Browse Items (15542 total)

To alleviate disappointment at Criseyde's lack of agency, readers should appreciate her not as a "real" woman but as an embodiment of the medieval masculine imagination. Criseyde follows the pattern of many of Chaucer's female characters: caught in a…

Reexamines own earlier writings about Troilus's metaphysical "philosophizing response" and journey in TC, in response to a critique from Spearing from March 25, 1989.

Chaucer's MkT and "Le Chevalier de la charrette" illustrate variations on the character Ugolino from Dante's "Inferno." Chaucer manipulates Dante's story to emphasize the Monk's exemplum: the fall of a a great man beset by adverse fortune.

Focuses on the clothing of Alisoun of MilT and the Wife of Bath, with attention to color, stereotyping, and economic conditions. In Korean, with an abstract in English (pp. 158-59).

Focuses on fabliau and the clothing of Chaucer's women in MilT, WBT, and RvT, and claims that "women's desire and independent will are materialized by means of [the] Wife of Bath's clothing."

Chaucer used allegory to create a teleological statement of ideal behavior as an apologia for the most repressive aspects of ruling-class dominance and male chauvinism of the world in which he lived, and which he depicted on the literal level of ClT.

Argues that Chaucer’s "literary re-novation" of the Trojan source material, enacted in TC and theorized in HF, "is a matter of the purification and hybridization of foregoing traditions," terms derived from Bruno Latour. Explores the relations…

Surveys Marxist scholarship concerning "class clowns" in American school rooms, classroom management of them, and their vocational potential. Then discusses Nicholas of MilT and John and Aleyn of RvT as students "who ‘work the system' for the sake of…

Kaylor contrasts themes and techniques of Dante's "Commedia" and Chaucer's TC (and CT), suggesting that a shift in "frame-of-reference" occurred between the times of the two poets. Dante is concerned with universal, absolute, and transcendent…

Kittredge's dialectical interpretation of the Marriage Group in CT is re-examined in terms of the different views presented by W. W. Lawrence, D. R. Howard, J. L. Hodge, and C. C. Olson. The conclusion is that there seems little to be revised in…

Like other biographies, those of Chaucer have been constructed in light of the biographers' assumptions and images. Surveys biographies and biographical comments on Chaucer and suggests that modern commentary neglects the transcendent in his works.

Argues that Rom should be recontexualized, viewing the work not as a Chaucerian fragment, which perpetuates a fragmentary approach to the work, but as part of a tradition of translation. Analysis of decorated initials and borders in Hunter 409…

Suggests that Chaucer's LGW is part of a "counter-tradition" (also including Shakespeare, Milton, and Lucy Hutchinson) that develops against the epic's "images of sexual violence against marginalized females," and that this counter-tradition provides…

Analyzes the intricate relationship among literary theory, poetry, and music, with examples from Chaucer and others--specifically, the "strategies of poetic composition" and the "location of invention within the text"--to produce "a literary reading…

A New Historicist assessment of Middle English mirrors for princes: Chaucer's Mel and works by Trevisa, Hoccleve, Lydgate and Burgh, Hays, Ashby, and Gower. These texts construct an ideal king and normative social values and-set against the reign and…

Includes essays by Leonhard Schmitz (1881), George Dawson (1886), William Calder (1892), John W. Hales (1893), Frank J. Mather (1899), Henry C. Beeching (1900), Alfred Ainger (1905), George H. Cowling (1934), and "Chaucer at Woodstock" (1882).

In Confessio amantis and his other works, Gower avoids the word "rape," perhaps because of its ambiguity, and he presents forced coitus in ways sympathetic to the victim and cognizant of female repression. Mast includes recurrent comparisons with…

Although "mythographers allegorized Ovid's rape narratives as stories of cosmological creation or spiritual desire," Christine de Pizan presents Apollo's assault on Daphne (Épîstre d'Otha) as a disfigurement of the female body; in his tale of…

Surveys modern and postmodern theorizing of rape and addresses rape in medieval England. Topics include secular, legal notions of rape; rape in canon law, theology, and confessional manuals (especially vernacular ones); rape motifs in hagiography…

Comments on several medieval legal cases involving charges of rape, describes the role of rape in pastourelle tradition, and argues that, even though "no form of justice . . . can fully undo rape's harms," WBT "demonstrates the pressing need for…

The rapist-knight's plea to "Tak al my good and let my body go" (WBT 3.1061) highlights his role reversal not only with the raped maiden but also with women bound to legalized rape by the concept of the "marriage debt." Richman suggests that the…

Argues that the theme of testing female patience, found in ClT, Chretien's "Erec and Enide," and Robert Greene's "Friar Bacon and Friar Bongay," "demonstrates the interdependence of traditional motif, aesthetic sensibility, and societal structure."…

Biographical sketch of Bressie, focusing on her work with John M. Manly, Edith Rickert, and Lilian Redstone on the Chaucer life-records and her unsuccessful competition with Martin Crow to publish works related to Chaucer. Bestul admires Bressie's…

Translates a passage from Ramon Llull's thirteenth-century "De les Maravalles del Mon" (also known as "Felix" or "Livre de Meravalles") that has "marked similarities" with the account of the first deception in CYT.

In discussing Denise Giardina's novels set in Appalachia, offers observations regarding the effective portrayal of life in the mountains of the South, and compares this understanding to how the original language of Chaucer enhances the reading and…