Ensley, Mimi.
Journal of the Early Book Society 18 (2015): 136–57.
Establishes that John Harington owned a copy of William Thynne's 1542 edition of Chaucer's complete works and may have annotated it when he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Comments on Harington's annotations and speculates on communal reading…
Knox, Philip, Mark Griffith, and William Poole.
Medium Aevum 85.1 (2016): 33-58.
Proposes that prefatory verses published in Kynaston's Latin translation of TC demonstrate a high degree of academic interest in Chaucer in seventeenth-century Oxford. Several verses praise Kynaston by criticizing Chaucer's "rudeness," but others…
Fuller, David.
Corinne Saunders, ed. A Concise Companion to Chaucer (Malden, Mass.; Oxford; and Victoria: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 263-84.
Fuller insists that sound is "intrinsic to meaning" in reading Chaucer, commenting on the importance of metrical patterns and syntactic structures, appropriate intonation and pace, and pronunciation of final -e. Although it is difficult to…
McClellan, William.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Applies a "New Paradigm for Reading" to MLT based on the "new ethics" of Giorgio Agamben's analysis of Levi Primo's testimony of Auschwitz, combined with Walter Benjamin's concept of "constellations" of images that fuse past and present. Focuses on…
Rogerson, Margaret.
Jan Shaw, Philippa Kelly, and L. E. Semler, eds. Storytelling: Critical and Creative Approaches (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 167–80.
Observes how KnT signals transitions, scene changes, gestures, and even costuming, perhaps inspiring Shakespeare and Fletcher to create "The Two Noble Kinsmen" by dividing the Chaucer poem into written "parts" for actors before assembling their…
Travis, Peter W.
James J. Paxson, Lawrence M. Clopper, and Sylvia Tomasch, eds. The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer and the Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 161-81.
In the opening of NPT, Chaucer investigates the exemplary form, both honoring the aesthetic persuasion of Geoffrey of Vinsauf and of Horace and-through parody-undercutting prescriptive notions that narrative must have a predominant sense and readers'…
Although Astr can be read as "unmarked," or neutral in relation to issues of cultural otherness, its source in Messahala's Arabic treatise and its enfigurement of the astrolabe as feminine indicate that we can and should treat it (with other…
Jones, Timothy S.
Sheila Delany, ed. Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 109-32.
Surveys various allusions to and summaries of the story of David in English medieval tradition (including allusions in MLT, MerT, and Mel), arguing that treatments of the story reveal simultaneous desires: to embrace Hebrew Scripture as authentic and…
Prendergast, Thomas A.
In Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld, eds. Chaucer and the Subversion of Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 149-64.
Shows how PhyT both frustrates formal classification and foregrounds problems of reading and interpretation. Virginia is a text who is "misread" and rewritten by Apius, Virginius, Harry Bailly, and even Virginia herself.
Reid, Lindsay Ann.
Comparative Drama 55 (2021): 211–33.
Focuses on depictions of Dido in HF and in Shakespeare's "Titus," arguing that "Shakespeare found in Chaucer's "House of Fame" a medieval vernacular model for . . . [the] Virgilian-Ovidian hybridity" of the character, and showing that the two works…
Crick, Julia, and Daniel Wakelin.
Orietta Da Rold and Elaine Treharne, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval British Manuscripts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 49-75.
Surveys late medieval insular scripts, and discusses evident efforts to imitate anglicana formata in a stanza inserted into the roundel of PF in Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.4.27--added by a scribe who seems to have been "more accustomed to…
Teaching in the humanities should entail continual reconstituting of relevance. Detailed analysis of the portraits of Briseis/Criseyde in the "Roman de Troie," TC, and the "Testament of Cresseid"--even apart from the long works in which they…
Zieman, Katherine Grace.
Dissertation Abstracts International 59 (1998): 818A.
Late-medieval liturgical activities--especially benefactions and the education that lay behind them--resulted from a variety of conditions and motives and produced a volatile environment that influenced the rise of vernacular literacy.
Moulton, Ian Frederick, ed.
Turnhout: Brepols, 2004.
Nine essays by various authors on reading habits and the trope of reading in the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. The introduction by Moulton (ix-xviii) comments on evidence of reading practice in GP and other literature and summarizes…
Demonstrates the "openness" and "dynamic character" of the CT text by detailing how early scribes and editors dealt with various lacuna left by Chaucer.
Sherman, Mark A.
Dissertation Abstracts International 53 (1992): 163A.
The two great poems of Chaucer and Spenser employ poetics even closer to each other than previously recognized. Just as Th in contrast to KnT revises perception of CT, Spenser's Thopas subverts orthodox interpretation. Both poems, by deferring…
The influence of KnT on Conrad's "The Lagoon" is evident in several details, in narrative method, and, more distantly, in the fact that each is written in English that is "unfixed and de-centered."
Steiner, Emily.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Discusses the literary and historical contexts of Langland's poetics, and argues that the poem's "multilingualism makes it an exemplary English poem." Chapter 2, "Learning (B.8-12)," refers to WBT, MilT, and ClT.
Driver, Martha W.
Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray, eds. Shakespeare and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Performance and Adaptation of the Plays with Medieval Sources or Settings (Jefferson, N. C.: McFarland, 2009), pp. 140-60.
Focusing on Oberon and the mechanicals, Driver explores how medieval romances influenced Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and twentieth-century adaptations of it, observing the influences of KnT, Th, and other romances.
Johnston, Hope.
Studies in Bibliography 59 (2015): 45-70.
Links books as physical objects with customized Chaucer editions. Reviews how owners of early Chaucer editions customized their copies by adding "memorial inscriptions, title-page embellishments, and portraits inserted as frontispieces." As a result…
Stevenson, Kay Gilliland.
Chaucer Review 24 (1989): 1-19.
In BD, Chaucer examines the reader and the poet within the fiction of his narrative, while at the same time rereading and rewriting contemporary French poets.
Dinshaw, Carolyn.
Yale Journal of Criticism: Interpretation in the Humanities 1 (1988): 81-105.
The widely separate and influential readings of TC by E. Talbot Donaldson and D. W. Robertson, Jr., while based on diametrically opposed theoretical principles, nevertheless find themselves in areement by virtue of their attempt to effect some manner…
