Shimodao, Makoto.
Yuko Tagaya and Kanno Masahiko eds. Words and Literature: Essays in Honour of Professor Masa Ikegami (Tokyo: Eihosha, 2004), pp. 181-97.
Simpson, James.
Gordon McMullan and David Matthews, eds. Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 17-30.
Whereas fifteenth-century writers such as Hoccleve, Lydgate, and Skelton wrote texts that engaged in "a kind of conversation" with Chaucer, sixteenth-century writers treated Chaucer as a distant topic of philological study. Simpson argues that this…
Jucker, Andreas H., and Irma Taavitsainen.
Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1: 67-95, 2000.
Anatomizes numerous examples of insults in English, from Unferth's challenge of Beowulf to "flaming" in e-mail communication, including examples from SNT, exchanges between the Host and the Cook, and exchanges between the Host and the Pardoner in CT.…
Penhallurick, Robert, and Adrian Willmott.
Robert Penhallurick, ed. Debating Dialect: Essays on the Philosophy of Dialect Study (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), pp. 5-43.
Locates the earliest efforts to identify Standard English in William of Malmesbury's comments on language and foreignness, arguing that awareness of foreignness (and little more) underlies the ideal of a standard. Comments on various discussions of…
McClellan, William T.
Dissertation Abstracts International 46 (1986): 3361A.
Instead of the single and individual voices that Kittredge found in CT, several voices may appear in a single tale. When analyzed by Bakhtin's discourse theory, ClT reveals not one but three distinct contending voices.
Dor, Juliette.
Robert Clark and Piero Boitani, eds. English Studies in Transition: Papers from the ESSE Inaugural Conference (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 107-19.
Custance's earnest belief in a Christian deity is reflected in her prayers, while the narrator of MLT presents these prayers in the context of his own skeptical rhetorical questions. The tension between the two establishes the dialogic polyphony of…
Watson, Robert A.
Modern Philology 98: 543-76, 2001.
Watson coins the phrase "Ciceronian Platonism," defined as the "emphasis on the poetics of 'sermo'," suggesting that the earliest evidence of Chaucer's interest in the notion appears in BD, a poem offering "a Socratic therapy as filtered through both…
Item not seen. WorldCat records indicate that this volume of conference proceedings includes an essay entitled "De la Fée Morgane à la Femme de Bath de Chaucer"; no author indicated.
Spencer, Alice.
Kathleen A. Bishop, ed. "The Canterbury Tales" Revisited--21st Century Interpretations (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 228-55.
Explores tensions among the Boethian, Platonic form of Mel as a didactic dialogue, the Tale's practical Aristotelian subject matter, and its status as a compilation of composite proverbs. Reflecting a literate author, Mel modifies its sources and…
Studies the "Boethian dialogue model in literature concerned with courtly love," treating the literature as examples of dialogue rather than dream vision and examining the relationship between the hierarchical, upward-leading erotics of this…
Lynch, Kathryn L.
Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marin Leslie, eds. Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses), 1999, pp. 83-96.
PF represents an "oedipal moment"--a psychological suspension between the "male-dominated civilization of Africanus ('culture,' in a word)" and the "female-dominated love-garden of Nature and Venus ('nature')." The narrator stands "on the brink of…
Butterfield, Ardis.
London Review of Books, 27 August 2015, pp. 42-43.
Contemplates the writing of a literary biography of Chaucer, considering the use of archival material, the "arcades" of Walter Benjamin, and psychoanalysis. Comments on the GP description of the Shipman.
Purdie, Rhiannon.
J. A. Burrow and Ian P. Wei, eds. Medieval Futures: Attitudes to the Future in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell, 2000), pp. 167-84.
Surveys the literary and historical context for medieval attitudes toward dicing, mentioning hazardry in PardT and the notion of divine intervention in the chances of trade in CYT.
Tambling, Jeremy.
English 64, no. 244 (2015): 42-64.
Analyzes the influence of Chaucer on several Romantic thinkers and their subsequent influence on Dickens, as well as Dickens's own reference and allusions to CT. Focuses on how "Our Mutual Friend" reflects medievalism in such aspects as the…
Straker, Scott-Morgan.
Martin Gosman, Arjo Vanderjagt, and Jan Veenstra, eds. The Growth of Authority in the Medieval West: Selected Proceedings of the International Conference, Groningen, 6-9 November 1997 (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1999), pp. 285-306.
Assesses Lydgate's responses to authority in "Troy Book": his rhetorical additions to Guido delle Colonne's "Historia destructionis Troiae" (his source), his freeing himself from the influence of TC (his model) by transforming Chaucer into an…
Newman Jonathan M.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 36 (2014): 103-38.
Explores the Ovidian "erotodidactic" combination of "ars amandi" and "ars dictandi" in TC, describing the similar "rhetorical view of love" in the "Rota Veneris" of Boncompagno de Signa. Focuses on Pandarus, letter-writing, and the manipulative…
Considine, John.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Surveys the making of English, German, Latin, and Greek dictionaries from 1500 to 1650, including the contributions of Franciscus Junius (among others). Discusses the unpublished manuscript of Junius's glossary to Chaucer and the place of Chaucer's…
The entry on Chaucer (pp. 213-15, written by Paul Bacquet) summarizes the poet's life and comments on his language, his prosody, and the importance of CT.
Green, Richard Firth.
Neophilologus 92 (2008): 351-58.
Chaucer's allusion to the legendary Welsh bard Glascurion in HF (line 1209) is paralleled by details that survive in the traditional ballad "Glasgerion," or "Glen Kindy." Echoes of the ballad tradition are also found in Gavin Douglas's "The Palice of…
Bestul reexamines the relevant evidence and shows that Chaucer lived at 179 Upper Thames Street rather than at 177. The study illuminates the history of scholarly politics and of conflicting "historical paradigms" behind the 1966 "Chaucer…
Studying CT alongside early and late versions of the Wycliffite Bible reveals examples of Chaucer's nearly direct quotations from LV and of his sympathy with developments in translation theory from EV to LV, which favored more idiomatic renderings of…
Hirsh, John C.
English Language Notes 37.4: 1-8, 2000.
Chaucer's many references to Rome in CT reflect an interest that originated in a visit there. In particular, classical associations and the decoration of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere illuminate the style and meaning of SNT. A visit to Rome may have…
Newman, Barbara.
Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, eds. Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 2003, pp. 135-55.
Traces two medieval constructions of Nature as goddess: the antifeminist tradition that runs from Alan de Lille through Jean de Meun to Chaucer's PF, and the relatively profeminist legacy of Heldris of Cornwall ("Roman de Silence") and Christine de…
