Goyne, Jo.
Bonnie Wheeler, ed. Feminea Medievalia I: Representations of the Feminine in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Academia Press, 1993), pp. 139-60.
Explores the limitations and parameters of word and will in ClT. Chaucer asserts that words must not encumber the will beyond its limited capacity, even in the service of virtue.
Landman, James H.
New Medieval Literatures 4: 139-70, 2001.
Decried by detractors such as Gower and Langland, legal discourse was a way of bridging the growing gap between legal tradition and contemporary reality. Although it satirizes legal pragmatism, The "Tale of Beryn" reflects appreciation of such…
Windeatt, Barry.
Gerald Morgan, ed. Chaucer in Context: A Golden Age of English Poetry (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 189-216.
Argues that petition is an integral part of the "narrative process and imaginative texture of Chaucer's poems," and that it greatly affects poetic meaning. Discusses Purse and the F and G versions of LGWP, among other poems.
Yager, Susan.
Once and Future Classroom 16, no. 1 (2020): 1–14.
Offers multiple examples of ways to play with the scansion of Chaucer's verse as means to engage student interest, nuanced readings, and enjoyment. Examples include scenes of awakening, bird-talk in HF and NPT, and wedding celebration in MLT and WBT,…
Considers the "post-Chaucer continuations and additions" to CT, particularly so-called "spurious" links between tales, "Siege of Thebes," "Tale of Beryn," "Canterbury Interlude," "Ploughman's Tale," "Plowman's Tale," "Tale of Gamelyn," and…
Allen, Valerie.
Anne Marie D'Arcy and Alan J. Fletcher, eds. Studies in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts in Honour of John Scattergood (Dublin: Four Courts, 2005), pp. 35-52.
Allen explores the showiness and ideology of tournaments in late medieval England, not only for knights but also for archers, focusing on Roger Ascham's "Toxophilus" for information about the latter. Allen comments on Chaucer's GP Yeoman as an absent…
Nolan, Barbara.
R. F. Yeager and Charlotte C. Morse, eds. Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V. A. Kolve (Asheville, N.C.: Pegasus Press, 2001), pp. 255-99; 8 color figs.
"In-etched" reminiscences of the Annunciation strain against the dominant sexuality of MilT, simultaneously suggesting and denying the metonymic and synecdochaic relations between divine and earthly love. Nolan cites analogous examples of…
Buffy, Emily.
Comparative Drama 55 (2021): 138-65.
Addresses performance texts associated with the early Elizabethan Inns of Court (“closet dramas, translations, masques, and orations”), arguing that they reflect four Chaucerian "paradigms of play" ("Chaucerian Self-Fashioning," "Chaucerian…
Brundage, James A.
Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler, eds. Desire and Sexuality in the Premodern West (Toronto; Buffalo, N.Y.; and London: University of Toronto Press, 1996), pp. 23-41.
Cites FrT as evidence that the archdeacon's court and its officers were "bitterly disliked," in turn evidence of the gap between legal norms of sexual behavior and actual practice in medieval Europe.
Kinch, Ashby McDalton.
Dissertation Abstracts International 61: 3988A, 2001.
Central to medieval love poetry is the figure of dying for love--found in works by Marcabru, Bernart de Ventadorn, Dante, Petrarch, Chaucer (BD, TC, complaints), and Alain Chartier, as well as in the Harley lyrics and the Findern manuscript. Donne…
Salemi, Joseph S.
Chaucer Review 15 (1981): 209-23.
Although the frame of TC is Boethian determinism, within it works the playful hand of Fortune (and the word "play" occurs frequently, with a variety of senses). The three major personages represent different attitudes toward freedom of choice and…
Fisher, William Nobles.
Dissertation Abstracts International 36 (1976): 7435A.
Through the game created by the Host and other references to playing, Chaucer created a festive structure for his tales whose movement leads the narrators, their audience, and the modern reader towards an ever-broadening perspective on life.
Pugh, William White Tison.
Dissertation Abstracts International 61: 2705A, 2001.
Play and game reveal to knightly protagonists human imperfection and divine truth. Pandarus is the "game-master" of TC, and Troilus achieves perspective through the game of courtly love.
The "first survey of medieval English plant names to appear in print," Hunt's work covers 1,800 names, 500 not found in the OED, of interest to botanists and lexicologists as well as nonspecialists.
Quinlan, Heather E.
Canton, Mich.: Visible Ink, 2020.
Introduces medical, historical, sociological, and literary aspects of various infectious human diseases, including addiction, illustrated with sidebar facts, literary examples, and photographs and reproductions. A chapter on "The Black Death"…
Smith, D. Vance.
South Atlantic Quarterly 98: 367-414, 1999.
Like Freud and Boethius, Chaucer views tragedy as the temporal transformation of a literal or figurative space. Integral to this understanding of tragedy is the notion of memory as a function of death, a relationship apparent in BD, MkT, and HF.…
Johnson, Ian.
Maarten J. F. M. Hoenen and Lodi Nauta, eds. Boethius in the Middle Ages: Latin and Vernacular Tradition of the 'Consolatio Philosophiae' (Leiden, New York, and Koln: Brill, 1997), pp. 217-42.
Helps clarify the place and meaning of John Walton's translation of Boethius's "Consolatio Philosophiae" (1410) by contrasting it with Chaucer's Bo.
Taavitsainen, Irma, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta, and Matti Rissanen, eds.
Berlin and New York : Gruyter, 2000.
Twenty-seven essays by various authors, addressing issues of linguistic history, dialect, lexicon, syntax, and prosody. Includes an introduction by the editors and a subject index. For six essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Placing Middle…
Wolfe, Matthew C.
Chaucer Review 33: 427-31, 1999.
It is possible that Ret was written as a general work, found among the papers and drafts of CT, and then put at the end of that work by scribes and early editors. If thought to apply to Chaucer's entire corpus, Ret broadens our view of the poet as a…
Knight, Stephen.
R. F. Yeager and Charlotte C. Morse, eds. Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V. A. Kolve (Asheville, N.C.: Pegasus Press, 2001), pp. 445-61.
Knight calls for a critical confrontation with the semiotics of place in Chaucer, commenting on a number of topographical references in Chaucer's works, suggesting closer examination of implications of places to which Chaucer traveled (especially…
Walling, Amanda.
Studies in Philology 115 (2018): 1-24.
With Albertanus of Brescia's "Liber de consolationis et consilii" as a common source, Mel and MerT both confront issues of counsel, gender, and lordship. MerT offers a skeptical, antifeminist, homosocial reassessment of the relatively optimistic…
Howes, Laura L., ed.
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007.
Eleven essays by various authors, with an introduction by the editor and a survey of spatial theory and medieval literature by John M. Ganim. For five essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Place, Space, and Landscape in Medieval Narrative under…
