Higl, Andrew.
Joshua R. Eyler, ed. Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 167-81.
Treating a book or a "corpus" of literature as a body encourages a prosthetic approach to texts and to narratives. Henryson's addition to Chaucer's TC in his "Testament of Cresseid" works as a "double prosthesis" in which Henryson seeks to…
In MLT, Gower's tale of Constance, and Émaré, the role of daughter--the woman cast adrift--is ambiguous, entailing both helplessness and independence, subversion and female power. Such tales reflect the notion of the daughter moving from temporary…
Sanok, Catherine.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
Discusses the creation of female audiences, examining LGW and other works (including WBT) to explore how saints' lives shaped literary history, thus making women "visible participants" in vernacular literary culture. Alceste is a metonym for a…
Chaucer weaves heraldic allusions into the portraits of Lygurge and Emetreus, the two kings who support Palamon and Arcite in the tournament. These allusions indicate the contemporaneity of KnT.
Explores relationships between heralds and poets as reflected in works by Chaucer (including HF and KnT), Malory, Skelton, and Spenser. These works "reveal complex concerns about literary and political authority, the public status of the poet, and…
Nitzsche, Jane Chance.
Chaucer Newsletter 2.1 (1980): 6-8.
Licorice, according to medieval herbals, quenched thirst (thus allowing Nicholas to stay in his room for a long time?). Cetewale, as zedoary, dispels gas (Nicholas' fart?). It is also an aphrodisiac and the "nardus" of Canticles, a symbol for the…
GP, KnT, MilT, RvT, WBT, SumT, ClT, FranT, PardT, and NPT in comic-book style, with watercolor-and-ink drawings and synoptic modern English text. Middle English phrases included in illustrations. Designed for children / early readers (grades 3-7).
Somerset, Fiona.
Fiona Somerset, Jill C. Havens, and Derrick G. Pitard, eds. Lollards and Their Influence in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 2003), pp. 127-38.
Argues that details of SumT gain dimension in light of the contemporary debate concerning the Eucharist and transubstantiation as recorded in the "Upland Series." Division of the indivisible fart is a blasphemous joke on questions of divisibility in…
Mulryne, J. R.
J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, eds. War, Literature, and the Arts in Sixteenth-Century Europe (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), pp.165-89.
Mulryne assesses attitudes toward chivalry in early seventeenth-century shows and plays, including discussion of how Shakespeare and Fletcher's Two Noble Kinsmen reflects the magnificence and human pain of KnT.
Rudat, Wolfgang E. H.
Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire 54 (1976): 823-36.
The imitation in GP's opening of Virgil's Second "Georgic" suggests a sexual motivation for the pilgrimage and some of the stories. This allusive effect is seen in MerT but it affects other tales and portraits, e.g. the Prioress's. Similarly Horace…
Gallacher, Patrick J., and Helen Damico, eds.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.
Essays began as papers read at the sixty-first annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, April 1986. For three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search under Alternative Title.
Carruthers, Leo, ed.
Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1994.
Fourteen essays on heroism and anti-heroes in "Beowulf" and other Old English poetry, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," and the works of Dunbar, Malory, and others. For four essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Heroes and Heroines in Medieval…
Far from viewing herself as a "passive pawn," Criseyde sees herself as actively fleeing from an unhealthy relationship with Troilus to a healthy one with Diomedes. At the end of TC, she is no longer the cynical widow of Book 2, but instead a more…
Boehler, Karl E.
Dissertation Abstracts Interbational 66 (2005):1348A
Boehler employs the concept of "shame culture" (which emphasizes satisfaction and honor over personal happiness, or even survival) as a means to examine medieval heroes (including those in KnT.) Ultimately, shame culture contributes not only to the…
Simpson, John Mack.
Mohammad Ali Jazayery and Werner Winter, eds. Languages and Cultures: Studies in Honour of Edgar C. Polome (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1988), pp. 621-29.
Pandarus exhibits absolute loyalty to his lord--one of the values of Indo-European heroic philosophy--while at the same time betraying his own sister.
Irving, Edward B.,Jr.
Richard G. Newhauser and John A. Alford, eds. Literature and Religion in the Later Middle Ages: Philological Studies in Honor of Siegfried Wenzel (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995), pp. 43-59.
A comparison of "Beowulf" and KnT reveals that the latter has epic elements such as death, mortality, and the struggle with the chaos inherent in an epic universe.
Kennerly, Karen, ed.
New York: Random House, 1973.
An anthology of brief fables and fable-like poems, narratives, and literary selections from various cultures and epochs. Includes John Dryden's "The Cock and the Fox Or, The Tale of the Nun's Priest, from Chaucer" (pp. 191-217) as an example of a…
Jordan, Robert M.
Thomas J. Farrell, ed. Bakhtin and Medieval Voices (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), pp. 81-93.
Examines the "ideological markers" that indicate the various "languages" of MLT, arguing that they cannot be resolved into unity by recourse to a supposed personality of the teller.
Schultz, James A.
Journal of the History of Sexuality 15.1 (2006): 14-29.
Schultz critiques uses of "heterosexual" as a term and as an ahistorical concept in queer studies of medieval literature. Chaucerian critics (and others) use the term in ways that "distort the very object" of their studies, "thwart" history, and…
Lochrie, Karma.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
Lochrie theorizes what sexualities, particularly female sexuality, might "have looked like before heterosexuality and the normal" were constructed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by statistical practices, exploring various medieval texts,…
Item not seen; reported in the MLA International Bibliography as a comparative linguistic treatment of dreams in Chaucer, Gower, and Langland. In Japanese.
With Chaucer's Criseyde (as with Malory's Guinevere), readers are forced to construct her character from the "implicature" of her acts and words rather than deduce it from explicit and consistent statements.
