Waters, Claire McMartin.
Dissertation Abstracts International 59 (1999): 4423A.
Focuses on the association of preaching and the preacher's body in medieval tradition, exploring the association through traditional identification of women and the body. Women preachers of hagiographic tradition and various exemplary women…
In Chaucer's day the Epistle was regarded as canonical. In James 3.3-10, the theme is the tongue, the use and abuse of language--the theme not only of the Manciple's mother's advice but of the tale itself.
Argues that Chaucer intended to complete SqT, evident in the fact that the Franklin's interruption is unjustified or inconsistent with the characterization of the Franklin in several ways.
Pearcy, Roy J.
English Language Notes 11 (1974): 167-75.
Documents various "medieval representations of Hell's Mouth," and suggests that the example in ManP (9.35-40) complements the concern with Last Judgment in ParsP.
Brosnahan, Leger.
Studies in Philology 58 (1961): 468-82.
Reviews and evaluates discussions of the authenticity of "the six-line continuation and the final couplet of the Nun's Priest's epilogue," agreeing on textual grounds with the "traditional judgment of scholars" that the lines are "inauthentic" and…
Pigg, Daniel F.
Albrecht Classen and Connie Scarborough, eds. Crime and Punishment in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), pp. 347-58.
Argues that PhyT not only addresses changes in the medieval social power structure, but also serves as a "critique of masculine power" within the medieval European court system.
Burger, Glenn.
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. 117-30.
The actions of the Host and the Pardoner in fragment 6 connect PhyT and PardT and their respective tellers, bringing "the male body into view to an extent not seen elsewhere" in CT.
Read in the light of late medieval letter collections and conduct manuals for women, the comedy of ShT springs from a recognition of the merchant's wife's "clever manipulation of her roles: as hostess, social networker, housekeeper, business…
Ellis, Deborah S.
Carole Levin and Jeanie Watson, eds. Ambiguous Realities (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1987), pp. 99-113.
Associations of the home and domestic situation with "ambiguity, insecurity, and women's vulnerability" are most effective in TC and ClT. In the medieval home, the hall was the domain of the male and open to public affairs; the chamber was the…
Salisbury, Eve, Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn Price, eds.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.
Thirteen essays by various authors discuss the portrayal of domestic violence in medieval literary, iconographic, legal, religious, and dramatic texts, focusing on how the texts reflect the family as a microcosm of society. For essays that pertain to…
Hamaguchi, Keiko.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 26 (2004): 331-54.
Explores the "postcolonial uneasiness visible" in KnT, particularly in Hippolyta's subversive mimicry in the face of efforts by Theseus and the Knight to westernize her "Amazon-ness." Emelye's powerful gaze upon the victorious Arcite reveals similar…
Osborn, Marijane.
Helen Damico and John Leyerle, eds. Heroic Poetry in the Anglo-Saxon Period: Studies in Honor of Jess B. Bessinger, Jr. Studies in Medieval Culture, no. 32 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993), pp. 313-30.
Argues against over-ingenious readings of the dayraven in "Beowulf" and of the stone with which Alison threatens Absalon in MilT (3708, 3712), clarifying the commonplace nature of each.
Romance typically treats ambiguous doubles, threatened incest,and the unfallen world. Though SqT fits both genre and teller, it devalues the marvelous (e.g., the dry tree) and transmutes its components (analogously to but differently from CYT). The…
Ulrych, Margherita.
John Douthwaite and Domenico Pezzini, eds. Words in Action: Diachronic and Synchronic Approaches to English Discourse (Genoa, Italy: Culturali Internatzionali Genova, 2008), pp. 295-311.
Describes various kinds of mediation involved in interlingual, intralingual, and intersemiotic translation, and assesses the nature and degree of interpretation and originality in such mediation. Includes extended discussion of Ermanno Barisone's…
Morrison, Susan Signe.
Exemplaria 8 (1996): 97-123.
WBPT addresses the relationship between vernacular texts and female audiences. Vernacular translations of authoritative texts allow women to enter the discourse of power, creating a new discourse that validates not only the existence of a different…
Kuczynski, Michael P.
Chaucer Review 37: 315-28, 2003.
Scriptural injunctions underlie Chaucer's apology in MilP 1.3172-81 and his encouraging the audience to be cautious when judging his poetic enterprise.
Hahn, Thomas.
Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson, eds. Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015), pp. 41-59.
Provides a "newly broadened context for Chaucer's obsession with Dido," and looks at Chaucer's narrators in HF and LGW.
"Working within and yet exploding New Critical terminology," E. Talbot Donaldson's studies of Chaucer's irony--exemplified in his writing on Criseyde--are grounded in his deep understanding of rhetoric. They anticipate Linda Hutcheon's theory of…
In juxtaposition to D. W. Robertson's comprehensive historicist method, E. Talbot Donaldson's "fundamentally rhetorical mode of analysis" also constituted a historicist approach, but one that moved from philological detail "toward some larger whole,"…
Revisiting E. Talbot Donaldson's scholarship provokes nostalgia as well as the recognition that, for Donaldson, "poems of the order of Chaucer's arouse feelings as well as thoughts, feelings based on the critic's own experience."
Goodman, Jennifer [R.]
Bonnie Wheeler, ed. Feminea Medievalia I: Representations of the Feminine in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Academia Press, 1993), pp. 69-90.
The desperation of the falcon in SqT and that of Dorigen in FranT link the two tales. Similar links include three sets of parallel relationships between older and younger men, as well as the notions of "trouthe" and fortitude in each tale's ending.
The riddle at the end of FranT-who is the most "fre"?-distracts the reader from the central issues of the Tale, namely the concept of the "Real" (Pierre Macherey) and questions of gender. Although Dorigen is apparently excluded from the answer to the…
