An anthology of criticism, with a brief introduction (pp. vii-ix) that characterizes CT as "unique" because "no other work so fragmentary creates such an illusion of completeness." The volume reprints essays and excerpts by twenty-one writers,…
Steadman, John M.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972.
Studies the "flight episode," Troilus's laughter, and the location of the eighth sphere in TC "against the background of the apotheosis tradition [Lucan, Cicero, Dante, Boccaccio, and various commentaries] and the conventions of classical…
Kendrick, Laura.
Susanna Fein and David Raybin, eds. Chaucer: Visual Approaches (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), pp. 116-38.
Compares Chaucer's and Deschamps's poetic critiques of the "comedy of drunkenness," examining passages in GP, MLT, PardP, and ManP as well as Deschamps's chanson royale "Sur l'ordre de la Baboue" (included, with translation, in an appendix). Traces…
Contrasts Gower's and Chaucer's depictions of alchemy in, respectively, the "Confessio Amantis" and CT, and analyzes what these narratives reveal about the poets' views of money and economy. Unlike the depiction of money in Book V of the "Confessio,"…
The last tales of CT form a closing sequence of transformation: SNT (conversion fervor in the early church), CYT (alchemical madness of fourteenth-century England), ManT (debasing of myth), and ParsT (change of soul through penitence), as Chaucer…
Hermann, John P.
Chaucer Review 19 (1985): 302-37.
The theme of dismemberment initially voiced in the metaphor of the "forstraught" hare (line 1295) reverberates throughout the tale, giving rise to secondary themes of exchange of roles and dissemination of vows, underpinned by references to saints'…
Bodden, M. C.
Jennifer C. Vaught, ed., with Lynne Dickson Bruckner. Grief and Gender: 700-1700 (New Yorl: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 51-63.
In FranT and ClT, masculine grief is aligned with courtly ideals of gentility; feminine grief, with courtly suffering. By complicating these associations and disallowing consolation of grief, Chaucer intervenes in the "discursive practices" of the…
Late medieval manuscript illuminations show Danes and other northern pagans with costumes and weapons that are emblematic of the Near East. Like MLT and Gower's Tale of Constance, these images indicate that the term Saracen included various…
Examines "The King of Tars," "The Siege of Jerusalem," and KnT in order to demonstrate that identity, however embodied, was unfixed in these works and perhaps in the later Middle Ages at large.
Recounts the aims and accomplishments of the modernization of Chaucer edited by Horne in 1840-41, with contributions by Leigh Hunt, William Wordsworth, and Elizabeth Barrett, among others. Correspondence helps to clarify what individual contributors…
Travis, Peter W.
Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010.
Reads NPT as Chaucer's self-reflexive "ars poetica," a Menippean parody of the complexities of engaging with language and literature. Through subtle play with the traditional liberal arts education, especially the trivium, NPT explores imitation,…
Assesses the "artistic role" in TC of the narrator--a commentator and a "historian [who] meticulously maintains a distance between himself and the events in the story." Explores "temporal, spatial, aesthetic, and religious" devices in the poem…
Kallas, Piotr.
In Magdalena Grabowska, Grzegorz Grzegorczyk, and Piotr Kallas, eds. Narrativity in Action (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2017), pp. 77-100.
Describes (and reiterates) appreciation of Ricardian culture, exploring ways that Chaucer evokes a strong sense of contemporary London in CT and how, in "The Clerkenwell Tales," Peter Ackroyd evokes a similar sense of reality.
Criseyde's statement that she lacks Prudence's third eye should be understood in the context of Augustine's theories of time and intentionality and the philosophical realism on which they draw. Her observation points up her failure to see…
Hernández Pérez, María Beatriz.
SELIM 11 (2001-2002): 29-47.
Assesses "The Assembly of Ladies" in light of several Chaucerian techniques, particularly his use of a disarming narrative persona. The relatively straightforward female narrative persona of "Assembly" is unlike the narrator of LGW, although both…
Tabulates and analyzes various combinations of Middle English infinitive markers--the -e(n) ending, the particle "to," and the particle phrase "for to"--finding that they occur in no identifiable grammatical or semantic patterns of distribution in…
Hsy, Jonathan.
In Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld, eds. Chaucer and the Subversion of Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 85-98.
Reads the tragedies that constitute MkT as disability narratives, exploring how formal strategies within stanzaic units interface with a thematic focus on bodily disorder. MkT enacts a "symbiotic relationship between literary form and social…
Bitot, Michel, ed., with Roberta Mullini and Peter Happe.
Tours: Universite Francois Rabelais, 1996.
Twenty-eight essays by various authors addressing Chaucer, Langland, medieval drama (English, Spanish, and French), Malory, Thomas More, and Renaissance drama, especially Shakespeare. For four essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Divers Toyes…
Choi, Yejung, and Ji-soo Chang.
Medieval and Early Modern English Studies 12 (2004): 225-56.
The authors critique several Korean translations of CT published since the early 1960s: those by J. Kim, B. Song, Dong-il Lee and Dongchoon Lee, and another attributed to J. Kim.
Gauges the implications of the wide range of musical images in GP, exploring the exegetical roots of Chaucer's uses of these images, and assessing concord, discord, and silence as indicators of moral approval or censure. Chaucer's uses are not…
Cooper, Helen.
Rachel Stenner, Tamsin Badcoe, and Gareth Griffith, eds. Rereading Chaucer and Spenser: Dan Geffrey with the New Poete (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), pp. 60-74.
Identifies parallels between Chaucer's and Spenser's depictions of ranges and varieties of love-relationships in PF; TC; CT; and "The Faerie Queene," books III–IV. Introduced via allusion to FranT, Britomart is central to Spenser's collection of…
Alberghini, Jennifer.
Dissertation Abstracts International A80.08 (2019): n.p.
Studies tensions between family approval and the consent of marital couples in late medieval England and its literature, arguing that TC and LGW offer conflicting views of the tension while MLT resolves it.
Zanoni, Mary Louise.
Dissertation Abstracts International 42 (1982): 5115A.
Chaucer's use of philosophy, classic and medieval, goes far beyond Boethius. KnT explores order and disorder in terms of scholasticism; TC treats will and determinism in the light of views from Augustine to Bradwardine; and NPT subtly inverts…
Studies the tradition in which God speaks through humans and the proto-reformation implications of literary texts where the laity use speech usually reserved for priests. Chapter 4, "Cursed Speakers," considers the carter's and old woman's curses in…
Olhoeft, Janet Ellen.
Dissertation Abstracts International 44 (1984): 2143A-44A.
Polarities in Chaucer's work lead the reader to nonjudgmental acceptance of opposites through involvement with characters,triangular relationships, and language.
