Browse Items (15544 total)

Addresses lovesickness in TC, John Gower's "Confessio Amantis," and "The Book of Margery Kempe," considering it "as an embodied and thus imminent process that organizes relationships around culturally defined ideas of either negotiation and mutuality…

Textbook edition of TC, conservatively edited from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 61, with modern punctuation, sidebar glosses and bottom-of-page notes, an index of characters, a glossary of common words and phrases, and a select bibliography.…

Identifies connections among "war, narrative, and literary technique" in TC to show "how Chaucer constructs . . . siege as a dynamic space in which to imagine the forces that shape and determine human behaviour." Chaucer "reconfigures the idea of a…

Examines desire and intimacy in TC and "reinterprets the depiction of pleasure" in the poem, "particularly the bed scene in Book III, through an allegorical reading of medieval and modern concepts of desire."

Explicates the scene of Pandarus's interruption of Criseyde's reading group (TC,
II.85ff.), attending to its intertextualities, the implications of its setting in a paved "secular parlor," the nature of the female aristocratic readers, and…

Studies "the moral meaning of spiritual and political mediation" in late medieval England, focusing on miracles of the Virgin, TC, Julian of Norwich's "A Revelation of Love," and Thomas Hoccleve's "Regiment of Princes," using aspects of Emmanuel…

Describes the treatment of the rondel in manuscripts of PF as a form of code-switching, identifies resonances of PF and SqT in Charles d’Orléans's Valentine's Day poetry, and explores the implications of describing love-talk or bird-talk as a form of…

Argues that the "ongoing negotiations between experience and authority, flesh and spirit, nature and the divine, are fluid, bidirectional, and mutually dependent" in PF. The poem depicts a cacophonous set of voices and demonstrates that the…

Includes discussion of LGW, arguing that its narrator "frustrates love conventions that are constructed around the author's presumed heteronormativity" and "privileges literary learning over lived experience within a gendered hierarchical structure."

Reprints seventeen critical studies of LGW published between 1904 and 2003, several excerpted from larger works. The introduction by Hartwell summarizes the plot of LGW, with little commentary on LGWP, and comments on the plots and sources of the…

Studies Ovid's "Tristia" and LGW and argues that "Ovid's literary autobiography" revealed in the "Tristia" is "assimilated and elaborated" by Chaucer in LGWP. This connection not only allows Chaucer "to convey . . . a sense of his own Ricardian,…

Argues that Chaucer reformulates "mythocultural memory" in LGW when he depicts traditional male heroes as "diminished men," neither valorous nor gentle. By deconstructing the "structurally adamant images of the Greco-Roman male," the poet escapes…

Attributes Chaucer's assertion of St. Augustine's "gret compassioun" for Lucrece as a rape victim (LGW, 1691) to the poets' unmediated first-hand knowledge of Book I of the "City of God," clarifying Augustine's sympathy for rape victims, arguing that…

Argues that Gavin Douglas's construction of Honour and Venus in the "Palyce of Honour," though misogynistic, constitutes a complex allegorical response to Chaucer's model of literary renovation in the HF.

Clarifies "two distinct modes of ekphrasis, the literal and the literary," exploring how and where they are deployed in HF (storm at sea and wall paintings of Dido and Aeneas) and in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (castle description and Gawain's…

Considers the "temporal hybridity" of late medieval engagements with the matter of Troy, including discussion of the "epistemological legitimization of a poetics of innovation" in HF that extends into early modern treatments of the material, evident…

Interprets HF as 'an experiment in the exercise of poetic memory and poetic composition" that "suggests that memory's anarchic associations cannot fully be controlled," in part because of differences between "the memory of things and the memory of…

Argues that Equat exemplifies how late medieval writers blended "theoretical and practical material, exploiting the flexibility of the vernacular and moulding it to their needs." Following Kari Anne Rand, treats Equat as the work of John Westwyk…

Discusses previous scholarship on line 1315 of BD, and suggests that emending the line to “Gan [hym] homwarde for to ryde" brings it into conformance with the rest of this "briskly tetrametric poem."

Ecocritical examination of the depiction of the sea in the Ceyx and Alcyone episode of BD, focusing on its shorelessness, comparing it with analogous accounts and with the representation of water in John of Trevisa's "On the Properties of Things,"…

Presents a modern English translation of the facing-page 1868 edition of Chaucer’s Bo. Claims in introduction that “this is not a work of scholarship but of love and gratitude.” Adjusts "punctuation and paragraphing of the Middle English text in…

Includes comments on how "Godfridus super Palladium," Astr, and "The Book of John Mandeville"--found together in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS e Musaeo 116--share concern with "possible future[s]" and with “the role of practical or instructional…

Considers the medieval folding almanac as a tool to access information, examining British Library, MS Harley 937, the prologue of which uses Astr "to explain its intention to satisfy its uneducated reader," posing Astr as a "model for its…

Presents evidence from a "description of a manuscript of Chaucer’s 'Treatise on the Astrolabe' that appeared in a sale catalogue in 1843." This description, because it doesn’t correspond to any known, available copies, suggests another manuscript of…

Describes in detail an astrolabe--Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum/Zeughaus, Innsbruck, inv. no. 2957, U215--and relates it to other fourteenth-and fifteenth-century English astrolabes labeled "Chaucerian" because their "strapwork" is similar to…