Meyer-Lee, Robert J.
Chaucer Review 45 (2010): 1-31.
The editorial break between MerE and SqH cannot be defended on the basis of manuscript evidence. The break has obscured an element of the "artistic design" of CT: a sequence of four tales whose tellers represent occupations held either by Chaucer or…
Studying how Chaucer's and Gower's uses of their sources reflect their understandings of history and their political agendas, Urban invites readers to consider parallels between the poets' uses of sources and historicist criticism. Uses various…
Thum, D. Maureen.
Philological Quarterly 71 (1992): 261-79.
Using the same folkloric motif as exemplum, Chaucer and Kipling conflate it with other motifs to form a new configuration; both embed the narrative in a series of fictive frames and modify it by commentary of multiple fictive voices. A comparative…
Phillips, Helen.
Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone, eds. The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), pp. 71-97.
Attempts to define fifteenth-century "Chaucerian poetry," commenting on the historical use of the term and positing several thematic and formal features, especially the "meta-fictive and self-reflexive virtuosity" that results from various kinds of…
Ensley, Mimi.
Yearbook of English Studies 32 (2018): 333-51.
Argues that the scriptural glosses found in Thomas Godfray's 1535 publication of "The Ploughman’s Tale" are similar to Langland's techniques in "Piers Plowman," as are the "poem’s anticlericism and alliteration"; when Godfray republished the tale in…
Comments on literary framing structures in manuals of religious instruction and confession, from the "Somme le Roi" to ParsT. Briefly compares ParsT to "Jacob's Well."
Lewis, Celia Milton.
Dissertation Abstracts International 62: 2109A, 2001.
The "Seven Sages," the "Decameron," and CT share, in addition to frame structure and historical milieux, a concern with death and avoidance of it (plague), a changing sense of time, and a new concept of authorial identity (especially Chaucer). The…
Lewis, Celia.
Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard, eds. New Readings of Chaucer's Poetry (Rochester, N.Y., and Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 139-64.
Late-medieval preoccupation with mortality defies the solace of fiction. PhyT and PardT offer no hope of physical or spiritual life, and ParsT kills storytelling.
Hilmo, Maidie.
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Maidie Hilmo, eds. The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower (Victoria, British Columbia: U of Victoria, 2001), pp. 14-71.
The Ellesmere miniatures are evidence of the process of text production--the shaping and preparation of the manuscript for aristocratic viewing--and a visual guide to the reading process. The illustrations foster the aristocracy's sense of…
Gittes, Katharine S.
New York, Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, 1991.
In the traditions of Indian and Greek frame narratives, tensions exist between the framing story and the enclosed tales, although Western aesthetics promote tighter structure and more detailed characterization. Medieval framed narratives florished…
Ellis, Steve.
New Medieval Literatures 7 (2005): 35-52
Virginia Woolf's discussions of Chaucer have "the effect of cutting him down to size." This effect reflects her reaction to High Modernist affection for the Middle Ages and her "subversive and anti-canonical approach to literary history."
Butterfield, Ardis.
Susanna Fein and David Raybin, eds. Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), pp. 25-46.
Butterfield reviews traditional, generally dismissive attitudes toward "Frenchness" in Chaucer criticism and advocates a new awareness of the linguistic complexity that underlies Chaucer's uses of French models and French diction, particularly the…
Wiggins, Alison.
Anne Lawrence-Mathers and Phillipa Hardman, eds. Women and Writing, c.1340-c.1650: The Domestication of Print Culture ([York]: York Medieval Press, 2010), pp. 77-89.
Examines the readers' marks in an annotated copy of the 1550 Thynne edition of Chaucer's Workes (Folger STC 5074 Copy 2), identifying its century-long provenance (1578-1677) of female ownership and commenting on how notes, bracketed passages, and…
Bessinger, Jess B., Jr., and Robert P. Creed, eds.
New York: New York University Press, 1965.
Includes 26 essays on Germanic, Old English, Middle English, and Renaissance literary and linguistic topics, along with a dedicatory poem, a brief Introduction, and a list of Magoun's publications between 1924 and 1964, including reviews. For two…
Bremmer, Rolf H., Jr.
Studies in Medievalism 11: 37-72, 2001.
Bremmer reviews the study of Chaucer undertaken late in life by the pioneering Dutch Anglo-Saxonist Franciscus Junius, as reflected mainly in copious marginalia in Junius's copy of Speght's 1598 edition of Chaucer's Works.
Sharp, Michael David.
Dissertation Abstracts International 60: 1549A, 1999.
Examines the "boundaries between licit and illicit forms of homosocial desire" in communities in late-medieval England. Assesses various texts, including MkPT, FrT, and SumT.
Zangen, Britta.
Gabriele Genge, ed. Sprachformen des Körpers in Kunst und Wissenschaft. Kultur und Erkenntnis, no. 25 (Tübingen and Basel: A. Francke, 2000), pp. 244-58.
CT is startlingly antifeminist ("erschreckend frauenfeindlich") in its depiction of women and of male attitudes toward women. Recent criticism has begun to recognize this antifeminism but has not fully overcome adulation of the author.
Taylor, Jerome.
Aldo Scaglione, ed. Francis Petrarch, Six Centuries Later: A Symposium. North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, Symposia, no. 3 (Chapel Hill: Department of Romance Languages, University of North Carolina, 1975), pp. 364-83.
Chaucer's Clerk responds to WBT using the poetry of Petrarch, the tale of Griselda, and a spiritually improved version of Aristotelian logic.
Baker, Donald C.
Paul Ruggiers, ed. Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1984), pp. 157-69.
Summarizes Furnivall's capacious contributions to Chaucer studies (and Middle English generally), and comments that his "chief contributions" to the editing of Chaucer lie in his "selection of the texts" to print and his care with copying, printing,…
O’Neill, Rosemary.
Sharon M. Rowley, ed. Writers, Editors, and Exemplars in Medieval English Texts (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 101-24.
Explores marital struggles and "postnuptial renegotiation of marriage obligations" in WBPT and "The Book of Margery Kempe." Presents "contemporary feminist theories of contracts, consent, and choice" to reveal limitations of "choice" and negotiations…
Schoff, Rebecca Lynn.
Dissertation Abstracts International 65 (2004): 1773A
Examines the works of Chaucer, Langland, and Margery Kempe in the context of the standardization of textual discourse that accompanied the development of printed books.
Webb, Diana.
Christine Meek and Catherine Lawless, eds. Studies on Medieval and Early Modern Women: Pawns or Players? (Dublin and Portland, Ore.: Four Courts, 2003), pp. 75-89.
Webb briefly cites two CT characters: the Prioress is an unusual, but not impossible, instance of a nun on a local (as opposed to a foreign) pilgrimage; the Wife of Bath parallels several historical women who capitalized on their peripatetic…
Associative thinking in WBP may have drawn on the model of Aristotelian psychology and argumentation as understood in Chaucer's day. As a consequence, the Wife of Bath's voice remains more real to a modern audience than does the debate she…
