Bloomfield, Morton W.
Donald M. Rose, ed. New Perspectives in Chaucer Criticism (Norman Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1981), pp. 23-36.
We need an "over-all metaphysics" such as the fourteenth-century "Aristotelian ontology and psychology," or such modern systems as "phenomenology, Marxism, Heideggarian ontology, positivism,...existentialism, and Chomskyean rationalism" as approaches…
Vance, Sidney.
Sandra Ward Lott, S. G. Hawkins, and Norman McMillan, eds. Global Perspectives on Teaching Literature: Shared Visions and Distinctive Visions. (Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1993), pp. 101-108.
Observes parallels between WBT and the narrative of the matriarch Sogolon in the African (Mandingo) epic "Sundiata." Each includes a quest, a knowledgeable old hag, shape-shifting, and a version of rape. Such parallels enable us to "engage in a…
Begins with a discussion of "Chaucerian meanings" to investigate medieval textual production and verse translations from French to English, and considers how the "boundaries of the Chaucer canon have been established and defined by the inclusion and…
Both Jerome and Chaucer follow Paul in deploying "provocative women" to dramatize contemporary controversies over who may interpret scripture. The Wife of Bath performs exegesis even as she effectively likens her husbands to "exegetes whose sins…
Explores how Chaucer's characters in CT challenge the medieval social norm of community over "pryvetee" by telling tales that expose others' "pryvetee and obscure their own; by profession as a means of asserting individual power over one's pryvetee;…
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…
Archibald, Elizabeth.
Teresa Tavormina and R. F. Yeager, eds. The Endless Knot: Essays on Old and Middle English in Honor of Marie Borroff (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 161-75.
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."
Henningfeld, Diane Andrews.
Dissertation Abstracts International 55 (1995): 1945A.
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.
Strakhov, Elizaveta.
Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2022.
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…
Buchanan, Peter.
Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Oxford, 2021.
Dissertation Abstracts International C83.10(E) (2021).
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…
Lee, Brian S.
Susan Yager and Elise E. Morse-Gagné, eds. Interpretation and Performance: Essays for Alan Gaylord (Provo, UT: Chaucer Studio Press, 2013), pp. 199-210.
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.
Heffernan, Carol Falvo.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 94 (1995): 31-41.
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…
Harding, Wendy.
Colette Stévanovitch, ed. L'Articulation langue-littérature dans les textes médiévaux anglais (Nancy: Association des Médiévistes Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur, 2005), pp. 177-89.
Contradictions inherent in medieval social order are evident in the sources of Mel, but Chaucer reconciles these contradictions through his treatment of pity.
Pelen, Marc M.
Florilegium 10 (1991, for 1988): 107-25.
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.
Kennedy, Beverly.
Norman Blake and Peter Robinson, eds. The Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers, Volume II (London: King's College, Office for Humanities Communications, 1997), pp. 23-39.
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, Patricia Clare.
Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren, eds. Postcolonial Moves: Medieval Through Modern. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 47-ı70.
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"…
Beidler, Peter G.
Peter G. Beidler, ed. Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde (Cambridge; and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 131-42.
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…
Brewer, Derek S.
Michio Kawai, ed. Language and Style in English Literature: Essays in Honour of Michio Masui. The English Association of Hiroshima (Tokyo: Eihosha, 1991), pp. 27-52.
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…
