Browse Items (16364 total)

Describes the problems and rewards of teaching Chaucer to Orthodox Jewish women.

Similarities between Thomas Hoccleve's portrait of Chaucer in "Regement of Princes" and the Ellesmere portrait do not confirm speculations that the artists were drawing from life.

Argues that Chaucer's portrait of Blaunche in BD is not a mere rhetorical exercise in the tradition of Vinsauf's prescriptions but "a serious attempt" to reform the "descriptio feminae," exploring identity by examining the relation between mind and…

Charles Cowden Clarke, Charles Knight, and John Saunders were the most effective popularizers of Chaucer for the common reader in nineteenth-century England. These individuals translated Chaucer into modern English and bowdlerized his language in…

Reprints Clouston's two-volume work (1887), with its original Introduction and Index, commentary on the brass steed of SqT, and chapter entitled "Chaucer's 'Pardoner's Tale'" (pp. 490-511) that traces the sources and analogues of the Tale. Adds an…

Forni lauds the BBC's modernized television adaptation of CT (2003) for its appeal to a wide audience while retaining fidelity to the original texts; for its intertextuality; and for its highlighting of aspects of Chaucer that appeal to contemporary…

Shows that the steady growth in understanding of the historical context of Chaucer's poetry has coexisted with a tendency, on the part of scholars as well as popularizers, to view Chaucer as the jovial poet of "merrie England."

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…