Browse Items (16345 total)

Pope's copy of Chaucer, with his own youthful annotations, still survives. And though his marking of the text shows careful perusal of it (especially Rom), these early annotations are ultimately not very revealing of Pope's maturer feelings about…

Challenges the traditional provenance of CT manuscript Oxford, Trinity College, MS 49, detaching it from Saffron Walden, and asserting that it was not donated to Trinity College by Sir Thomas Pope, founder of the college, but given by Thomas Unton,…

Argues that Pope's copy of Chaucer--the Hartleby copy of Speght's 1598 edition of Chaucer's "Works"--gives evidence of Pope's plan for reworking HF into his "Temple of Fame." Elsewhere in the volume, Pope's reader's marks are light.

Compares "Rape" 1.67-70, with ParsT I, 944-45, to show that Pope uses the Parson's "remedie agayns Leccherie."

Bennett artues that the pilgrimage frame of CT was influenced by Gregory's "Liber," particularly in presenting "a range of human types" and in suiting pastoral care to individual exigencies. The "Liber" has particular applications to Chaucer's…

Argues that in his reworking of HF as "The Temple of Fame," Alexander Pope "comprehensively repudiates the inconclusiveness" of Chaucer's work. Where Chaucer suggests "the contradictions and confusions" of literary tradition and authority, Pope…

The author explores some of the effects arising from polysyllables (i.e., here words with more than one stressed syllable), concentrating on those in rhyming position, especially words referring to worthynesse and gentillesse, the virtues credited to…

Critics generally gloss "embosen" as either "concealed in the woods" or "exhausted from the hunt." Examination of the word determines its precise meaning as a hunting term and also sheds light on Octovyen's hunt.

Disputes the assumption that "meten" and "dremen" are synonyms in Chaucer and illustrates systematic differentiation in WBT, NPT, BD, Rom, HF, Bo, and TC (plus other, non-Chaucerian texts). In general, the late fourteenth century is a transitional…

Linguistic tensions in MerT reflect two opposed points of view: January's and that of May and Damian combined. (In Japanese.)

Raises questions about what it means to be modern in one own's time and about polyphony (including polyphonic music, polyvocality, and literary dialogism) as an index to modernity, collecting fourteen essays on relevant topics, most of them on…

Based on Nietzsche's epistemology, the essay discusses Chaucer's use of multiple perspective in PF, TC, and NPT as the poet's instrument for encouraging his readers to reflect on the multiplicity of their experiences.

Hsy explores the use of English, French, and Latin by writers such as Chaucer, Gower, and Margery Kempe in conjunction with the polyglot mercantile culture of London. Argues that these writers "hybridize" multilingual traditions to form "hybrid …

Reads ManT as an example of successful "characterization through narrative technique," assessing its paucity of actual storytelling relative to the amount of moralizing. This tedious moralizing is comic and results from Chaucer's adaptations of his…

Explores the political discourse of fifteenth-century England, identifying a "pre-Machiavellian moment" in which awareness of political upheaval and the unreliability of Fortune influenced or produced a variety of vernacular texts. Assesses the…

Surveys "legends" about Chaucer's prodigality, from Thomas Usk's "Testament of Love" to early editions of Purse and modern critical reception of the poem. Editions of Purse and critical responses seek to defend Chaucer "from charges of political…

Uses ABC, Hoccleve's "Complaint of the Virgin Before the Cross," and other sources to outline a mutually reinforcing relationship between the Lancastrians (orthodox supporters of the Church) and the Church (which allied with the Lancastrians).

Studies aesthetic and political relations between France and Francophone England during the Hundred Years' War, with particular attention to uses and politics of the "formes fixes" of lyric poetry among French writers, Chaucer, and Gower. Examines…

In contrast to other analogues to PhysT, Chaucer "systematically obliterates social content" to deprive the characters of plausible motives. This "bad piece of work" is "pornographic or free-floating sadistic sensationalism, with murder as its only…

Challenging suggestions that individuals like Chaucer are agents of linguistic change, Machan argues that they cannot foresee history and therefore cannot work to a future end. The article surveys political factors in late-medieval English linguistic…

London politics in the 1380s were characterized by "shifting planes of alliance." Such shifting in the early years of the decade led to the eventual struggle of 1385-88 between Richard's court party and the duke of Gloucester's aristocratic…

Divided into three sections - "Politics and Discourse," "London Life and Chaucer's Poetry," and "Chaucer's Social Circle" - this essay surveys a variety of Chaucer's narratives and short poems, showing how they reflect urban and political elements in…

A Marxist approach to form, structure, and character shows broad dichotomies in Chaucer's art; e.g., between city and country, Gothic and modernist narratives, and worldy and otherworldly philosophies. From the last divergence derives the major…

Considers depictions of wilderness in GP and ManT, along with works by Gower and Langland, as metaphors for undisciplined rulers.

Chaucer's works have been treated variously through the centuries: vernacular text teaching a diverse audience in debates over "Englishing" the Bible; both model and subject for translation to the Neoclassics; basis for study in the nineteenth…