Studies how recollection is achieved through physical, cognitive, and interpretive challenges. Uses examples from Chaucer's romances to explore individual and collective memory processes, discussing memory in KnT, BD, and TC.
Brewer, Derek.
Mary-Jo Arn, and Hanneke Wirtjes, eds. Historical and Editorial Studies in Medieval and Early Modern English (Groningen: Wolters-Nordhoff, 1985), pp. 37-47.
Rebuts use of audience to privilege interpretation in Middle English romances. Rather than representing a historically authentic event, the Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 61 frontispiece of Chaucer reading to a court audience may be merely a…
Mahoney, Dhira B.
Douglas Kelly, ed. The Medieval "Opus": Imitation, Rewriting, and Transmission in the French Tradition. (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996), pp. 405-27.
Discusses medieval English translation of Christine's works, focusing on Hoccleve's translation of "L'Epistre au Dieu d'Amours." Also considers the influence of LGW on Hoccleve's translation.
Bower, Hannah.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.
Explores relations between the practical purposes of medieval medical recipes and their imaginative and aesthetic effects, focusing on how the texts of these recipes reflect their broader discursive culture, c. 1375-1500. Cites Chaucer's recurrent…
Minkova, Donka.
Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta, and Matti Rissanen, eds. Placing Middle English in Context (Berlin and New York: Gruyter, 2000), pp. 431-59.
Surveys critical discussion of the prosodic behavior of Romance loan words in Middle English, challenging the Halle/Keyser analysis and the reliability of rhyme. Providing examples from alliterative poetry, Chaucer, and Henryson, Minkova argues that…
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…
