Rosenfeld, Jessica.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011
Examines pleasure, happiness, and enjoyment in late-medieval literature as it was influenced by Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics," mediated by commentaries and the "Roman de la Rose." Considers a balance of intellectualism and voluntarism, and an…
Mitchell, J. Allan
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Mitchell explores the relationships among fortune, ethics, and validity in TC and other late medieval writings: Usk's "Testament of Love," "The Chaunce of the Dyse," Gower's "Confessio Amantis," Lydgate's "Fall of Princes," and Malory's "Morte…
Mitchell, J. Allan.
Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004.
Examines the ethics of exemplarity in "Confesso Amantis" and in CT, arguing that reading for the moral--deliberating ethically--is improvisatory and reflexive and aims at practice rather than theory. Exemplarity involves the reader in its moral…
Simpson, James.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998): 73-100.
Reads LGW as a work about "voluntarist" hermeneutics, reflected in Cupid's "cupidinous," tyrannical understanding of TC and in the narrator's telling of the legends as a "testamentary document of a dying author."
Craun, Edwin C.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Discusses how the late medieval Church encouraged and participated in "fraternal corrections," and establishes connections with major English reformist writings, including "The Book of Margery Kempe" and "Piers Plowman." Brief mention of Chaucer's…
Offers a psychoanalytical reparative reading of PrT, focusing on PrP, the conclusion of the tale, and various intertexts (Psalm 8; the "Alma Redemptoris Mater"; and Dante's "Purgatorio," XXXIII), unpacking interplays between utterance and intention;…
Czarnowus, Anna.
Rafal Boryslawski, Czarnowus, and Lukasz Neubauer, eds. Marvels of Reading: Essays in Honour of Professor Andrzej Wicher (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Slaskiego, 2015), pp. 103-13.
Assesses representation of the mothers-in-law in MLT and their equivalent in the BBC adaptation, where the mother-in-law is of Iranian origin, but looks on Custance from a highly racist perspective.
The three Aristotelian modes of persuasion are ethos (character), pathos (emotion), and logos (reason). In his long poem, Chaucer fails as narrator-rhetor (ethos, logos) but succeeds as human (pathos) and is himself a rhetorical solution to a…
Shore, Rachel.
Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric 5 (2008): 98-106 [Electronic Publication].
Chaucer uses his naïve narrator to achieve an effective balance among the rhetorical appeals of ethos, pathos, and logos in CT. Also, this narrator's view of the Prioress overwhelms her appeal to ethos in PrPT and her heavy emphasis on pathos also…
Knapp, Ethan.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 247-73, 1999.
Hoccleve's three encomia for Chaucer in "Regement of Princes" praise Chaucer's genius but also pose strategies for "poetic usurpation." In applying them to Chaucer, Hoccleve capitalized on the "polyvocality" of the metaphors of father, master, and…
Most of the objects and language associated with the Pardoner mirror his fragmentation of incompleteness. Significantly, the literary background in the "Roman de la Rose" follows the account of the castration of Saturn and Raison's defense of plain…
Wallace, David, ed.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Surveys the literatures of late medieval Europe (eastern, western, and peripheral) from the onset of the Black Death to the end of the Great Schism at the Council of Constance, describing historical events, cultural conditions, ideological…
Erzgräber, Willi.
H. Maes-Jelinek et al., eds. Multiple Worlds, Multiple Words: Essays in Honour of Irene Simon (Liege: University of Liege, English Department, 1987), pp. 103-21.
Examines Chaucer's fabliaux (MilT and RvT) as designed for a courtly audience and TC as revealing a "subtle interplay between nobility, gentry, and the middle class." Chaucer's work is symptomatic of a general literary development: "the exploration…
Matthews, William.
Modern Language Review 51 (1956): 217-20.
Identifies a ballade by Eustache Deschamps (number 880: "Que diriez vous du froit mois de Janvier") as an analogue, possibly a source, of several details in MerT.
Sinnreich-Levi, Deborah M.,ed.
New York: AMS Press, 1998.
Thirteen essays reexamining Deschamps's work and life. While critics in the first half of the century saw Deschamps as a possible source for Chaucer and as an admirer of Chaucer's work, these essays investigate a wider context for his work, including…
The mother-daughter bond appearing in medieval English poetry and hagiography is analyzed from a modern sociopsychological point of view, especially the surrogate mother-daughter, in which hags and crones advise young women. Deals briefly with WBT,…
Fyler's assertion that Chaucer's ambiguous use of generic and gendered "man" is both self-conscious and consciously feminist assumes a false stability of meaning for the generic masculine and ignores the critical construction of authorial…
Comic novel cast as the first-person memoir of British academic who identifies with Shakespeare's Hamlet (p. 7) and alludes to Chaucer at least once, citing his own feelings as being similar to those of the "ghost of Troilus at the end of Chaucer's…
Houwen, Luuk.
Andrew James Johnston, Ferdinand von Mengden, and Stefan Thim, eds. Language and Text: Current Perspectives on English and Germanic Historical Linguistics and Philology (Heidelberg: Winter, 2006), pp. 97-111.
Exemplifies text/image relationships by examining a number of misericords depicting scenes from the beast fable tradition of Reynard and other sly foxes. Considers the role of NPT in the development of this visual tradition.
Kennedy, Kathleen E.
In The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. https://opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu, 2017. Relocated 2025 at https://opencanterburytales.lsusites.org/
Introduces the social practices in Chaucer's age; designed for classroom use. Arranged by the cycle of the day, with commentary on food, clothing, shelter, marriage, childhood, days of the week, festivals, and more, with hypertext links (some broken)…
Lockhart, Jessica Jane.
Dissertation Abstracts International A79.07 (2017): n.p.
Examines the use of riddling and the structure of riddles as a means of representing "the wondrous in the everyday." Specifically considers Chaucer's use of this in BD and PF. Additionally suggests that the "Secretum philosophorum" is an intertext in…
DeVries, David N.
Nancy M. Reale and Ruth E. Sternglantz, eds. Satura: Studies in Medieval Literature in Honour of Robert R. Raymo (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2001), 248-62.
Assesses the intertextual relationship of Lydgate's "A Balade in Commendation of Our Lady" with TC and with Alan de Lille's "Anticlaudianus," exploring how aureate diction contributes to the poem's "connection between poetry and redemption in…
Duke, Elizabeth Anne Foster.
DAI 29.11 (1969): 3971A.
Examines "the relationships existing among the printed editions" of CT from Caxton through Tyrwhitt, based on comparisons of their versions of GP and considering their uses of prior texts, emendation policies, and editorial innovations.
Cigman, Gloria.
Leo Carruthers and Adrian Papahagi, eds. Jeunesse et vieillesse: Images médiévales de l'age en littérature anglaise (Paris: Harmatten, 2005), pp. 93-101.
Imaginative re-creation of the Wife of Bath's life and times from childhood onward, expanding on hints in WBP.
