Spearing, A. C.
Chap. 4 in A. C. Spearing, Readings in Medieval Poetry. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 107-33.
It is not necessary to claim unity in the love, death, and heavenly reward of Troilus. Endings mark the boundaries between the work and the world (a central theme in modern social anthropology concerns boundaries or threshold crossing).
FranT is about people's vulnerability to themselves, about the intimate connection between their identities--or senses of self--and their bodies, about how this vulnerability compromises moral strength and capacity for spiritual fulfillment, and…
Spearing, A. C.
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, John T. Thompson, and Sarah Baechle, eds. New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices: Essays in Honor of Derek Pearsall (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), pp. 7-33.
Discusses how TC is a "renarration" of earlier medieval narratives and reveals how Chaucer uses the "autographic 'I'" in Book II of TC. Focuses on "aspects of narrative freedom" used by Chaucer throughout TC.
Compares Chaucer's and Gower's versions of the story of Virginia, her rape, and death, remarking upon their various similarities and differences. Building upon that comparison, offers correctives for how a narrator might be used for old texts in…
Although the Merchant's voice and attitudes are cynical and misogynistic, the "marriage encomium, Justinus's speeches, and the episode of Pluto and Proserpine" counter them. Tensions between the narrator and the material of MerT represent "competing…
Addresses issues of disease, medical practice, faith, household remedy, and gender in fourteenth-and fifteenth-century Middle English "medical discourse," often found embedded in or juxtaposed to broader works, including narrative poetry that engages…
Stadolnik, Joseph.
Medium Aevum 85.2 (2016): 314-18.
Maintains that the quoted maxim on friendship in Astr is misattributed to classical sources and actually comes from a twelfth-century medical treatise, "Practica brevis," attributed to Johannes Platearius. While Chaucer may have seen the line in…
Bliss, Jane.
Rochester, N.Y.; and Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008.
Bliss surveys the variety of ways that names, naming, and namelessness in romance "contribute to our understanding" of the genre, focusing on Middle English narratives but also discussing French and Anglo-Norman analogues. She identifies a number…
Sylvester, Louise.
Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta, and Matti Rissanen, eds. Placing Middle English in Context (Berlin and New York: Gruyter, 2000), pp. 227-92.
Explores the role of taboo on the semantic shift of the term 'bug' from an object of terror to an insect. Assesses the occurrence of the word in the Delaware manuscript at NPT 7.2936, where other manuscripts have devils.
Hough, Carole.
Richard Dance and Laura Wright, eds. The Use and Development of Middle English (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 215-29.
Analyzes the name "Pertelote" in NPT as "beautiful paramour" and "little beauty," and "Colle," "Talbot," and "Gerland" as dog-names. Includes recurrent concern with levels of style in Chaucer's naming and on names that link aspects of CT, e.g.,…
Scala, Elizabeth.
Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the "Canterbury Tales" (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), pp. 19-32.
Assesses how Brian Helgeland's "A Knight's Tale" and John Madden's "Shakespeare in Love" "tell us more than they realize": that Chaucer always stands separate from his fiction and, conversely, that Shakespeare's "theatrical life" enables us to…
Krygier, Marcin, and Liliana Sikorska, eds.
Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005.
Ten essays selected from the papers presented at the Third Medieval English Studies Symposium in Poznan, Poland, in November 2004, focusing on Old and Middle English language and literature. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Naked…
Item noit seen. The second of the two verse dramas included here, "De Raptu Meo," is an adaptation of a portion of O’Connor’s "Chaucer’s Triumph" (2007), depicting Chaucer as he is accused of raping Cecily Chaumpaigne.
Hass, Robin Ranea.
Dissertation Abstracts International 56 (1996): 3949A-50A
In the light of medieval "artes poetriae," rhetoric is perceived as feminine. Chaucer's hagiography, courtly romance, and fabliaux demonstrate rhetoric in various modes: as chaste, "pedestal," and wanton, especially as voiced by the Clerk and the…
Edmondson, George.
Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico, eds. The Post-Historical Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 139-60
The appearance of naked "Geoff" Chaucer in Brian Helgeland's film, "A Knight's Tale," "challenges the logic of the present . . . assumed by presentism," even while reminding us that historical periods exist, "each one haunted by the moment of its…
This anthology of drama, poetry, fiction, and essays that pertain to Medea ranges from Euripides to the late twentieth century, including a facing-page selection (pp. 114-23) from the story of Hypsipyle and Medea in LGW, presented in Middle English…
Explores the skeptical uncertainly about dreams that is expressed in the opening of HF as it relates to classical and medieval notions of "mythopoesis" and the validity and interpretation of poetry. Reads HF as a parody of mythopoesis.
Renda, Patricia A.
Dissertation Abstracts International 66 (2005): 1759A.
Considers Chaucer's rendition of Lucrece (in LGW) as part of a series of narratives that transform Lucrece's story into a text that "reveal[s] an evolving patriarchal ideology."
Heinrichs, Katherine.
Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 12 (1991): 13-39.
Mythological lovers alluded to in TC were associated in medieval letters with "amor stultus," foolish love. Allusions to Oenone, Tereus and Procne, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Myrrha help characterize the love of Troilus and Criseyde as foolish,…
Explores historicity and fictionality in medieval narratives of early. mythic Thebes. Includes brief commentary on the sources of Chaucer's knowledge of Oedipus and his conflation of Egyptian and Boeotian Thebes in KnT 1.1470ff.
Drake, Graham Nelson.
Dissertation Abstracts International 50 (1990): 2046A.
A study of later medieval commentaries on classical myth in the Boethian work sheds light on such matters as Chaucer's treatment of the Muses and Lydgate's view of Hercules.
Dane, Joseph A.
[Santa Barbara, Calif.]: Punctum, 2018.
Includes a series of essays in medieval studies and book history that are concerned "with the tenuous connection between what we define as evidence and what we construct as the narrative, scholarly or historical, that makes sense of that evidence."…
