Browse Items (15542 total)

Uncovers the complex relationship between monumentality and print culture as it contributed to Chaucer's early modern reception in post-Reformation England.

Satiric narrative poetry in rhymed couplets, with thirty-five tales told by academics from the University of Montana on their way Silicon Valley; parodies CT and includes several references to Chaucer and his work. WorldCat records indicate that a…

Explores treatments of monstrous women in Middle English romance, particularly Melusine, Medea, and Constance. Argues that Chaucer adapts the romance to critique the suffering, violent treatment, and "liminality" of women within the genre. Depicting…

Using figures from Middle English literature (including Chaucer's Constance and Medea), Urban argues that the literature both dramatizes and "interrogate[s] the prevailing gender ideology."

Physical and mechanical marvels suggest a mechanistic rather than a supernatural universe in SqT, Gower's version of the Alexander legend, and Sir John Mandeville's eastern marvels.

Reads the Sultaness of MLT as the antithesis of Western medieval ideals of motherhood, the opposite of Constance, and a reification of distorted notions of women of color.

Jones surveys in medieval and early modern art and literature the figures of starving and fatted beasts that eat, respectively, obedient wives and complaisant husbands, presented as background to Chaucer's reference to Chichevache in ClT. Includes…

Textual evidence and historical information suggest that the Merchant of ShT is a money changer involved in usury. Usury was a sin equivalent to adultery. Love of money was more than simple "cupiditas"; because of his usury, the Merchant's wife…

Ten essays by various authors and an introduction by the editors. "Introduction: 'Greet prees at Market'-- Money Matters in Medieval English Literature" comments on recent critical interest in the social and political aspects of late medieval…

Argues that ShT comments on fourteenth-century controversies regarding tithing and examines the connections drawn between international finance and agrarian production.

Discusses the "impact on . . . consciousness" of late-medieval European economic expansion, focusing on evidence in French and English chronicles and on reflections of the rise of bourgeois power in fabliaux, in the "technical language of finance and…

Brief biography of the first translator of CT into Spanish (ca. 1920). (In Spanish.)

Reconciles an apparent discrepancy between teller and tale in Chaucer's depiction of the Monk, arguing that the worldliness of the GP description, the exchange in MkP, and the concern with fall through Fortune in MkT are unified by the "common,…

Unlike the character in the sources and analogues, Custance in MLT forcefully confronts her father's authority at times. This confrontation and her willingness to disclose her past inscribe a "lesser version of the incest motif that has supposedly…

Explores how John Gower's tomb in Southwark lent "authority" to the character of Gower-as-chorus in Shakespeare and George Wilkins's play "Pericles." Includes examination of how the title pages, commemorative verses, and Chaucer's portrait in Thomas…

Discusses the function of groups of twelve lines in the NPT.

Irony--"the Chaucerian pose"--is of five basic types in CT: verbal, structural, dramatic, and philosophic irony, as well as irony of manner.

Surveys the reception of Chaucer reflected in translations by Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Pope, and Wordsworth, viewing it as the beginning of modern criticism, of the modern idea of a national literature, of modern textual criticism, and of modern…

The lack of popularity of PhyT may derive in part from the separate, seemingly modern, aesthetic it espouses--one designed not to "define virtue and suppress vice" but to illustrate a sense of "randomness and discontinuity" that anticipates a new…

Tabulates the plots and motifs of twenty-one modern Irish tales purported to be analogues of the pear tree episode in MerT, suggesting that those accounts which include the motif of optical illusion (rather than blindness) should not be considered…

Examines biographical, textual, and comparative approaches to Th to show how dependent they are on modern notions of author and text. Argues that medieval textuality and authorship pose methodological problems for understanding Th as parody, a genre…

Outlines the aspects of Chaucer's works that are usually regarded as characteristic of twentieth-century British modernism: innovation and convention-breaking, fusion of genres, colloquial idioms, metrical license, dramatic monologue, poetic…

Examines how the long eighteenth century reflected "the emergence of a modern historical consciousness." Chapter 2, "Chaucer Ancient and Modern: Standardization, Modernization, and the Eighteenth-Century Reception of The Canterbury Tales," pp.…

Chapter 2 examines two views of CT in eighteenth-century England: as a philologist's "historical foundation in need of preservation" and as "merchandise facilitating social refinement."

Surveys representations of male and female fainting in medieval romances and "chansons de geste," and describes the medieval medical status of fainting ("syncope"). Considers Troilus' swoon in TC 3, observing that the "precision of Chaucer's medical…