Browse Items (16035 total)

Questions assumptions about Chaucer's authorial practices and challenges J. L. Lowes's theory that F is the earlier version of LGWP. G may be earlier, a hypothesis that accounts for structural differences in the two versions and for numerous lexical…

Chaucer's tale of Hypsipyle and Medea (LGW 4) shares verbal features with the "Gest Historyale of the Destruction of Troy" and the "Laud Troy Book." Not derived from one another, they may go back to an earlier Middle English translation.

In contrast to the uniformity specified in LGWP, the legends themselves, when examined in light of the nominalist principle of particularized language, reveal widely differing heroines, not indistinguishable victims. ShT functions as pattern; CYT as…

The placement of Chaucer's PF in MS Bodley 638, MS Laud Misc. 416, and MS Digby 181 suggests that the poem can be interpreted, respectively, as suggesting the value of courtly love, stressing the importance of "proper governance," and illustrating an…

In PF, personal happiness and community service result when proper choices are made. Lovers must be aware of their individual roles in society.

The summary of "Somnium Scipionis" is closely linked with the dream, distinguishing the past narrator, who reads the "somnium" and dreams the dream, from the present narrator, who summarizes the "Somnium" and his dream. (In Japanese.)

The artistry of Chaucer's poetry is influenced by his historical role as a "negociis regis" employed to argue, persuade, and "embrace opposing doctrines" in the name of the king. Chaucer's skill as a negotiator can be seen in TC, wherin Criseyde,…

"Bear the bell" (TC 3.198) is best explained through a Welsh phrase in Dafydd ap Gwilym referring to falconry. Falcons wore bells, and the phrase meant "to be pre-eminent."

Ovid's Narcissus becomes polysemous, generating figures of language among "Pearl" (Dreamer as Narcissus); TC (narrator's drawing on the myth for rhetoric to link pagan and Christian); "Piers Plowman B" (Christian Narcissus and "dreamer-Will"); and…

Sixteen essays or portions of longer works, all pertaining to metafictive or metatextual aspects of TC as a self-conscious work of literature. Each includes a synoptic introduction. For the nine essays that are here published for the first time,…

Contrasts Chaucer's depictions of desire in TC with source passages in Boccaccio's "Filostrato" and with a passage in Dante's "Purgatorio." Chaucer's depiction is based on the "impoverished" view of desire presented in Boethius's "Consolation" and…

Examines the roles of loss and violence in the construction of feminine figures in chivalric literature, considering such constructions in light of fourteenth-century social history. In TC, Chaucer considers the relation between heroism and suffering…

In Filostrato, Troilo's accurate decoding of Criseyde's language enables him to discover her reciprocal desire, leading to fulfillment. In TC, fulfillment is more complex as Troilus, Pandarus, and the narrator each construct their own meaning of…

In TC 1, the narrator's initial confidence that Troilus is an exemplary figure conflicts with the reader's growing awareness of the narrator's limited knowledge of love and its conventions, paralleling Troilus's own movement from confidence to…

The unresolved ending of TC capitalizes on concern with means and ends throughout the poem, encouraging readers to resist the illusion of closure in any act of interpretation.

Echoes of Dante's "Commedia" in TC are not ironic. In each poem, love is religious, even theological, reflected in the characters' Christian references in TC. The poems are distinct not as Christian is distinct from pagan but as comedy is distinct…

Explains Fortune as a figure that embodies historical flux and affirms aristocratic privilege. In TC, references to Fortune do not provide a philosophical norm against which to test the attitudes of the characters; the references assert politically…

Troilus and Criseyde fall in love through looking, here analyzed through medieval optical science, as a literary convention, and as a gendered social taboo. Stanbury contrasts the activity, passivity, and willfulness of Criseyde's gaze with that of…

Compares how Dante's Paolo and Francesca fall in love with the process of Criseyde's falling in love. Each poet self-consciously depicts love, but whereas Dante maintains a conventional view of his feminine character, Chaucer discloses the…

The occasions, imagery, and verbal play of the lyrical interludes in TC clarify Criseyde's role as a Christian archetype, one who leads Troilus from self-absorption to transcendence but who nevertheless remains ambiguous in her own silence and her…

In TC, "shall" and "will" are important "to the characterization and overall modal texture." Chaucer appears to adumbrate John Wallis's seventeenth-century formula that "shall" expresses the speaker's determination to perform the intended action,…

Compares the rhetoric of the passages in "Filostrato" and TC in which Criseyde first sees Troilus outside her window. Chaucer combines his own "fictional vision" with rhetorical and narrative conventions drawn from Ovid and romance to create the…

Richly rhetorical and allusive, Chaucer's "Go, litel bok" stanza, in its undercutting of the opposition between "makyng" and "poesye," reflects his ambivalence toward the new classicizing poetics of trecento Italy.

Permeating Chaucer's writing, Augustinian psychology and philosophy can be foregrounded in interpreters' theater productions of TC.

The discourse of antifraternalism is important in understanding Pandarus's role in relation to Troilus and, especially, Criseyde. Havely examines words that form part of that discourse.