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…
Brewer, Derek.
Leo Carruthers and Adrian Papahagi, eds. Prologues et épilogues dans la littérature anglaise du Moyen Âge (Paris: Association des Médiévistes Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur, 2001), pp. 55-72.
In CT, Chaucer uses prologues to achieve great diversity, displacing himself with other narrators. He develops a counter movement in his epilogues, in which the conventions of religious epilogues communicate, however tenuously, a unified religious…
Lot 1543 is "Chaucer (black letter): printed by Wyllyam Bonham, at the sign of the Reed [sic] Lyon," given to Rogers (1763 - 1855) by his friend Horne Tooke.
Assesses the socio-political assumptions and implications of mid-nineteenth-century German study of Chaucer, especially pre-academic translations and commentary.
Cites and quotes a portion of Dorigen's "song" in FranT 4.857-94 as an early, pre-Romantic lyrical example of the "'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry' effect" in poetry, a trope by which reference to a physical space links the inner concerns of multiple…
Goossens, Louis.
Louis Goossens, and others. By Word of Mouth: Metaphor, Metonymy, and Linguistic Action in a Cognitive Perspective. Pragmatics & Beyond, New Series, no. 33 (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1995), pp. 175-204.
Uses data from Aelfric, Chaucer, and Shakespeare to demonstrate how metonymy "works as a tool for meaning extension in a diachronically diverse data base," arguing that there is "something of a metonymy-metaphor continuum" and a complex relation…
Bale, Anthony.
Literature Compass 5.5 (2008): 918-34.
Surveys medieval notions of authorship from the twelfth century to the late fifteenth century, commenting on topics such as anonymity, laureateship, Mandeville's "Travels," "The Cloud of Unknowing," "The Book of Margery Kempe," and the development…
Chaucer and Gower both adapted the story of Constance from the Anglo-Norman chronicle of Trevet. A comparison of the proper names, institutional terms, and speeches shows that Gower closely follows Trevet while Chaucer modifies the story in MLT.
Traces the history of the motif of infernal punishment in the devil's anus, suggesting that the earliest evidence of the motif is found in the "Seven Heavens Apocryphon" of Irish visionary tradition and that Chaucer's use of the motif in SumP derives…
Dauphant, Clothilde.
In Miren Lacassagne, ed. Le rayonnement de la cour des premiers Valois à l'époque d'Eustache Deschamps (Paris: Presses de l'Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2017), pp. 81-94.
Traces changes in the putatively fixed form of the balade as used by Eustache Deschamps, John Gower, Chaucer, and others, commenting on variations in number of stanzas, rhyme schemes, the inclusion of envoys, etc. Includes comments on Ven, For, Ros,…
Amoils, E. R.
English Studies in Africa 17 (1974): 17-37.
Explores the complementary thematic interconnections of PhyT and PardPT (integrity and fraudulence, spiritual fertility and sterility, virtue and vice, defeat of death), reading their interdependence in light of ParsT and the section of the "Roman de…
Huppé, Bernard F., and D. W. Robertson Jr.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963.
Interprets BD and PF as allegories, offering "An Approach to Medieval Poetry" (pp. 3-31) as an introduction to exegetical or patristic criticism and a justification of the method. Explores the imagery, structures, ironic juxtapositions, and meanings…
Davis, Rebecca.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015): 101-32
Argues that motion in HF is "not the antithesis to form but its condition of possibility." Water imagery links Boethian "enclynyng," the littoral "field of sand" that signals transition between Books I and II, and the eel-trap shape of the House of…
