The Host's use of "tredefowel" in MkT and NPE suggests that he may have been aware of "cock" as an obscenity (as well as a symbol for priest), a meaning supported by evidence from other languages, literature, and iconography.
Boitani, Piero.
Piero Boitani. The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 56-74.
Discusses links among eros, melancholia, and acedia as well as the tragic psychological dilemma of love in Petrarchan sonnets, Dante, and TC, especially in Chaucer's use of the Petrarchan sonnet "S'amor non e." The "oxymoronic essence" of TC allows…
Rowe, Donald W.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
TC is best understood in terms of the tradition of "discordia concors," the harmonization of opposites, which Chaucer saw exemplified in the "school of Chartres" and Jean de Meun. Chaucer's profound philosophical insight, which linked the perfection…
Halfim, Miriam.
Rio de Janeiro : Civilização Brasileira, 1984.
Halfim summarizes social conditions of Jews in early English society and assesses the depiction of Jews in PrT (pp. 22-34), Marlowe's "The Jew of Malta," and Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice." The authors of all three works reiterate Christian…
Galler, Matthias.
Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007.
Galler studies the theme of death in Middle English literature and argues against the "pessimistic" dictum that the people and works of the late Middle Ages were primarily concerned with the transience of life, the dominant approach on this subject…
Fictional autobiography of Chaucer in which he recounts the arrival of a thirty-first Canterbury pilgrim, a woman who narrates how she has been impregnated by an extraterrestrial being. Illustrated by Giselda Leirner. In Portuguese.
Wallace, David.
Brian Cummings and James Simpson, eds. Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 502-23.
Wallace explores "degrees of enclosure" for nuns and surveys representations of nuns in medieval and Renaissance literature and art. Comments on Chaucer's depictions of the Prioress and the Second Nun: Chaucer "tells us much about one of his nuns and…
Outlines medieval number theory and its applications to literary composition and interpretation, describing the significances of seven and five. Then explores how and where numerological significance is evident in TC: in its five-part structure,…
Nohara, Yasuhiro.
English Review (Momoyama Gakuin University) 11 (1996): 27-47.
Argues that the intensive use of "wel" in "wel nyne and twenty" (GP 24) helps account for the apparent discrepancy between the phrase and the number of pilgrims in CT.
Baker, David.
Robert Tubbs, Alice Jenkins, and Nina Engelhardt, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Mathematics (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 23-40.
Exemplifies how Chaucer "has a great deal of fun with the coalescence of medieval arithmetic, geometry and logic into a single discipline more recognizable today as mathematics," exploring the "proto-probabilistic" dicing and poison-bottle selection…
Peck, Russell A.
English Studies 48 (1967): 205-15.
Analyzes the symbolic import of the numbers used in lines 1-12 of ParsP (29, 4, 11, and 6), considering them in light of medieval number theory, time-telling, and the astrological sign of Libra. Together, the numbers "suggest the approaching…
Peck, Russell Albert.
Dissertation Abstracts International 25.07 (1964): 2894-95A.
Describes the "metaphysical associations" that numbers had in medieval imagination, and explores Chaucer's uses of number symbolism in his verse forms, the dates and astronomical calculations within his works, numbers associated with his characters,…
Reiss, Edmund.
Medievalia et Humanistica 1 (1970): 161-74.
Includes brief comments (pp. 168-69) on Chaucer's use of the number 29 in GP and ParsP, and, in BD, on the use of 8 (Octovyen) and references to Argus (the "Arab mathematician Al-Kwārizm") and number symbolism.
Item not seen. The WorldCat records indicate that this is a score for three pieces of choral music: the roundel from the conclusion of PF (here titled "Now Welcome"), along with "Sweet Rose of Virtue" by William Dunbar and "Pleasure It Is." by…
Nolan, Edward Peter.
Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 1990.
Studies the figure of the Pauline paradigm "videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate" (1 Cor. 13.12) in Western ontology and epistemology, examining "the functions of intra- as well as intertextual literary mirroring" (Virgil's use of Homer, Chaucer's…
Recent critics of Chaucer--Terry Jones, David Aers, and others--are conventional in their desire to moralize medieval literature. The trend of contemporary criticism of FranT, TC, and KnT, as examples, is to isolate from the story tableaux serving…
Brosnahan, Leger.
Larry D. Benson, ed. The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature. Harvard English Studies, no. 5 (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 11-18.
Explains the imagery of BD 646 as a literary application of a commonplace proverb; the line is drawn from Machaut and implies the instability of Fortune.
Proposes a method for classifying noun-plus-noun compounds and compiles all such compounds in Chaucer's works, showing that, with one exception, modern types of compounds were already in use in Chaucer's Middle English.
Ruggiers, Paul G.
Chaucer Review 8.2 (1973): 89-99.
Comments on Chaucer's "serious" poetry for the ways that it relates to various kinds of tragedy and tragic outlook--classical Greek, Boethian, "pathetic tragedy," ethical or moral tragedy, etc. Except in extreme cases such as MkT, Chaucer inflects…
Shoaf, R[ichard] A[llen].
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 1 (1979): 55-66.
Fluent in English, French, Latin, and Italian, Chaucer realized the burden of responsibility in translating another poet's work. Also highly aware of the mutability of language, he sought to re-create new meaning in translations which he hoped would…
