Leicester, H. Marshall,Jr.
Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, eds. Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 15-26.
Invoking "Derridean models," Leicester examines the problem of evolution of medieval manuscripts. With its possibility of "univocal meaning," "logocentric" oral literary culture flattens out the difference between composer and audience; the scribal…
Boyd, Beverly.
Florilegium 9 (1990, for 1987): 147-54.
Almost all Chaucer's poetry specifically addressed to Mary includes translation, adaptation, or quotations from disparate sources brought together via "collage" technique. This layered effect has precedent in church liturgy and macaronic lyric.
Elliott, Ralph W. V.
Review of English Literature 7.2 (1966): 63-71.
Questions some of critics' claims about the Pardoner (particularly rejecting the claim that he is drunk), and argues that the Pardoner's character and his performance cohere and exhibit his "craft and talent" as well as his efforts "to entertain and…
A personal memoir recording a childhood experience of reading about "Dan" Chaucer in "The Book of Knowledge," leading to an early understanding of the unchanging drives and characteristics of human nature. A childhood neighbor was like the Wife of…
Willocks, Stephanie.
English Journal 85:7 (1996): 122-24.
Advocates imitative role-playing as a way to teach Chaucer. Students select pictures from newspapers and magazines, create characters from the pictures, and develop stories for the characters to tell. Stories are told during an imaginary journey,…
Oldmixon, Katherine Durham.
Dissertation Abstracts International 62:1009A, 2001.
Fourteenth-century English Breton lays, such as "Sir Degaré," "Sir Orfeo," and FranT, displace "Celtic" otherworlds to Brittainy and depict them as exotic, feminine, and supernatural-places of self-discovery that contrast with the domestic and…
Armour-Hileman, Victoria Lee.
Dissertation Abstracts International 50 (1989): 950A.
Three paradigms of the Celtic universe made their way, through either oral or literary tradition, into early English literature, as is shown in "Sir Orfeo," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," passages from four of the tales in CT, Spenser, and…
Minnis, Alastair.
Rita Copeland, ed. The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Vol. 1, (800–1558) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 413-34.
Aligns Chaucer's depictions of classical culture and his attitudes toward pagan belief, arguing that his "remarkable degree of cultural relativism" and his "reluctance to resort to simplistic forms of Christian triumphalism" are "delimited" only by…
Imitative indirect discourse in the portraits of the Monk, Friar, and Parson presents attitudes not Chaucer's in language not his. Examining personae in early tales may alter the pilgrim's portrait or the tone, as when the Merchant's ironic praises…
Crampton, Georgia Ronan.
David A. Richardson, ed. Spenser: Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, and Modern (Cleveland State University, 1977), pp. 132-34. [Microfiche available from the Department of English.]
Spenser and Chaucer both composed subtle, complex closures, spreading out before the audience several endings, like sections of a fan. Many medieval poems ended almost interchangeably in a formulaic prayer for salvation.
Vernon, Matthew X.
Matthew X. Vernon. The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 203-45
Explores ways that John Dryden’s notions of congeniality and the value of the vernacular in his commentary on Chaucer help to clarify Gloria Naylor’s adaptations of Dante’s "Inferno" in "Linden Hills" and of CT in "Bailey’s Café,…
Marshall, Linda E.
Philological Quarterly 56 (1977): 407-13.
Identifies parallels between Chaucer's dream visions and the one depicted in Osbern of Gloucester's "Liber derivationum" or "Panormania": the reading of a book inspires the central dream and there is a significant concern with Macrobius's concept of…
Spencer, Alice.
Kathleen A. Bishop, ed. Standing in the Shadow of the Master? Chaucerian Influences and Interpretations (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), pp. 160-203.
Bokenham repeatedly refers to himself as an "auctor" as a way to extricate himself from the classicizing, conventional, and paternal shadow of Chaucer.
Thaisen, Jacob.
Boletín Millares Carlo 24-25 (2005-06): 379-94.
Analysis of MS Gg.4.27 of CT, combining a codicological approach with analysis of linguistic aspects such as graphemic and graphetic variants. This multifocal approach helps identify the process of copying as well as the scribal profile.
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)…
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…
