysics" such as the fourteenth-century "Aristotelian ontology and psychology," or such modern systems as "phenomenology, Marxism, Heideggarian ontology, positivism,...existentialism, and Chomskyean rationalism" as approaches…
Vance, Sidney.
Sandra Ward Lott, S. G. Hawkins, and Norman McMillan, eds. Global Perspectives on Teaching Literature: Shared Visions and Distinctive Visions. (Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1993), pp. 101-108.
Observes parallels between WBT and the narrative of the matriarch Sogolon in the African (Mandingo) epic "Sundiata." Each includes a quest, a knowledgeable old hag, shape-shifting, and a version of rape. Such parallels enable us to "engage in a…
Begins with a discussion of "Chaucerian meanings" to investigate medieval textual production and verse translations from French to English, and considers how the "boundaries of the Chaucer canon have been established and defined by the inclusion and…
Both Jerome and Chaucer follow Paul in deploying "provocative women" to dramatize contemporary controversies over who may interpret scripture. The Wife of Bath performs exegesis even as she effectively likens her husbands to "exegetes whose sins…
Explores how Chaucer's characters in CT challenge the medieval social norm of community over "pryvetee" by telling tales that expose others' "pryvetee and obscure their own; by profession as a means of asserting individual power over one's pryvetee;…
Analysis of typical scholarly and critical comment on GP reveals that the common practice of assuming a context for the pilgrims' daily lives has some unsatisfactory consequences. Chaucer creates a fiction of travel to free the pilgrims from the…
Archibald, Elizabeth.
Teresa Tavormina and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Endless Knot: Essays on Old and Middle English in Honor of Marie Borroff (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 161-75.
Considers MLT "in the context of other Middle English family romances," a genre in which "members of a nuclear family are separated and then reunited after various adventures."
Henningfeld, Diane Andrews.
Dissertation Abstracts International 55 (1995): 1945A.
Medieval anatomical, religious, and legal ideas about rape appear in medical texts, religious rules, saints' legends, romances, and WBT. These works reveal cultural attitudes toward rape and women in general.
Lee, Brian S.
Susan Yager and Elise E. Morse-Gagné, eds. Interpretation and Performance: Essays for Alan Gaylord (Provo, UT: Chaucer Studio Press, 2013), pp. 199-210.
A comic completion, in mock Middle English, of CkT as a version of both Little Red Riding Hood and the parable of the Prodigal Son, with allusions to TC, GP and several stories from CT.
Heffernan, Carol Falvo.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 94 (1995): 31-41.
Medieval contraceptive information includes mention of pears in discussion of techniques for preventing conception, so May's desire for a pear in MerT may indicate that she wants to deny January's foolish desire for offspring.
Argues that WBT presents a different vision of law, informed by female agency, where the focus is on reeducation. The rapist-knight is rewarded rather than punished, but this failure of justice functions as a call to activism, as the law so depicted…
Harding, Wendy.
Colette Stévanovitch, ed. L'Articulation langue-littérature dans les textes médiévaux anglais (Nancy: Association des Médiévistes Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur, 2005), pp. 177-89.
Contradictions inherent in medieval social order are evident in the sources of Mel, but Chaucer reconciles these contradictions through his treatment of pity.
Pelen, Marc M.
Florilegium 10 (1991, for 1988): 107-25.
Can one reconcile in a "single poetic focus" the contradictory voices of MerT? Plato, Claudian, Boethius, and especially Ovid distinguish between true and false fictions on the basis of whether legend is used to recognize cosmological order or to…
Includes thirteen essays by Benson, all but one reprinted from earlier publications. For three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Contradictions: From "Beowulf" to Chaucer under Alternative Title.
