Yeager, Robert F., ed.
Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1984.
Essays on reviews of scholarship, language and paleography, and literary criticism. For four essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Fifteenth-Century Studies: Recent Essays under Alternative Title.
Thomas, Arvind.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer SAC 42 (2020): 27-72.
Identifies parallels between the legal maxims of RvPT and the commentaries of medieval canon and civil law, including ones by Giovanni da Legnano (cited in ClT, 34) and a pair of canonists named (in Latin) Aleyn and John. Focuses on laws that pertain…
LaGuardia, Eric.
François Jost, ed. Actes du IVe Congrès de l'Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée, Fribourg 1964 (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), II: 844-54.
Distinguishes between medieval and Renaissance versions of poetic "figural imitation." In the former, identified by Erich Auerbach, the "poetic image participates in two modes of reality at the same time: historical and absolute": in the latter, it…
Boyd, Jessie Mary Heather.
Dissertation Abstracts International 40 (1980): 4585A.
For Chaucer, a poem was an imaginative focus for the representation of a larger pattern of experience. The patterns created by the opposing figures of speech in his poetry (the concrete and empirical/the archetypal) reflect a complex sense of…
Cooper, Lisa H.
In Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld, eds. Chaucer and the Subversion of Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 99-124.
Claims that Astr shares with Chaucer's "literary" works a deep conceptual investment in form and is more than a technical manual. Astr layers textual, celestial, and technological forms (book, cosmos, and astrolabe) in a dynamic relationship with…
Minnis, A. J.
Phillip Lindley and Thomas Frangenberg, eds. Secular Sculpture: 1300-1550 (Stamford: Shaun Tyas), 2000, pp. 124-43.
Minnis considers possible sources or inspirations for Chaucer's techniques of describing the architecture and statuary in the Temple of Venus of HF, surveying previous scholarship. Despite the possible influence of actual art and architecture or the…
Examines the ambiguous character of Criseyde in TC 4. Chaucer gives her a point of view only to call her morality into question and he provides a sense of history that he never allows her fully to understand. TC is a "feminist work that fails to…
Robinson, Michele.
Dissertation Abstracts International 49 (1989): 1797A.
Inheriting the tradition that women were either saintly or satanic, Chaucer grasped the opposition between rhetorical and mimetic treatment, as shown especially in LGW and ManT. Robinson applies medieval and modern feminist theories.
Like the fifth "passus" in the C-text of "Piers Plowman," ParsT and Ret use confession as a means of inscribing the author's identity within the poem. Langland's "autobiographical" passage--part confession, part "apologia"--integrates his…
Reads the Miller (whose mouth is compared to "a greet forneys" in GP) in the context of representations of rebel peasants in the chronicles of Thomas Walsingham, Henry Knighton, Jean Froissart, and the Anonimalle chronicler, as well as in Gower's…
Johnston, Andrew James.
Thomas Honegger, ed. Riddles, Knights and Cross-dressing Saints: Essays on Medieval English Language and Literature (Bern: Lang, 2004), pp. 1-32.
Johnston compares uses of medieval details, anachronisms, and hermeneutic concerns in two films (Brian Helgeland's "A Knight's Tale" and David Fincher's "Seven") and Umberto Eco's novel, "The Name of the Rose." Includes attention to Chaucer…
Examines all fifteenth-century witnesses of WBP, which are available on CD-Rom (SAC 20 [1998], no.11). Some scribes still had a system for the use of final -e, here studied in strong and weak adjectives in early, mid-, and late-fifteenth-century…
Werthmuller, Gyongyi.
South Atlantic Review 79.3-4 (2015): 6-19.
Tabulates evidence of the greater regularity of stress in Gower's verse than in Chaucer's, particularly in nouns and adjectives that feature the apocope of final unstressed -e. Attributes this regularity to the influence of Gower having written…
Werthmuller, Gyongyi.
Juan Camilo Conde Silvestre and Javier Calle Martı ´n, eds. Approaches to Middle English: Variation, Contact and Change (New York: Peter Land, 2015), pp. 179-97
Considers several factors (apocope, compounding, etymology, and metrical environment) in the presence or absence of final "-e" in Gower's and Chaucer's monosyllabic adjectives, clarifying Gower's relative regularity by identifying the paucity of…
Farris, R. S.
Essays in Medieval Studies 32 (2016): 57-63.
Focuses on the relationship between WBT and its analogue, "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle," to show how such a study traces cultural shifts.
Kaempfer, Lucie.
Dissertation Abstracts International C81.04 (2019): n.p.
Considers joy to be the "climactic centre" of TC, addressing the presence and forms of joy “in the poem's construction of language, themes, and characters" and assessing "whether joy, in medieval culture, is a physical emotion, an affective state, a…
Green, Eugene.
Michael Bilynsky, ed. Studies in Middle English: Words, Forms, Senses and Texts (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 165-83.
Explores the pragmatic linguistic devices Chaucer uses to establish a common ground of communication and "create convincing exchanges" between the Dreamer and the Eagle in HF, identifying and analyzing various concerns: "back-channel," lexicon,…
Schmerling, Hilda L.
New York: Gordon Presss, 1977.
In a section called "Springtime in the Canterbury Tales: Chaucer's Inheritance of the Sacred and the Profane" (pp. 1-26), tallies a number of classical and medieval attitudes toward spring and comments on Chaucer's various allusions to and images of…
Kohl, Stephan.
Willi Erzgraber and Sabine Volk, eds. Mundlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im englischen Mittelalter. Script Oralia, vol. 5 (Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1988), pp. 133-46.
Kohl examines conscious "orality" and appeals to the reader by narrators in the poetry of Ricardian authors: Gower, the "Gawain" poet, and others, including Chaucer (CT, TC, PF, LGW, and HF). With the introduction of unreliable narrators, the…
Le Saux, Francoise.
Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 20168), 1:465-77.
Describes late-medieval Breton political status and summarizes the region's literary production in Breton and in French, commenting on drama, Arthurian materials, and religious literature. Includes discussion of the setting of FranT in Brittany as…
O'Brien, Timothy D.
Chaucer Review 33 (1998): 157-67.
In KnT, Chaucer's use of the word "queynte," the dying and quickening fires in the temple, and the spurting and spewing of the flames to "suggest parturition, life's uncertainty and tenuousness and even menstruation." Emelye's tears at the sight of…
Emerson's allusion in "The Poet" to the lecture on gentility in WBT attributes the sentiment to Chaucer (rather than to the Wife), concentrates on the fire's brightness, and suggests that the passage refers to "good blood in mean condition." Since…
Robertson, Elizabeth.
Helen M. Hickey, Anne McKendry, and Melissa Raine, eds. Contemporary Chaucer across the Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), pp. 25-41.
Assesses Troilus's and Criseyde's first looks at one another in TC as examples of physiological sense perception, rather than as mental or emotional processes or stages. Resists feminist and patristic readings of these gazes, and reads them in light…
