Johnson, Lesley.
Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson, eds. Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 195-220.
Literary and historical contexts modify the presentation of the Griselda story in its many versions, reflecting a broad range of views on women and marriage. Chaucer's version raises questions about the exemplary value of Griselda in religious and…
Reads the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 as an inspiration for the relationship between textual authority, bibliophobia, and violence in WBPT. Compares Alisoun to rioters who destroyed writings they deemed threatened their personal rights. Argues that…
Wang, Laura.
Carolynn Van Dyke, ed. Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 131-42.
Classical and medieval antifeminist texts disparagingly compare women and animals. In WBP, Alisoun "redeploys animal similes" to claim the privileges of animal-like status because she is naturally crafty and sly, impatient, and cannot be held…
Felch, Susan M.
Medieval Perspectives 6 (1991): 144-53.
The realist-nominalist debate underlies Chaucer's language, which, through multiple discourses and by analogy, embodies social order. By withholding his authority, Chaucer delegates responsibility for moral decisions to his readers.
Jeffrey, Chris.
Katja Lenz and Ruth Möhlig, eds. Of dyuersitie & chaunge of langage: Essays Presented to Manfred Grlach on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday (Heidelberg: Winter, 2002), pp. 319-38.
Applies "register-theory" to PardPT to demonstrate Chaucer's "Gothic" juxtapositioning of various kinds of discourse. Jeffrey examines the mode, domain, topic, and tenor of the discursive units in PardPT and suggests that the characteristic variety…
Chaucer's political commentary is often disguised by ambiguity--the refusal ever to mean one thing--and the multiple nuances of his words. In revising LGWP, Chaucer inserted allusions to the "dangerous talk" of his day--to texts and interpretation…
Riddy, Felicity, ed.
Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991.
Eleven essays on such topics as the theory and techniques of dialect comparison, the texts of Skelton and Dunbar, the N-town manuscript, and specific manuscripts.
For individual essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Regionalism in Late Medieval…
Stanbury, Sarah.
New Literary History 28 (1997): 261-89.
ClT is about visual investigation. Contemporary manuscript illumination, panel painting, and statuary are instructive for understanding Chaucer's representations of lines of sight framing the female body. Relying on complex tensions between an…
Smarr, Janet Levarie.
Martin Eisner and David Lummus, eds. A Boccaccian Renaissance: Essays on the Early Modern Impact of Giovanni Boccaccio and His Works (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2019), pp. 293-310.
Observes that ClT sets its view of marriage in opposition to WBPT, suggesting that this reflects Chaucer's familiarity with Boccaccio's "Decameron" and inspired "the reversal of Griselda’s gender" in two early modern English plays, analyzed here:…
Dauby, Hélène.
Anne Berthelot, ed. "Pur remembrance": Mélanges en mémoire de Wolfgang Spiewok. WODAN, no. 79; Greifswalder Beitrge zum Mittelalter, no. 66. (Greifswald: Reineke-Verlag, 2001), pp. 131-41.
TC illustrates the mechanisms of perception, memory, and imagination as defined by fourteenth-century scientific theories. The two protagonists are enmeshed in a net of gazes--their own as well as those of others--and the narrative unfolds as viewed…
Anthologizes in four volumes oral accounts by asylum seekers and immigrants detained in Britain and elsewhere, recorded by various poets and novelists, and modelled on the CT, with an opening Prologue in each volume, followed by narratives with…
Straus, Barrie Ruth.
Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn Price, eds. Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), pp. 122-38.
Straus explores how ClT, MLT, and PrT adapt and accommodate the traditions and conventions of the family romance to "articulate a profound cultural anxiety about paternity."
Proposes that Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and other contemporaries may have viewed Ovid's work not merely as a source of exempla, but as a rhetorical model for subversive stories.
Studies the marginalia printed with the 1606 edition of "The Plowman's Tale," arguing that it challenges both Papal authority and the Church of England, encouraging Puritanism. Also discusses the place of this edition in the tradition of Chaucer…
Schoff, Rebecca L.
Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007.
Circumstances of transmission affect not only how authors are received but also how they write. This effect was particularly strong in late medieval culture, when authors such as Chaucer, William Langland, and Margery Kempe were aware that readers…
Simpson, James.
Eva von Contzen and James Simpson, eds. Enlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022), pp. 195-212.
Assesses the syntax and rhetorical/literary functions of the "open-ended list that forms part of a sentence," focusing on those composed during the "cultural revolution" at the beginning of the Reformation in sixteenth-century England, but framed by…
Simpson, James.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
The volume surveys the literature of late medieval and early modern English writers in relation to political institutions contemporary with the literature, tracing an arc of "diminishing liberties." Simpson characterizes the shift in literature from…
Ito, Eiko.
Studies in English Literature (Tokyo), English number (1978): 65-89.
An analysis of reflexive verbs in Chaucer within the case grammar framework. It shows the possibility of the semantic motivation of the reflexive pronoun and of a finer distinction of reflexivity in terms of the semantic relationship among the verb,…
Aers, David.
David Aers, ed. Medieval Literature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), pp. 58-73.
Reacting to critical theorists--Bakhtin, Derrida, De Man, Eagleton, Lentricchia, and others--Aers writes an essay as a meditation on "glosynge" in SumT 1788-96.
Gaylord, Alan T.
Chaucer Review 40 (2006): 311-33.
A search of contemporary Chaucerian criticism for signs of whether D. W. Robertson's "exegetical criticism" continues to generate important work yields the conclusion "no, yes, and perhaps": "no," in the wake of the ascendance of historicist…
Recounts personal experiences of studying PrT and its reception as a prelude to examining the role and status of medieval studies in twenty-first-century British educational culture, particularly its inequalities, colonialisms, and appropriations,…
Brennan, John P.
Studies in Philology 70 (1973): 243-51.
Surveys critical discussions of Chaucer's authorship of the "substantive" glosses that appear in his manuscripts, shows that the glosses to PrT 7.579-85 derive from Jerome's "Adversus Jovinianum" rather than from the liturgy of the Holy Innocents,…
