Browse Items (16012 total)

Analysis based on Michel Foucault and Judith Butler shows that, in a wide variety of medieval texts including CT, the speakers' situations affect their social position and their ability to refashion genres.

Explores analogues to PardT, including sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish versions. Focuses on a modern Andalusian legend from Priego de Cordoba.

Setting out to establish what medieval readers thought about romances and what they labeled romances, Furrow concentrates on a wide range of romances from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. Her discussion of romance and truth includes analysis…

Chaucer attempts to represent simultaneously three levels of reality in his three "confessional" characters (the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, and the Canon's Yeoman): actual life, idealized fiction, and higher truth.

Positioned midway between aristocracy and the lower orders of society, the Franklin appropriately tells a story that emphasizes the necessity and correctness of the social order as he (and Chaucer) would have understood it. Thus, the…

Summarizes debates about the relative importance of logical explanation (authority) and practical experience in medieval medical theory, an opposition between doctors and surgeons. Presented as both doctor and surgeon, Chaucer's Physician embodies…

CT is the last formulation of one of Chaucer's strongest literary preoccupations: the dynamic interaction of experience and art. The links present reality as it is immediately perceived: chaotic but vital. The tales present reality as it is…

Sayers reviews commentary on the Wife of Bath's deafness; suggests that we treat it more literally than metaphorically; and posits that, through the deafened Wife, Chaucer "does not resolve the opposition between experience and authority, but rather…

Mentions Chaucer (WBP) while discussing the rise of experience as an acceptable authority in the writing of female mystics, supplanting a previous exclusive reliance on traditional authority.

Explicates a "series of four scenes" in TC (2.596-931) that enable readers to "know what it feels like to 'be' Criseyde," establishing a fundamental empathy with her by, unusual in the age, seeing "into the mind of a woman." Examines the passage as a…

Argues that the Wife’s non-congenital deafness signifies not spiritual deafness, but damage done to her by the contents of Jankyn's book, which she, ironically, destroys. Compares Alison's interpretations of Scripture in WBP with those of Jerome in…

Argues that function shifts and the development of impersonal constructions reduced the nouns and verbs associated with dreaming in the development of English. Nohara focuses on the loss of forms of "sweven" and "meten" from Middle English, drawing…

Examines the characteristics of Chaucer's usage of the expletive "there." In Japanese.

The rape victim in WBT quickly vanishes from the text because she is "excommunicated," or denied access to the privileges of the knight who exploits her.

Shows that throughout his career Chaucer "attempts to stike a balance between apologizing for the instability of his meaning and open acceptance of the capricious nature of language." Comments on Chaucer's attitudes toward language, interpretation,…

Argues that theological modes of inquiry are needed in interdisciplinary approaches to literature that have tended toward secular and "reductive" methodologies. Notes the difficulty of teaching theological modes of inquiry through Chaucer when few…

Davis assesses late medieval, first-person narration in English literature as a rhetorical and allegorical device and as an autobiographical stance. She comments on the influence of Augustine and Boethius and explores a range of Middle English…

Surveys uses of first-person narrative in late medieval English literary texts, agreeing with and extending earlier critics' arguments that find in this literature notions of selfhood often attributed to the early modern period. Observes how and…

Turkish tales that parallel the folkloric formula at the end of FranT-"Which was the noblest act?"-generally treat who is the most ignoble. So many Turkish stories fall into this category that Chaucer's Knight may have "previewed a performance"…

The relation between public and private in MilT may be understood as the condition of "extimacy": "the presence of the Other at the place thought to be most intimate." The "structure of extimacy" frustrates masculine attempts to control or acquire…

Identifies the legal features of the lovers' pacts in CT. Legal diction (e.g., "accord"), careful preparation, and various kinds of delay connect the illicit relations in MilT, WBPT, ShT, MerT, RvT, and others with the legal contract of marriage.

Argues that TC "dramatizes" the relations among vision, imagination, reason, and intellect found in Bo, tracing the effects of the lovers' "faulty reasoning" in failing to progress from sight-based earthly pleasure to eternal good, emphasized in…

Contextualizes MerT by looking at medieval scientific writings on "pica" ("deviant pregnancy cravings") and the medieval "pathology of pregnancy," assessing May's pregnancy and her "sexual longings."

Includes a summary of Pound's appreciative criticism of Chaucer's poetry and the possible impact the assessment had on T. S. Eliot's views.

Surveys the influence of Provençal and Italian poets on the works of Ezra Pound, and examines Pound's critical commentary about Chaucer (in his "ABC of Reading"), comparing passages from the two poets and exploring the extent to which the "three…