Dor, Juliette.
Juliette Dor, ed. A Wyf Ther Was: Essays in Honour of Paule Mertens-Fonck (Liege: University of Liege, 1992), pp. 129-40.
Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of polyphony illuminates MLH, MLP, and MLT, in which Custance's religious voice contrasts with the Man of Law's many ambivalent voices, including his "rhetorical, epic, and legal registers." While Custance is a stock figure,…
Takada, Yasunari.
Toshiyuki Takamiya and Richard Beadle, eds. Chaucer to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of Shinsuke Ando (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992), 45-54.
Examines Chaucer's use of "thoughte" in HF to translate Boethius's "mens" and Dante's "mente," arguing that the personal, experiential epistemology implicit in Chaucer's word undermines the transcendental visions of his predecessors and anticipates…
Brewer, Derek.
Leo Carruthers and Adrian Papahagi, eds. Prologues et épilogues dans la littérature anglaise du Moyen Âge (Paris: Association des Médiévistes Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur, 2001), pp. 55-72.
In CT, Chaucer uses prologues to achieve great diversity, displacing himself with other narrators. He develops a counter movement in his epilogues, in which the conventions of religious epilogues communicate, however tenuously, a unified religious…
Lot 1543 is "Chaucer (black letter): printed by Wyllyam Bonham, at the sign of the Reed [sic] Lyon," given to Rogers (1763 - 1855) by his friend Horne Tooke.
Assesses the socio-political assumptions and implications of mid-nineteenth-century German study of Chaucer, especially pre-academic translations and commentary.
Cites and quotes a portion of Dorigen's "song" in FranT 4.857-94 as an early, pre-Romantic lyrical example of the "'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry' effect" in poetry, a trope by which reference to a physical space links the inner concerns of multiple…
Goossens, Louis.
Louis Goossens, and others. By Word of Mouth: Metaphor, Metonymy, and Linguistic Action in a Cognitive Perspective. Pragmatics & Beyond, New Series, no. 33 (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1995), pp. 175-204.
Uses data from Aelfric, Chaucer, and Shakespeare to demonstrate how metonymy "works as a tool for meaning extension in a diachronically diverse data base," arguing that there is "something of a metonymy-metaphor continuum" and a complex relation…
Bale, Anthony.
Literature Compass 5.5 (2008): 918-34.
Surveys medieval notions of authorship from the twelfth century to the late fifteenth century, commenting on topics such as anonymity, laureateship, Mandeville's "Travels," "The Cloud of Unknowing," "The Book of Margery Kempe," and the development…
Chaucer and Gower both adapted the story of Constance from the Anglo-Norman chronicle of Trevet. A comparison of the proper names, institutional terms, and speeches shows that Gower closely follows Trevet while Chaucer modifies the story in MLT.
Traces the history of the motif of infernal punishment in the devil's anus, suggesting that the earliest evidence of the motif is found in the "Seven Heavens Apocryphon" of Irish visionary tradition and that Chaucer's use of the motif in SumP derives…
Dauphant, Clothilde.
In Miren Lacassagne, ed. Le rayonnement de la cour des premiers Valois à l'époque d'Eustache Deschamps (Paris: Presses de l'Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2017), pp. 81-94.
Traces changes in the putatively fixed form of the balade as used by Eustache Deschamps, John Gower, Chaucer, and others, commenting on variations in number of stanzas, rhyme schemes, the inclusion of envoys, etc. Includes comments on Ven, For, Ros,…
Amoils, E. R.
English Studies in Africa 17 (1974): 17-37.
Explores the complementary thematic interconnections of PhyT and PardPT (integrity and fraudulence, spiritual fertility and sterility, virtue and vice, defeat of death), reading their interdependence in light of ParsT and the section of the "Roman de…
Huppé, Bernard F., and D. W. Robertson Jr.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963.
Interprets BD and PF as allegories, offering "An Approach to Medieval Poetry" (pp. 3-31) as an introduction to exegetical or patristic criticism and a justification of the method. Explores the imagery, structures, ironic juxtapositions, and meanings…
Davis, Rebecca.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015): 101-32
Argues that motion in HF is "not the antithesis to form but its condition of possibility." Water imagery links Boethian "enclynyng," the littoral "field of sand" that signals transition between Books I and II, and the eel-trap shape of the House of…
McClellan relates Giorgio Agamben's theory of the ambiguity of political sovereignty and his ideas on "gesture" and "shame" to Walter's sovereignty and Griselda's submission in ClT. Argues that these are key to understanding the Tale: "The paradoxes…
Sheridan, Christian.
Sandra M. Hordis and Paul Hardwick, eds. Medieval English Comedy (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007), pp. 111-23.
Sheridan assesses the "common logic" of puns and money in ShT. Both pose the threat of vacuity--meaninglessness or lack of value--while simultaneously offering pleasure.
Includes discussion of MerT that explains Chaucer's precision in using astronomical data for poetic purposes. Suggests that Chaucer used Alfonsine tables, and aligns the astronomical details and imagery of MerT with celestial events that occurred in…
Mogan, Joseph J., Jr.
Papers on Language and Literature 1 (1965): 72-77.
Identifies two examples of the "memento mori" motif and two of "ubi sunt" in TC, three of these added by Chaucer to his material, and all of them contributing to the poem's dominant theme of the transitory nature of human love and life.
Jacobs, Edward Craney.
Chaucer Review 15 (1981): 151-54.
Madame Eglentyne's "Amor vincit omnia," where we would expect "Caritas vincit omnia," is used for ironic effect. Since Paul defines "caritas" as the "bond of perfection," Chaucer's use of the motto to bind together the Prioress' rich beads is…
