Bullon-Fernandez, Maria.
R. F. Yeager, ed. Re-Visioning Gower (Asheville, N.C.: Pegasus Press, 1998), pp. 129-46.
In Gower's version of the Constance story, incest is a metaphor for the relationship between the Church and the crown, a means to critique the two. In contrast, MLT "tries to avoid suggesting any tension between lay and clerical power."
Stretter, Robert.
Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge, eds. Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Explorations of a Fundamental Ethical Discourse (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), pp. 501-24.
Stretter comments on various romances and includes discussion of how, in KnT, Palamon and Arcite's mutual love for Emily disrupts their sworn brotherhood, a powerful bond of obligation and friendship. Chaucer alters a long cultural and literary…
Riddy, Felicity.
Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson, eds. Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 54-71.
Examines the sexual politics of FranT, arguing that its fundamental ideas of "gentilesse" and "pitee" reflect an aristocratic, masculinist hierarchy. The courtly setting entails this hierarchy, which dominates the tale, but Dorigen's complaint and…
Lavezzo, Kathy.
Susanna Fein and David Raybin, eds. Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), pp. 47-64.
Traces recent critical engagement with the "problem" of late medieval English national identity in Chaucer, especially as it reflects anxieties about political upheaval, linguistic variety, cultural "hybridity," and English geographical isolation.…
Comments on the GP sketch of the Knight, Gower's "To King Henry the Fourth," and the Wilton Diptych as evidence of English support for Philippe de Mezieres's promotion of the 1396 crusade against the Turks, perhaps evidence of English participation…
Heng, Geraldine.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Includes comparison of PrT with sources and analogues: the Anglo-Norman Hughes de Lincoln and two accounts--"The Child Slain by Jews" and "The Jewish Boy"--found in the Vernon manuscript. Analyzes the stories' various contributions to the…
Social history of England, particularly London, in the late fourteenth century, focusing on the laboring class and the Uprising of 1381 (Peasants' Revolt). Concentrates on economic conditions, legal practice, sanitation and medicine, plague, urban…
Rogers, Nicholas, ed.
Stamford, Conn.: Paul Watkins, 1993.
Includes five essays on relations between image and text, three on literature, and three on the church and society. For one essay that pertains to Chaucer, search for England in the Fourteenth Century under Alternative Title.
Waugh, Scott L.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
A descriptive political history of Edward's reign that explores how his personality and style of ruling were crucial to the development of political order and various domestic institutions. Pt. 1 surveys major events of Edward's reign; pts. 2 and 3…
Rigby, Stephen H.
Stephen H. Rigby, ed. A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 497-520.
Rigby explores how a variety of Middle English texts reflect and reinforce the normative ideologies of class and gender in late medieval England. Contempt for the world helped to assert social hierarchies, justify inequalities, and quell tensions.…
Heng, Geraldine.
Modern Language Notes 127, supplement (2012): S54-85.
Compares several late-medieval boy-murder narratives to assess attitudes toward Jews before and after their 1290 expulsion from England. Chaucer's PrT is the "finest aesthetic treatment" of the story in the Middle Ages and, in comparison with other…
Strohm, Paul.
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998.
Combines New Historicism and cultural psychoanalysis to explore how the Lancastrian dynasty and its supporters responded to and helped to construct a response to Henry Lancaster's usurpation of Richard II's throne.
Ariza-Barile, Raúl.
Open access Ph.D. dissertation. University of Texas at Austin, 2017.
Available at https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/63016
Accessed January 28, 2021.
Chapter 2 comprises discussion of how "astronomy travelled from Spain to England" and speculation about "how Chaucer might have benefitted [sic] from this collaboration in order to produce" Astr.
Manzalaoui, Mahmoud.
Medium Aevum 34 (1965): 21-35.
Summarizes the transmission of the "Liber Scalae" (ultimately Arabic), and identifies similarities between its eschatological and cosmological details and those found in late-medieval English works, including "Pearl," "The Land of Cockayne," and HF,…
Rothwell, W[illiam].
English Studies 82: 539-59, 2001.
Anglo-Norman should be considered "a coherent, if constantly changing, entity from 1066 to the middle of the fifteenth century" (559), with widely different forms that influenced English in the fifteenth-century, when scribes were working both in…
Surveys the sustained influence of Italian culture in England from Chaucer through Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Gascoigne, Marston, Fletcher, and Shakespeare. Summarizes the development of Italian city-states and explores topics such as Italian influence…
Ullyot, Michael.
Ian Frederick Moulton, ed. Reading and Literacy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 45-62.
Assesses how two seventeenth-century modernizations reflect the reception of their Middle English originals. Jonathan Sidnam's modernization of the first three books of TC (ca. 1630) offers respectful tribute to Chaucer and seeks to preserve his…
Karpova, Olga.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011.
Identifies and describes reference works that pertain to individual English authors, published (in print or online) from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first century--concordances, glossaries, name-dictionaries, indices to quotations and…
Defines and classifies various kinds of comedy according to their natures, subject matters, and social functions; then surveys this variety in the English literary tradition from the Middle Ages to 1970. Describes Chaucer's comedy (pp. 67-75) as…
Scattergood, V. J., and J. W. Sherborne, eds.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983.
Ten essays on court culture in Chaucer's England. For three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages under Alternative Title.
Coleman, Janet.
Chaucer and the Italian Trecento (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 33-63.
English culture was shaped by widespread literacy, English nationalism and political unity, a common language and traditions, schools, study of Latin, biblical commentary, knowledge of the classics, the humanistic movement, travel, and foreign…
Surveys the history and development of English drama from the Renaissance to the modern period, emphasizing "the nature and effects" of plays and performance. Includes a chapter entitled "The Dream Vision from Chaucer to Shakespeare" (pp. 61-79),…
Boffey, Julia.
Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox, eds. Literary Aspects of Courtly Culture: Selected Papers from the Seventh Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 113-21.
Examines the provenance and contents of several fifteenth-century manuscripts, arguing that such compilations reflect interest in Chaucer's dream poems, acquaintance with a range of English and French texts, and a "lively awareness of current…
