Explores various denotations in medieval uses of "phantom," and contends that Chaucer's use of the word in HF (line 493) capitalizes on these meanings and neatly encapsulates the poem's fundamental concern with the difficulties of seeking to…
Walzem, Al.
Kathleen A. Bishop, ed. "The Canterbury Tales" Revisited--21st Century Interpretations (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 44-59.
Reads the Wife of Bath as ur-feminist and traces parallels between WBP and WBT. These parallels indicate the Wife's efforts to teach feminist principles.
Steel, Karl.
How Not to Make a Human: Pets, Feral Children, Worms, Sky Burial, Oysters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), pp. 17-40.
Reviews medieval disapproval of pet-keeping among religious personnel as evidence that companionship with animals has a long history and that medieval "pet-love" can "help us to unthink the human." Comments on pet-slayings in versions of the…
Tolan, John.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993.
Surveys the life and works of Petrus Alfonsi and the reception of his two major works: the anti-Jewish "Dialogi contra Iudaeos" and his collection of tales and wisdom literature, "Disciplina clericus." Tolan briefly mentions Mel as evidence of…
Surveys the influence of Petrarchan materials and traditions in European literature of various eras, including brief comments (p. 45) on Chaucer's uses of Petrarchan materials.
Galloway, Andrew.
Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway, eds. Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), pp. 140-68.
Explores a relationship between "late-medieval aesthetics and renunciation" in ClT and establishes differences between Petrarch's and Chaucer's treatments of the Griselda story. Points out that Chaucer's Clerk challenges both Petrarch's "absolutist"…
Ginsberg, Warren.
James J. Paxson, Lawrence M. Clopper, and Sylvia Tomasch, eds. The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer and the Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 125-41.
Assesses how the Host's address to the Clerk reflects effort to shape the identity of the Clerk as a tale-teller, so that even before the Clerk speaks, literary, philosophical, and spiritual discourses compete to define his subjectivity.
Finlayson, John.
Studies in Philology 97: 255-75, 2000.
Argues that Chaucer used Boccaccio's version of the Griselda story in addition to Petrarch's. A number of Chaucer's alterations and additions to Petrarch have a "strong, often detailed relationship" to Boccaccio, Petrarch's own source.
Minta, Stephen.
Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1980.
An introduction to Petrarch, his works, and their reception in England and France to the seventeenth century. Observes connections between the end of Petrarch's "Canzoniere" and Chaucer's Ret, and comments on Chaucer's reference to Petrarch in ClP…
Sung,Wei-ko.
EurAmerica: A Journal of European and American Studies 46.1 (2016): 1-44.
Surveys "the idea literary fame" in classical and medieval traditions (Homer, Hesiod, Virgil, Statius, and Dante); analyzes Petrarch's notion more extensively; and examines HF to show that though Chaucer, "like Petrarch, was intimately familiar with…
Grigsby, Bryon Lee.
New York and London: Routledge, 2004.
Grigsby considers leprosy, bubonic plague, and syphilis, focusing on how they were constructed as moral phenomena and how literary depictions contributed to historical developments in our (mis)understandings of them.
Thebes's foundational perversion (Jove's rape of Europa) establishes a recursive pattern of love and violence. Creon's dynastic expectation for Anelida and Arcite results in Anelida's self-deception and leads as well to Arcite's servitude to his new…
Holloway, Julia Bolton.
Julia Bolton Holloway. Jerusalem: Essays on Pilgrimage and Literature (New York: AMS Press, 1998), pp. 173-94.
Assesses the Wife of Bath (in contrast to the Clerk) and the Pardoner (in contrast to the Parson) as "Chaucer's Diptych of Eve and Adam," commenting on their depictions in the Ellesmere manuscript and reading them as inversions of the ideals of…
Hellstrom, Par.
Samlaren: Tidskrift for Svensk Litteraturvetenskaplig Forskning 103 (1982): 90-111.
Reviews criticism and scholarship on Chaucer in Sweden and England, treating backgrounds (social, religious and philosophical, and literary), general works, and new directions in scholarship.
Surveys criticism of Chaucer's works from Hoccleve and Lydgate to Dryden, identifying what it "reveals and contributes to the understanding and appreciation of Chaucer's poetry" rather than his literary reputation or the "state of English criticism…
Bloomfield, Morton W.
Chaucer Review 14 (1980): 287-97.
The stylistic device occurs when a noun is given personification by the poet's use of a verb (or occasionally a verb phrase, adjective, or adverb). Chaucer uses few of them: the lyrics have more than do the longer narratives.
Flannery, Mary C.
Literature Compass 13.6 (2016): 351-61.
Includes discussion of Sorrow in Rom, treating the poem as one that maps "an imaginative space in which to represent (and perhaps also elicit) emotion, one that interweaves emotional with embodied, sensory experience," and one that may "reflect the…
Byron-Davies, Justin M.
Revelation and the Apocalypse in Late Medieval Literature: The Writings of Julian of Norwich and William Langland (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2020), pp. 130-73.
Opens with brief contrasts between the uses of dream vision in NPT, Gower's "Vox clamantis," and Langland's "Piers Plowman" before examining at greater length Langland's use of literary techniques that echo the Bible.
Taavitsainen, Irma.
Geoffrey Lester, ed. Chaucer in Perspective: Middle English Essays in Honour of Norman Blake (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), pp. 218-34.
Pragmatic analysis of linguistic features that produce "personal affect" in several of the CT. Uses features such as exclamations, oaths, and aspects of proximity and reader involvement to describe characterizations of the Knight, the Prioress, the…
