The tale of Orpheus is a tragic love story used to convey the central moral lesson of Boethius's "Consolation," a lesson corresponding to the "moralitee" spelled out in the epilogue to Chaucer's TC. Both the Orpheus metrum and Chaucer's poem have a…
Fulton, Helen.
Francesca Kaminski-Jones and Rhys Kaminski-Jones, eds. Celts, Romans, Britons: Classical and Celtic Influence in the Construction of British Identities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 51-78.
Compares "English, Welsh, and Irish refabrications of the Trojan legend as national origin myths," focusing on the ambivalences of the legend, describing the “translatio imperii studiique,” and commenting on medieval (including Chaucerian) meanings…
Margherita, Gayle.
Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury, eds. Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 116-41.
Reprinted in Gayle Margherita, The Romance of Origins Language and Sexual Difference in Middle English Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 82-99.
Twenty-five percent of the Old French loanwords in Rom are "new to English or used with a new English menaing'; most reflect influences of aristorcratic, secularized French romances. Includes chart of loanwords.
Akbari, Suzanne Conklin.
Kathryn Lynch, ed. Chaucer's Cultural Geography (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 102-34.
Comments on such terms and concepts as "nacioun," "degree," "countre," race, and geography in KnT, SqT, MLT, and WBT, indicating that in CT the world is ordered by the principles of geography and nation. Nationalism is emergent in CT, but Orientalism…
Bleeth, Kenneth (A.)
Kathryn Lynch, ed. Chaucer's Cultural Geography (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 21-31.
Bleeth surveys critical responses to SqT for the ways they reflect assumptions about and attitudes toward the East as a cultural Other. Considers criticism from Thomas Warton (1778) through recent efforts to come to terms with and go beyond Edward…
Five chapters, focusing on "Sir Orfeo," "The Awntyrs off Arthure," the "Second Shepherd's Play," BD, and Pearl, respectively. The study emphasizes the intertextual relationships between classical myths, on the one hand, and Celtic and Anglo-Saxon…
Nolan, Peter E.
William Calder, Ulrich K. Goldsmith, and Phyllis B. Kevevan, eds. Hypatia: Essays in Classics, Comparative Literature, and Philosophy Presented to Hazel E. Barnes on Her Seventieth Birthday (Boulder, Colo.:Associated University Press, 1985), pp. 137-50.
A "double game" of "dual modes of organization, verisimilitude and ordination" informs medieval literature. Nolan examines von Murungen's "Ich horte uf der Heide," Dante's story of Paolo and Francesca, Chaucer's tale of Walter and Griselda, and two…
Blake, Kathleen A.
Modern Language Quarterly 34 (1973): 3-19.
Examines in KnT the rhetorical and thematic concerns with order, choice, and the difficulties of achieving resolution. Reads Palamon and Arcite as a balanced pair, and Theseus as a figure of the limited human ability to avert fortune and determine…
Item not seen; cited in WorldCat, with parallel record for a piano/vocal score. A related website, Criseyde: A New Opera by Alice Shields, is available at http://www.aliceshields.com/criseyde/index.html (accessed March 28, 2014).
McKenna, Steven R.
Dissertation Abstracts International 49 (1989): 3370A.
Chaucer's poetry presents tensions between the authority of literature and that of traditional oral wisdom. In HF, the confused narrator cannot induce meaning; in TC, Troilus's mindset, Pandarus's and Criseyde's reliance on proverbs, and the…
Lázaro Lafuente, Luis Alberto.
Margarita Gimenez Bon and Vickie Olsen, eds. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference of the Spanish Society for Medieval Language and Literature (Vitoria-Gasteiz: Dpto. Filologia Inglesa, 1997), pp. 146-53.
Discusses oral satiric performance in PardPT, focusing on medieval flytings, sermons, and "additive" oral structure.
Uhlman, Diana Rae.
Dissertation Abstracts International 52 (1992): 2564A.
Freed from the false dichotomy of oral/writen literature, these three works are seen as history created through the fusion of oral and written sources (Bede), literary use of oral performance conventions (CT frame), and credible combinations of…
Sola Buil, Ricardo J.
Juan Camilo Conde Silvestre and Ma Nila Vzquez Gonzlez, eds. Medieval English Literary and Cultural Studies (Murcia: Universidad de Muscia, 2004), pp. 145-61.
Evaluates the effects of the transition from orality to literacy in CT. Chaucer's oral mode of presentation conditions his manipulation of that tradition to the extent that it compels his audience to believe that he has read what, in fact, comes from…
Brewer, Derek.
Willi Erzgraber and Sabine Volk, eds. Mundlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im englischen Mittelalter. ScriptOralia, no. 5 (Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1988), pp. 85-119.
Chaucer's style in his poetry, though not in his prose, is a special mixture of orality and literacy. Brewer analyzes characteristics of orality (with examples): formulas and set phrases, sententiousness, repetition with variation, metonymy,…
Nicolaisen, W. F. H., ed.
Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995.
Four plenary papers and eight sectional papers from the Twenty-Second Annual Conference, Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, 21-22 October 1988.
Parks, Ward.
Mark C. Amodio, ed. Oral Poetics in Middle English Poetry (New York and London: Garland, 1994), pp. 149-79.
The tension between literacy and orality--evident throughout CT--can be seen in GP, where a literate and learned Chaucer positions himself as the mere recorder of oral performance. Th satirizes the English metrical romance, a genre deeply rooted in…
Taylor, Jerome.
College English 19.7 (1958): 304-06.
Describes an "experiment in the use of oral reading as a means of teaching" TC that increased students' "critical appreciation" of the poem and Chaucer's art.
Amodio, Mark C., ed.
New York and London: Garland, 1994.
Eleven essays by different hands define and explore the complex relationship between the emerging Middle English literate tradition and its receding oral ancestor in the centuries following the Norman Conquest. For three essays that pertain to…
Klassen, N.
Stanford Humanities Review 2:2-3 (1992): 129-46.
Surveys the late-medieval science of optics, focusing on Alhazen, Grosseteste, Bacon, Ockham, and their links between optics and epistemology. In Boccaccio's "Filostrato," sight is merely a convention of courtly literature, but Chaucer's optical…
Elbow, Peter.
Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1975.
TC, KnT, and NPT are constructed on the pattern of oppositions found in Boethius' "Consolation" and the dialectic method of scholastic philosophy. At crucial points, however, Chaucer relinquishes this method and chooses one side. The pattern of…
Baker, Alison A.
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 23.1 (2016): 351-61.
Proposes a "mnemonic device" for six of the Roman classical gods (Apollo, Diana, Venus, Mars, Minerva, and Bacchus) "that can be used to teach and understand" them in CT and in Spenser's "Faerie Queene."
The "textual-critical ferment" of the 1980s prompted two "editorial ideas" that have largely (and sadly) been ignored by Chaucer editors and teachers: Derek Pearsall's suggestion that an edition of CT should allow the fragments to be arranged…
