Bude, Tekla.
Sonic Bodies: Text, Music, and Silence in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), pp. 146-68.
Argues that Chaucer "experiments with the body-disabling power of music as a site of poetic potential," tallying how, in CT, "musical performance nearly always causes narrative tension" and music "prosthetizes disability"--"advental" insofar as it…
Hsy, Jonathan.
David Hillman and Ulrika Maude, eds. The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 24-40.
Explores how disability studies have expanded to include consideration of relations between "embodiment and literary form," focusing on representations of deafness in the fifteenth-century Castilian "Arboleda de los enfermos" (Grove of the Infirm) of…
In WBT, the first mention of fairies--the Wife's lament for their disappearance--is linked to and introduces the other fairy scenes. The knight's experience demonstrates that even in her first mention of fairies the Wife associates them with…
Duprey-Henry, Annalese.
Dissertation Abstract International A81.06 (2019): n.p.
Addresses lovesickness in TC, John Gower's "Confessio Amantis," and "The Book of Margery Kempe," considering it "as an embodied and thus imminent process that organizes relationships around culturally defined ideas of either negotiation and mutuality…
Strub, Spencer.
Ph.D. Dissertation. University of California, Berkeley, 2018. Dissertation Abstracts International A82.09(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses and at https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3cr3q8b9; accessed August 18, 2025.
Explores speech in late medieval English "literature and prescriptive religious writing," focusing on how "inward feelings [are] realized only in intersubjective exchange." Includes discussion of, among others, "Piers Plowman," "Mum and the…
Seaman, Myra.
Myra Seaman, Eileen A. Joy, and Nicola Masciandaro, eds. Dark Chaucer: An Assortment (Brooklyn, N. Y.: Punctum Books, 2012), pp. 139-49.
Rejects conventional readings of BD as a demonstration that art can transcend suffering; instead shows how BD "enacts . . . a disconsolate poetics, in which pain and suffering perdure."
Gellrich, Jesse M.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Examines the ways oral tradition continues to influence writing in late-medieval literature, considering works of Ockham and Wyclif, chronicles of the reigns of Edward III and Richard II, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," and KnT.
Shafik-Ghaly, Salwa William.
Dissertation Abstracts International 49 (1989): 3716A-3717A.
Shakif-Ghaly scrutinizes "Yvain" and TC for medieval "dispositio" through Genettian narratology and for "manifestatio" through Anglo-American theory. Despite differences between the texts, such an analysis brings out tensions of medieval authors and…
CT "shows a surprising array" of ways in which Chaucer "ignores, skirts, transcends, or even anticipates structural closure," engaging his readers in the "dialogic processes of discourse itself." Surveys techniques of openendedness in CT, arguing…
Pakkala-Weckstrom, Mari.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 105 (2004): 153-75
Pakkala-Weckstrm analyzes the power struggles within male/female couples, examining politeness strategies and providing brief analyses of speech size, topic, control, distribution of flow, and turn-taking. Considers MilT, MerT, ShT, WBT, FranT, Mel,…
Trigg, Stephanie.
Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline, eds. Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400-1602 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), pp. 270-91.
Considers how editors and critics from Caxton to Furnivall assume or pursue identity with Chaucer, imitating what they perceive to be Chaucerian sensibility in an effort to claim understanding of the poet and his works. Adopting the poet's voice and…
Wells, Marion.
In Jamie C. Fumo, ed. Chaucer's "Book of the Duchess": Contexts and Interpretations (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 71-93.
Drawing on affect theory and psychoanalytic methodologies, considers the relationship between the "awake body" and "emotional utterance" in BD, relating this to notions of "translatio." Highlights the centrality of the Ceyx and Alcyone episode to…
Traces the meanings and nuances of "discrecioun" (moral and rational judgment) in classical and medieval traditions, examining Chaucer's uses of the word and its thematic implications across his career as a poet. Includes references to most of his…
Morrison, Susan Signe.
Dissertation Abstracts International 53 (1992): 3275A-76A.
With few exceptions, medieval German and English texts depict female authority figures as truth-tellers. Female saints reveal the falseness of male antagonists, but queens lose their power to men who lie, act violently, and rule efficiently. CT…
An anthology of criticism, with a brief introduction (pp. vii-ix) that characterizes CT as "unique" because "no other work so fragmentary creates such an illusion of completeness." The volume reprints essays and excerpts by twenty-one writers,…
Dominick, Gina A.
Ph.D. dissertation (New York University, 2022), Dissertation Abstracts International A 84.01(E).
Explores how texts such as Julian of Norwich's "A Revelation of Divine Love," CT, and Thomas Malory's "Morte Darthur" "unsettle the medieval aesthetic-ethical form of "formosa deformitas," or, the 'beautiful ugly,' " and "bring attention to the…
Steadman, John M.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972.
Studies the "flight episode," Troilus's laughter, and the location of the eighth sphere in TC "against the background of the apotheosis tradition [Lucan, Cicero, Dante, Boccaccio, and various commentaries] and the conventions of classical…
Kendrick, Laura.
Susanna Fein and David Raybin, eds. Chaucer: Visual Approaches (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), pp. 116-38.
Compares Chaucer's and Deschamps's poetic critiques of the "comedy of drunkenness," examining passages in GP, MLT, PardP, and ManP as well as Deschamps's chanson royale "Sur l'ordre de la Baboue" (included, with translation, in an appendix). Traces…
Keller, Wolfram R.
Cornelia Wilde and Wolfram R. Keller, eds. Perfect Harmony and Melting Strains: Transformations of Music in Early Modern Culture between Sensibility and Abstraction (Boston, Mass.: De Gruyter, 2021), pp. 11-37.
Describes the background to and representations of the harmony of the spheres in PF and in HF, arguing that both poems depict the "three ventricles of the brain"--imagination, logic, and memory--and that, through parody and/or inversion, each depicts…
Contrasts Gower's and Chaucer's depictions of alchemy in, respectively, the "Confessio Amantis" and CT, and analyzes what these narratives reveal about the poets' views of money and economy. Unlike the depiction of money in Book V of the "Confessio,"…
The last tales of CT form a closing sequence of transformation: SNT (conversion fervor in the early church), CYT (alchemical madness of fourteenth-century England), ManT (debasing of myth), and ParsT (change of soul through penitence), as Chaucer…
Allen-Goss, Lucy M.
Sarah Baechle, Carissa M. Harris, and Elizaveta Strakhov, eds. Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature: With an Edition of Middle English and Middle Scots Pastourelles (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022), pp. 80-96.
Contrasts Chaucer's and Gower's Philomela stories, focusing on differences between the nuances and implications of weaving in LGW and embroidery in "Confessio Amantis," and arguing that Chaucer's version aligns better with modern understanding of…
