Gaylord, Alan T.
Chaucer Yearbook 1 (1992): 87-109.
Riches of tone and ambiguities encourage us to read Chaucer's poetry silently. Oral performances can illuminate and entertain, but they limit perception of range and depth of meaning. Gaylord examines unpunctuated portions of the Prioress's sketch,…
Includes previously published essays on English medieval writers, including Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve, and Ranulph Higden. Contains one unpublished essay, "Towards a Bohemian Reading of Troilus and Criseyde." Topics are divided into subsections:…
Rigby, Stephen H.
Stephen H. Rigby, ed., with the assistance of Alastair J. Minnis. Historians on Chaucer: The "General Prologue" to the "Canterbury Tales" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 1-23.
Introduces a collection of essays and emphasizes how different social, historical, and ethical "interpretative frameworks" can deepen an understanding of Chaucer's pilgrims in GP.
Matthews, David.
Frank Grady, ed. The Cambridge Companion to "The Canterbury Tales" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 233-37.
Discusses how professors can help students approach difficult texts such as CT, whether by helping students choose good translations or by sharing methods with non-medievalists, in particular modernists, who also confront hard-to-read.
materials.
Interlinear translation in modern English of the selections from Chaucer in the 8th edition of the "Norton Anthology of English Literature" (2006), edited by Alfred David and James Simpson. Includes GP, MilPT, MLE, WBPT, PardPT, NPT, ParsP, Ret,…
Ishiharada, Masahiro.
Hisayuki Sasamoto et al., eds. Hearts to the English-American Language and Literature: Essays Presented to Emeritus Professor Sutezo Hirose in Honour of His 88th Birthday (Osaka: Osaka Kyoiku Tosho, 1999), pp. 19-39 (in Japanese)
Collates variants between manuscripts and modern printed editions of GP, based on the catalog of variants in Manly and Rickert and the Variorum GP.
Collette, Carolyn P.
Christoph Huber and Henrike Lähnemann, eds. Courtly Literature and Clerical Culture / Höfische Literatur und Klerikerkultur / Littérature courtoise et culture cléricale. Selected Papers from the Tenth Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, Universitat Tübingen, Deutschland, 28 Juli-3 August 2001 (Tübingen: Attempto, 2002), pp. 177-94.
Collette reads the end of CT against Philippe de Mézières' "Songe du vieil pelerin," indicating Chaucer's connections with contemporary Anglo-French literature and exploring the relations between politics and morality in four Tales: alchemy as a…
Rose, Christine M.
Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose, eds. Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 21-60.
Rose surveys instances of rape or threatened rape in Chaucer's works, arguing that, though Chaucer presents rape as a trope that enfigures reader response or male competition, we must recognize and confront its literal value, accepting it both in…
Gaston, Kara.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Considers Chaucer's writings and their Italian influences, arguing for a view of Chaucer's poetry and its form over time, tracing "form as an object of discovery, rather than of recovery, and reading as a way of actively participating in the history…
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.
