Browse Items (16035 total)

CT, like the intellectual disputes of the fourteenth century, is characterized by extremes. Applying David Knowles's discussion of the period to fragment VII of CT, Brown notes that ShT, PrT, Th, Mel, and MkT show the "tendency to extremism…

Traces evidence of anatomical votive offerings, particularly genital renderings, in Roman practice, Reformation commentary, and modern accounts, presenting them as background to reading the Host's commentary on the Pardoner's cullions (PardT,…

In a chapter entitled "Constructing Compilations of Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales'," considers CT through the lens of Walter Benjamin's historical materialism. Teases out three narrative threads by means of "compilational construction." The…

Argues that a "turn to the Middle Ages" can reinvigorate feminist criticism, encouraging exploration of the "origins of gendered language," e.g., womanhood, femininity, and wifehood. Williams surveys the tradition of feminist approaches to medieval…

Explores the relationship between fragments I and II and the "Marriage Group," reading the tales in I and II and III through V as "an ongoing discourse between Chaucer and the ultimate narrator and reader." Argues that Kittredge's concept of the…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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."

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…

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.

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…

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…

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."

Item not seen. From the abstract: "this study presents the frame as a strategic locus of value in the literary text, arguing that the frame both constitutes and is constituted by an interplay between stylistic 'insides' and ideological 'outsides'. .…

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…

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…

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…

Identifies and edits from Bodleian Library MS Add. A.267 Francis Burton's version of RvT, in quatrains, from the early seventeenth century.

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.

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.

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.

Chaucer's Clerk responds to WBT using the poetry of Petrarch, the tale of Griselda, and a spiritually improved version of Aristotelian logic.