Pigg, Daniel F.
In Albrecht Classen, ed. Incarceration and Slavery in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age: A Cultural-Historical Investigation of the Dark Side of the Pre-Modern World (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2021), pp. 347-60.
Argues that the "unique aspect" of the depiction of imprisonment in KnT is that the "only liberation that can happen is apparently at the end of this life, which is seen as a prison," hence "hardly a liberation at all." Comments on Chaucer's likely…
Storm, Melvin.
Jane Chance, ed. The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England (Gainesville, University of Florida Press, 1990), pp. 215-31.
Examines the role of tone and narratorial voice in Chaucer's manipulations and distortions of the myth of Theseus in HF, Anel, LGW, and KnT. Theseus is vilified in HF and LGW as a betrayer of women; in KnT, he exemplifies mature "martialism…
Yeager, Stephen M.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014.
Examines alliterative English writing by focusing on Anglo-Saxon legal-homiletic discourse within vernacular English poetry. Brief mention of FranT, ParsT, MLT, and Mel.
Refers to Chaucer throughout, first by supposing what his early education was like, then by addressing the late-medieval relation between Latin and English as evident in HF, NPT, and ManT. Argues that "the work of Chaucer, Langland, and Gower…
Cannon, Christopher.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Examines the textbook practices of the medieval primary schools--the "grammar schools" or "grammatica"--as underlying the transition from Latin to English as the primary language of "literary" composition in England during the fourteenth century.…
Tokunaga, Satoko.
Satoko Tokunaga, ed. Aspects of Publishing History in the East and the West (Tokyo: Keio University Press, 2015), pp. 1-32,
Surveys the presentation of CT in manuscripts and printed books up to the publication of William Thynne's first complete works of Chaucer (1532). Focuses on editorial principles and concepts such as compilatio, authorship, and collation. In Japanese.
Pidd, Michael,and Estelle Stubbs.
Norman Blake and Peter Robinson, eds. The Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers, Volume II (London: King's College, Office for Humanities Communications, 1997), pp. 55-59.
Describes how the difficulties and decisions involved in transcribing manuscripts for the "Canterbury Tales" Project parallel fifteenth-century scribal practice.
Traces the development of English "central government control over local institutions," discussing the emergence of local groups and mentioning the GP Guildsmen.
Sanyal, Jharna.
Supriya Chaudhuri and Sukanta Chaudhuri, eds. Writing Over: Medieval to Renaissance (Calcutta: Allied, in collaboration with the Department of English, Jadavpur University, 1996), pp. 11-22.
Compares Criseyde of TC with her analogues in Henryson's "Testament," Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida," and Dryden's "Truth Found Too Late," arguing that in Chaucer's and Shakespeare's versions she is a victim of predatory males and is left open…
Minnis, A. J.
Proceedings of the British Academy 72 (1986): 205-46.
Discusses whether Chaucer is a medieval or a Renaissance poet, examining Chaucer's attitudes toward his world and the process by which Chaucer was inspired.
Phelan, Walter S.
Zvi Malachi, ed. Proceedings of the International Conference on Literary and Linguistic Computing, Israel (Tel Aviv: Katz Research Institute, 1980), pp. 291-316.
The lexical morphemes of Chaucer's poetic tales have been marked in the data base as narrative "verbs" or "adjectives" (Todorov: dynamic v. static predicate formulas). The character and percentage of formula "per lexical unit" provide a more…
Assesses the "most important" poems about animals in English literature, ca. 700-1400 A.D., focusing on three traditions: "Physiologus," bird debates, and beast fable and epic. Considers PF as a bird debate, describing how it transcends the…
Saunders, Corinne.
David Fuller, Corinne Saunders, and Jane Macnaughton, eds. The Life of Breath in Literature, Culture and Medicine: Classical to Contemporary (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 87-109.
Describes various depictions of breath, breathlessness, and "vital spirits" that signal deep emotion in medieval literature, including comments on BD, TC, and KnT, among other courtly and religious works.
Roscow, G. H.
Essays in Poetics 9:1 (1984): 78-94.
Analyzes the "sentence" of BD through its sentence structure. Any idea of "tragic reversal" disintegrates under the pressure of "forward-looking" consecutive sentences.
Ginsberg, Warren.
Andrew Galloway and R. F. Yeager, eds. Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian, and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), pp. 145-64.
Ginsberg compares Dante's, Petrarch's, and Chaucer's descriptions of geography in their poems: Dante relied on the landscape of Italy to establish a geographical base; Petrarch allegorized Dante's geography; and Chaucer then "translated Petrarch's…
Beidler, Peter G.
Sandra M. Hordis and Paul Hardwick, eds. Medieval English Comedy (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007), pp. 195-208.
Beidler compares and contrasts MilT with its likely source, the Middle Dutch "Hiele van Beersele." Of the two, MilT provokes greater laughter because it is more plausible, a result of more carefully deployed details.
Jost, Jean E.
Fifteenth-Century Studies 21 (1994): 133-48.
"Beryn" lacks several typical Chaucerian characteristics: a "courtly demeanor and value system," idealism, verbal wit, and sophisticated characterization. Neither prologue nor tale rises above slapstick or the "mundane reality of life."
Harris, Carissa M.
John A. Geck, Rosemary O’Neill, and Noelle Phillips, eds. Beer and Brewing in Medieval Culture and Contemporary Medievalism (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), pp. 265-84.
Analyzes "how English and Scottish literature and law during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries connected the figure of the tapster to sex work, transgression, public harm, and dangerous agency over men," and traces residue of this misogyny…
Examines food imagery in MilT, RvT, CkT, and GP. These portions of CT threaten, but do not quite achieve, the collapse of Lévi-Strauss's "culinary triangle."
Sixteenth-century editions of Chaucer's works "reflect a gradual transition from text-based definitions of what constitutes Chaucer to author-focused ones." Bly considers Thynne's edition of 1532, Stowe's of 1561, and Speght's of 1602, discussing…
Reads the Wife of Bath as "Chaucer's construction of the . . . female body as a literal and metaphoric text," and explores how depictions of the Wife in modern films respond to her critical reception as well as his original creation.
Baldwin, Anna.
Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt, eds. Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp.199-212.
By looking at two surviving "Patient Grissel" plays, the prose chapbook, and the ballad on the same subject, Baldwin shows that the popularity of Chaucer's ClT extended into the sixteenth century. Greene loosely modeled his "Pandosto" on the story…
Britton, Dennis Austin.
postmedieval 6.1 (2015): 64–78.
Establishes how Shakespeare and Fletcher used "images of Africanness to link race and class" in "The Two Noble Kinsmen," and claims this differs from Chaucer's concern with the "racial alterity" and "whiteness" of the Amazonian women in KnT.
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…
