Zhang, Lian.
American Notes and Queries 32, no. 2 (2019): 78–79.
Reports that two Taiwanese "translations" of CT (by fabricated translators) were actually reprints/adaptations of Fang Zhong's translation from mainland China.
De Looze, Laurence.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997.
Defines a genre that "plays with questions of truth, authority, and the relationship between the life 'in' a book and life 'outside' a book," a genre that both asserts autobiographical verity and calls "into question the possibility that the…
Mel resembles several other late-fourteenth-century retellings of this story as a proper model for wifely imitation. In using the form of the scholastic arts lecture, however, Prudence co-opts a masculine discursive style and its authoritative…
Pakkala-Weckström, Mari.
Chaucer Review 35: 399-411, 2001.
The debate between Prudence and Melibee is the struggle for "maistrie" between husband and wife. Learned and sophisticated, Prudence exhibits "feminine powers of persuasion." She changes from being "humble and respectful" to being "impatient,"…
The vivid association of the dramatic action of TC with its physical settings reflects a medieval rhetorical technique whereby architectural images ("loci") were employed as aids to organization and memory. The perception of the significance of…
Brewer, Derek.
Danielle Buschinger and Arlette Sancery, eds. Mélanges de langue, littérature et civilisation offerts à André Crépin à l'occasion de son quatre-vingtième anniversaire (Amiens: Presses du Centre d'Études Médiévales, Université de Picardie-Jules Verne, 2008), pp. 59-62.
Considers friendly and hostile relationships, commenting on GP and TC.
Landman, James [H.]
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998): 1-39.
In MLT, the torment of Constance is explicitly linked with the judicial torture of Alla's messenger. A notion of a "single, certain truth" underlies the concern with torture in the Tale, also reflected in the attitude toward fiction expressed in MLP…
Park, Youngwon.
Medieval English Studies 06 (1998): 163-95.
KnT reveals a providential pattern that is both Boethian and Pauline--"all things work together for the good." The gods of the Tale are pagan, but the outcome of the story shows Christian Providence.
Pelen, Marc M.
Papers on Language and Literature 30 (1994): 132-56.
The narratives of Trevet and Gower turn the story of Constance into a secular moral fable. Similarly, "the Man of Law exposes himself to Chaucer's irony ...: it is this transcendent freedom from the moral content of the legend that the Man of Law…
Whiting, Bartlett Jere, with the collaboration of Helen Wescott Whiting
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1968.
Lists proverbs, proverbial phrases, and sententia from early English writings, arranged alphabetically by topic, with quotations and citations of multiple occurrences in chronological order and indexes of important words and proper nouns. Chaucer is…
Illustrates Chaucer's "comic misapplication" of "monitory elements" as a device of characterization in CT, discussing how the misapplied expressions of traditional wisdom can be used cleverly (as with Nicholas in MilT), foolishly (John in MilT and…
Cannon, Christopher.
Textual Practice 24 (2010): 407-34.
Explores medieval definitions and aesthetic responses to proverbs by examining "The Proverbs of Alfred" and Mel, exploring how each depends upon "acts of recognition that are produced by the repetition of well-worn truths." Both works are examples of…
Taylor, Karla.
Stephen A. Barney, ed. Chaucer's Troilus: Essays in Criticism (Hamden, Conn.: Shoestring Press, 1980), pp. 277-96.
In conflating love and poetics in TC, Chaucer uses proverbs both to validate truth and to express the limitations of traditional language. The attempt to secure stability through this language and the failure of the attempt are part of Chaucer's…
An introduction to the study of proverbs (paremiology), covering definition and classification, several examples over time, scholarly approaches, and analyses of the contexts in which proverbs appear (e.g., song, advertising, cartoons, and…
Winick, Stephen D.
Proverbium: Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship 11 (1994): 259-81.
Challenges B. J. Whiting's (1934) intuitive definition of proverbs and offers an ethnographic definition, focusing on "strategies" of performance of the proverbs in CT and TC and the utility of proverbs in effecting "normalization, valorization, and…
Unique Scottish attribution of "Walton's Prosperity" (a copy of "Index" 2820) to Chaucer in British Library MS Cotton Vitellius E. xi suggests fifteenth-century reception of Chaucer as "fount of proverbial wisdom."
Stanley, E. G.
Notes and Queries 260 (2015): 358-60.
Given his "frequent equivocalness" on matters of high seriousness, there is good reason to believe that Prov, a "riddling poem" (NIMEV 3914), is Chaucer's work, philologists' objections on the basis of its inaccurate "compace"/"embrace" rhyme…
Bradbury, Nancy Mason.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 28 (2006): 237-42.
Bradbury addresses Chaucer's uses of proverbs as a "crucial" form of "quoting behavior"--a form of "soft source" important to Chaucer's art and its reception in manuscripts and early editions. Draws examples from KnT and refers to uses of proverbs in…
Ames, Ruth M.
Paul E. Szarmach and Bernard S. Levy, eds. The Fourteenth Century. Acta 4. (Binghampton: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, SUNY Binghampton, 1977), pp. 87-105.
Drawing on exegetical tradition, Chaucer effectively combines piety and irreverence in his handling of biblical themes and characters. In Mel and MLT he presents Old Testament platitudes and stereotypes as practical moral guides, while in MilT and…
Dwyer, June.
Studies in Short Fiction 35: 307-18, 1998.
Two possible versions of women's attitudes toward violence appear in WBPT: WBT idealizes women as a civilizing force working to curb male violence; WBP portrays a woman who uses violence when other means of control fail. Both constructs of female…
Yeager, Stephen M.
Critical Inquiry 45 (2019): 747-61.
Focuses on how protocol, a term for systems of rules allowing communication and behavior, is frequently used in digital environments, and builds on Alexander Galloway’s comparison of internet protocol to chivalry in "Protocol: How Control Exists…
