Browse Items (16012 total)

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…

Examines the textual witnesses for issues of authorship and attribution, as well as the various forms in which Sted survives.

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."

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.

Studies uses in late medieval England of French lyric models (formes fixes) as "reparative" translation of francophone culture, and response to linguistic and political trends and tensions of the Hundred Years War. Includes discussion of Chaucer's…

Argues that Chaucer is a "philosophical poet" who "innovated a radical, anti-teleological poetics of contingency," showing how in CYT, ClT, TC, and HF he "reworks his sources to articulate his vision of contingency, and contest humanist narratives of…

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.

Translation of CT into Portuguese verse. Item not seen; not listed in WorldCat.

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…

Contradictions inherent in medieval social order are evident in the sources of Mel, but Chaucer reconciles these contradictions through his treatment of pity.

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.

Argues that two distinct scribal attitudes toward the Wife of Bath can be perceived: a misogynous scholarly response typical of one manuscript family, and a more sympathetic popular response typical of another. Considers evidence from WBP,…

Ingham urges a "contrapuntal" postcolonial approach to premodern texts - i.e., an approach that observes differences and distinctions that are oppositional without overdetermining them. She explores how Chaucer's MLT and Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"…

Compares ShT with "Decameron" 8.1 to assess the negative and positive characteristics of masculinity portrayed in the monk and merchant of the Tale. The wife is given traits identified with men in the Middle Ages, perhaps because of the Tale's…

A word list from TC 4 shows that Chaucer invented new meanings by combining previously unconnected root words; however, someone else may have introduced those roots into the language.

William Empson writes of the concentrated imagery and controlled partial confusion in TC. In book 5, Chaucer manipulates the imagery of the voyage, star-steer, sun-son, etc., to bring the poem to its climax, wherein the narrator cannot indict…

Jasper examines Petruchio's use of clothing as a form of gender control in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, comparing it with similar uses of clothing in versions of the Griselda story-Boccaccio's, Petrarch's, ClT, and John Phillips's "The…

As an example of popular folk narrative, "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle" is flexibly open to multiple interpretations. Addressed to an elite audience, Gower's "Tale of Florent" and WBT lay claim to authority and function as exempla.

Treats "Thebes" and the Prologue to "Beryn" (here called "The Canterbury Interlude") as "efforts to write what Chaucer had left unwritten" and to confront contemporary controversies. Lydgate's work rebukes those who would critique monasticism and…

An introduction to the study of literature for classroom use, arranged by literary mode and focused thematically on social, religious, and literary controversies. Includes a section titled "Medieval and Modern Chaucer" (pp. 457-81) that raises…

Modern critical theory demonstrates the radically traditional closed systems of medieval poetry. In his negative examples and examples of abuse and falsification, especially in TC, Chaucer is also aware of what the classical tradition "is not."

Compares Mars with the "Ovide moralisé" and examines its adaptations of the "aubade, the complaint, the Valentine-tradition (Gower and Graunson), and the conventions of courtly love"--as inflected by Chaucer's own concerns and "personality," and…

Treats KnT as a traditional, conservative work, elevated in tone and style and dependent on "French and Italian traditions of eloquence." Conversely GP is the "most original of Chaucer's poems," innovative in its "mingling" of "praise and blame"…