McIntosh, Angus, M. L. Samuels, and Margaret Laing.
Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1989.
Eighteen essays on dialects, scribes, transmission, word geography, and related topics. Only one essay has not been previously published: Margaret Laing's "Linguistic Profiles and Textual Criticism: The Translations by Richard Misyn of Rolle's…
Reed, Thomas L.,Jr.
Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1990.
A prominent feature of Middle English debate poetry from 1200 to 1450 is irresolution, a quality appreciated in the context of carnival laughter (Bakhtin). Reed rejects univocal interpretation through allegory or symbolism in favor of "experiential…
Gray, Douglas.
Thomas G. Duncan, ed. A Companion to the Middle English Lyric (Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Rochster, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 2005), pp. 120-49.
Sketches the French backgrounds and courtly functions of late medieval English lyrics, surveying representative samples from Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, Lydgate, Charles d'Orléans, Skelton, the Findern manuscript, and Humphrey Newton's collection.…
Marshall, Simone Celine.
Notes and Queries 264 (2019): 90-91.
Describes scholarly inattention to the Middle English texts of KnT, NPT, WBT, and The Flower and the Leaf in John Dryden's "Fables Ancient and Modern" (1700) "slightly edited" from Thomas Speght's 1598 edition. Observes that the texts are "the…
Lawton, David A., ed.
Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 1982.
Essays by various hands on contexts for the alliterative revival, metrical and historical backgrounds, sources, manuscripts, audience, and the poems themselves.
Shimogasa, Tokuji.
Hiroshima Studies in English Language and Literature 25 (1980): 13-28.
Several Middle English adverbs of affirmation ("ywis," "wytterly," "sikerly," and "verayment") found in many medieval romances and in many of Chaucer's works function primarily as words of elaboration.
In calling the GP Miller a "knarre," Chaucer probably draws on an iconographic tradition illustrated in a pilgrim badge depicting a boar playing a bagpipe and inscribed "Laet knorren."
Strohm, Paul, ed.
Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2007.
Twenty-nine essays by various authors, each essay with suggestions for further reading. The volume has three indices: Medieval Authors and Titles; Names; and Subject. It seeks "to avoid settled consensus in favour of unresolved debate, to prefer the…
Ogura, Mieko.
Lexicon 8 (1979): 1-15. [Iwasaki Linguistic Circle].
In view of Kiparsky's new theory (1977), we can show the differences of the metrical rules in the specific types of mismatches allowed in each of Chaucer's works. We can say that the constraints on mismatches became severer in an orderly way from…
Cowen, Janet M.
Derek Pearsall, ed. Manuscripts and Texts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987), pp. 26-33.
In editing Chaucer, the problem of the final "-e" can be resolved "in a conservative edition by retaining the spelling of the base manuscript and in a modernised edition by regularising it." Cowen and George Kane, editors of LGW (in progress), treat…
Baker, David, ed.
Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1996.
A symposium on English poetic meter. Robert Wallace proposes ten rules for clarifying discussion of meter, and fourteen writers critique the validity and utility of the propositions; Wallace responds in a final essay. Recurring concerns include the…
English version of an essay originally published in Russian in "Voprosy Jazykoznanija" 3 (1971): 73-88. Tabulates and assesses metrical features of several Middle English poems, including several by Chaucer, exploring the development of English…
Guthrie, Steven (R).
Rebecca Baltzer A., Thomas Cable, and James I. Wimsatt, eds. The Union of Words and Music in Medieval Poetry. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991, pp. 72-100.
Explores lyric and narrative meters in Provencal poetry, Old and Middle French, and Middle English texts--especially Machaut and Chaucer--showing that a poet's intuitive sense of genre affects verse rhythm more directly than does musical notation. …
Weiskott, Eric.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.
Examines "uses and misuses" of three metrical forms found in English literary history between 1350 and 1650: alliterative meter, tetrameter, and pentameter. Rejects the traditional division between medieval and modern in reexamination of Chaucer’s…
Jimura, Akiyuki.
Masahiko Kanno, Gregory K. Jember, and Yoshiyuki Nakao, eds. A Love of Words: English Philological Studies in Honour of Akira Wada (Tokyo: Eihosha, 1998), pp. 103-14.
Some examples of metathesis in CT and TC (e.g., ax/ask, thurgh/thrugh, open/opne) may result from modern editorial selection; others (e.g., lisped/lipsed in GP 1.264-65) may indicate Chaucer's creative indication of individual speech patterns.
Hordis, Sandra M.
Kathleen A. Bishop, ed. Standing in the Shadow of the Master? Chaucerian Influences and Interpretations (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), pp. 46-64.
Hordis argues that Henryson's poem aggressively explores Chaucer's authorial authority. The text was produced in a time of emergent efforts by the Scots to construct a national identity, and it questions English literary influence.
In The General Prologue, Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women Prologue, The Friar's Tale, and The Summoner's Tale, Chaucer probes the indeterminacy of language and his own precarious use of words as means to truth. Discusses Diomede's use…
Wawrzyniak, Agnieszka.
Michael Bilynsky, ed. Studies in Middle English: Words, Forms, Senses and Texts (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 311-28.
Analyzes the metaphors, metonymies, and "metaphors based on metonymies" used in descriptions of love and of heart in CT, exploring the cultural dependence and/or universality of the figures, particularly differences between medieval and modern usage
