Galloway, Andrew.
David F. Johnson and Elaine Treharne, eds. Readings in Medieval Texts: Interpreting Old and Middle English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 288-305.
Galloway examines the claims to authority--traditional and innovative--found in prologues to Middle English works, with special attention to Chaucer's HF, LGWP, GP, and other prologues in CT (e.g., WBP). The essay identifies four types of prologues…
Sixteen essays from the Eighth York Manuscript Conference (July 5-7, 1996) on issues in Middle English textual studies: dating, punctuation, meter, scribal practice, and book production, among others. Includes a preface (xi-xii) that celebrates…
Walter, Katie.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Explores the transgressive and reparative potential of the mouth in medieval thinking--scientific, pastoral, and literary (especially "Piers Plowman"). Includes no sustained attention to Chaucer's works, but the index lists nearly forty references to…
Fifteen essays by various authors from the 1994 conference on Middle English held in Rydzyna, Poland. Individual essays consider lexicographical topics such as Middle English sexual vocabulary, plant names, and words associated with fate;…
Williams, Tara.
University Park: Penn State University Press, 2018.
Presents a multidisciplinary "theory of the marvelous" in Middle English literature. Focuses on how fourteenth-century texts, including CT, "represent a coherent and previously unrecognized theory of the marvelous, one focused on the intersection of…
Hanna, Ralph.
Corinne Saunders, ed. A Companion to Medieval Poetry ((Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 196-215.
Hanna discusses late medieval English "textual culture," commenting on the production and disposition of manuscripts, habits of collecting and anthologizing individual works, the vagaries of manuscript survival, reading practices, etc. Cites examples…
Boffey, Julia, and Christiania Whitehead, eds.
Cambridge: Brewer, 2018
Includes twenty essays by various authors and an introduction by the editors, examining textual, contextual, aesthetic, and cultural issues that relate to a wide variety of English lyrics from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. For three essays…
Gorst, Emma Kate Charters.
Dissertation Abstracts International A77.06 (2016): n.p.
Investigates two "networks of meaning" within which to view late medieval English lyrics: the relationships among lyrics in manuscript collections (using "network mapping software") and the relationships between embedded lyrics and "narrative events"…
Burrow, J. A., ed.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Includes nine Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lectures delivered since 1950, and one on Scots delivered in 1942. Reprints Dorothy Everett's "Some Reflections on Chaucer's Art Poetical" (1950), Derek Brewer's "Towards a Chaucerian Poetic" (1974), and…
Collects forty-five documents and images as backgrounds to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English literature; arranged under seven headings and keyed (by chart) to a variety of canonical Middle English literary texts. All of the selected texts are…
Surveys the forms, topics, and contexts of Middle English writing, clarifying its construction from various literary traditions set against a number of social, economic, and political conditions. The discussion is divided into five broad categories…
An introduction to critical approaches to Middle English literature, featuring twenty-two reprinted examples of critical methods by various authors. Chapters include authorship; textual form; genre; language, style and rhetoric; allegory;…
Gray, Douglas.
Alan Deyermond, ed. A Century of British Medieval Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2007), pp. 383-426.
Gray surveys the study of Middle English literature from the founding of the British Academy until the early twenty-first century, commenting on accomplishments of individual scholars up to World War II. He describes critical trends and how they…
Leahy, Conor.
Review of English Studies 70, no. 295 (2019): 527-49.
Assesses references and allusions to Middle English in poetry written by W. H. Auden between 1922 and 1930, including echoes of GP, MilT, and BD in “The Mill (Hempstead)” and “April in a Town,” and perhaps TC and NPT in “Troy Town.”
The rare pre-Chaucerian fabliaux in English display affinities with exempla, drama, and inverted romance. Critics have long pondered why no fabliau tradition in English exists; they hypothesize scribal prudery or loss of many texts. Considering the…
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."
