Henderson, Arnold Clayton.
Dissertation Abstracts International 59 (1999): 2489A.
Fables present a worldlier view than do Christian bestiaries, and neither genre presented a worldview full enough for Chaucer or other writers. Fable became more Christian, developing witty moralization, sharply drawn personae, and more vivid style…
Chapin, Arthur.
Yale Journal of Criticism 8:1 (1995): 7-33.
Compares the comic treatment of sententiousness in NPT with modern philosophical uses of aphorism. Both are "Menippean" in their contrasts of high and low discourse, and both ask us to perceive their points rather than to understand conceptually.
Green, Richard Firth.
Corinne Saunders, ed. A Concise Companion to Chaucer (Malden, Mass.; Oxford; and Victoria: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 199-217.
Green confronts "the interpretive function of morality in medieval literature" and discusses why Chaucer's "moral horizons" in CT are elusive. Many of the Tales include competing morals; frameworks such as estates satire and the seven deadly sins…
Twycross-Martin, Henrietta.
Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen, eds. Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Poetry. King's College London Medieval Studies, no. 5 (London: King's College Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 1991), pp. 30-50.
Considers The Testament of Cresseid as a "parallel text" to TC 5, arguing that although Henryson echoes various Chaucerian collocations, techniques, and structures, his counterpointing of fickle and stable earthly love is unlike Chaucer's opposition…
Argues that the Franklin presents a formula for happiness: living a life of "gentilesse" as opposed to the principle of adhering to a law-based system of morality.
Grady, Frank.
Frank Grady, ed. The Cambridge Companion to "The Canterbury Tales" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 205-17.
Discusses the "narrowness" of modern views of Chaucer and CT, and argues that this posture hides the range of Chaucer’s verse, which includes not only beast fables and fabliaux, but also saints’ lives and penitential discourse.
Woolf, Rosemary.
Mary Salu and Robert T. Farrell, eds. J. R. R. Tolkien: Essays in Memoriam (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 221-45. Reprinted in Rosemary Woolf, Art and Doctrine (London: Hambledon Press, 1986), pp. 197-218.
The epithets "moral" and "kindly" have for centuries been applied, respectively, to Gower and Chaucer, with a deleterious effect upon critical evaluation of the two poets. The epithets can revealingly be reversed. Gower is seen as kindly in his…
Morgan critiques modern claims for Chaucer's innovation in GP, arguing that Chaucer's methods resulted from the moral and artistic training of his time. We should read the pilgrim Chaucer both as earnest and as effective in displaying the sins of his…
Allen, Mark.
South Central Review 8 (1991): 36-49.
The imagery of falling reinforces CT's penitential motif at the end of PardT, in NPP, in ManP, and in Ret, affectively leading the reader "through art to morality."
Ginsburg, Warren.
John M. Hill, Bonnie Wheeler, and R. F. Yeager, eds. Essays on Aesthetics and Medieval Literature in Honor of Howell Chickering (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2014), pp. 165-76.
Emphasizes Chaucers skillful and "poetic" use of grammar, with special attention to nouns and pronouns in TC. Also addresses Chaucer's focus on rhetoric and logic in GP and ClT.
Robeson, Lisa G.
Dissertation Abstracts International 58 (1997): 451A.
Ancient writings, especially inscriptions in stone, impressed the medieval reader as the most reliable of records of past wisdom, even though they might be paradoxical or, eventually, disregarded. Considers "Queste del Saint Graal," HF, and…
Uncovers the complex relationship between monumentality and print culture as it contributed to Chaucer's early modern reception in post-Reformation England.
García, Ricardo L.
Bloomington, Ind.: iUinverse, 2011.
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…
Urban, Misty Rae.
Dissertation Abstracts International A69.12 (2009): n.p.
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."
Lightsey, Robert Scott.
Dissertation Abstracts International 62: 1845A, 2001.
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.
Niebrzydowski, Sue.
Elizabeth Herbert McAvoy and Teresa Walters, eds. Consuming Narratives: Gender and Monstrous Appetite in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), pp. 196-207.
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, Malcolm.
Timothy S. Jones and David A. Sprunger, eds. Marvels, Monsters, and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations (Kalamazoo, Mich: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002), pp. 203-21.
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…
Hahn, Thomas.
Julian N. Wasserman and Robert J. Blanch, eds. Chaucer in the Eighties (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986), pp. 235-49.
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…
Bertolet, Craig E., and Robert Epstein, eds.
Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
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…
Coley, David K.
Chaucer Review 49.4 (2015): 449-73.
Argues that ShT comments on fourteenth-century controversies regarding tithing and examines the connections drawn between international finance and agrarian production.
Kaye, Joel.
S. Todd Lowry and Barry Gordon, eds. Ancient and Medieval Economic Ideas and Concepts of Social Justice. (Leiden, New York, and Köln: Brill, 1998), pp. 371-403.
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…
