Hordis, Sandra M., and Paul Hardwisk, eds.
Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007.
Ten essays by various authors discuss comedy in Old English literature and in several Middle English media: drama, narrative poetry, stained glass, illuminations, and misericords. For three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Medieval English…
Baumeister, David J.
[Jay Ruud, ed.] Papers on the "Canterbury Tales": From the 1989 NEH Chaucer Institute, Northern State University, Aberdeen, South Dakota ([Aberdeen, S.D.: Northern State University, 1989), pp. 227-46.
Instructions, outlines, plot synopses, and handouts for use in teaching English medieval literature (including selections from CT) to high school seniors.
Johnston, Andrew James.
Gabriele Rippl, ed. Handbook of Intermediality: Literature--Image--Sound--Music (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), pp. 50–64.
Describes "medieval approaches to vision, to the relations between text and image and to ekphrasis" before assessing KnT as Chaucer's critique of "attempts to essentialise and keep separate different media and genres, especially the verbal and the…
Spearing, A. C.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Studies the backgrounds and traditions of "dream-poetry" in English literature from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, exploring poets' awareness of writing within an ongoing tradition and their uses of the dream device to express their…
Quinn, William A.
David F. Johnson and Elaine Treharne, eds. Readings in Medieval Texts: Interpreting Old and Middle English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 323-36.
Quinn defines the genre of dream vision, surveys "standard readings" of BD, and offers a "re-vision" of the poem that reconciles its humor and sadness by imagining it as a performance some years after the death of Blanche. The poem may have been…
Kowaleski, Maryanne, and P. J. P. Goldberg, eds.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Eleven essays by various authors (and an introduction by the editors) address a range of topics: domestic and monastic spaces, attitudes toward living alone, various literary and historical depictions of homes and households, etc. The collection…
Fumo, Jamie C.
In Alison Langdon, ed. Animal Languages in the Middle Ages: Representations of Interspecies Communication (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 217-34.
Departs from purely functional or allegorical approaches to the whelp in BD by situating the narrative's portrayal of canine-human relations within the field of critical animal studies. Establishes the role of the whelp in rectifying human…
Minnis, A. J.
Dissertation Abstracts International 37 (1976-1977): 1534C.
Theological commentators in the Middle Ages distinguished between the roles of "auctor" and "compilator." Gower seems to have modeled his main literary stances (as "propheta" in the "Vox Clamantis" and "sapiens" in the "Confessio Amantis") on the…
Anthologizes a wide array of medieval texts that pertain to disability studies, each with an introduction and apparatus by individual contributors. Entries include Historical and Medical Documents, Religious Texts, Poetry, Prose, Drama, and visual…
Anthologizes selections and excerpts from medieval literature and history (most in modern English), offered for use as a textbook in social history. Includes GP, lines 1-274 (pp. 228-48), in normalized Middle English, with no notes or glosses,…
An anthology of readings from medieval sources—literary, political, religious, etc.-- translated into modern English. Includes GP (translated by Frank E. Hill), titled "Chaucer's Picture of Medieval Society," with a brief descriptive introduction.
Evans, Ruth, ed.
Cardiff : University of Wales Press, 2006.
Seventeen essays by various authors on topics such as Robin Hood, Chaucer, medieval romance, medievalism, cultural studies, and modern crime fiction. Includes an introduction (pp. 1-6) and a bibliography of Knight's publications (pp. 269-77). For six…
Newman, Barbara.
Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013.
Explores how the "sacred and the secular interact" in Latin, French, and English texts and frames this "crossover concept" as key to understanding medieval literature. Includes discussion of PrT, FranT, KnT, MLT, WBPT, LGW, and TC.
Offers brief backgrounds to historical novels, medievalism, and crime fiction, and surveys the subgenre of medieval crime fiction, i.e., novels "featuring crime or mystery that is solved by a 'detective' and set during the European Middle Ages."…
Hanawalt, Barbara A.,and David Wallace, eds.
Minneapolis and London : University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Ten essays by various authors and an introduction by the editors. The essays focus on intersections between literary and historical texts, especially those concerned with representations of law and transgression of law. For three essays that pertain…
Cartwright, John [H].
John H. Cartwright and Brian Baker, eds. Literature and Science: Social Impact and Interaction (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2005), pp. 1-29.
Summarizes "Aristotelian cosmology" and describes its role as a structural and thematic device in Dante's "Paradiso." Describes the roles of astrology, the humours, and alchemy in Chaucer's CT, especially in the description of the Physician and in…
First, McGerr reviews modern theories on closure and examines medieval theory on literary design and closure in Geoffrey of Vinsauf, John of Garland, Ludolf of Hildesheim, Brunetto Latini, Dante, and others to show that "medieval concepts of closure…
David, Alfred.
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching, n.s., 2 (1991): 23-30.
Individual GP pilgrims represent distinct groups or organizations within medieval society, epitomizing social diversity--yet the community functions as a cohesive whole.
Brewer, Derek, ed.
Woodbridge, Suffolk ; and Rochester, N. Y. : D. S. Brewer, 1996.
An expanded revision of the 1973 edition, with one additional tale translated from French, three from Spanish, five from Middle English, three from German, six from Dutch (with three deleted), and one from Latin, for a total of eighty tales, songs,…
Treats three examples of eighteenth-century comic medievalism as the "male adolescence of the Enlightenment": Henry Fielding's presentation of Arthurian material as "farcically lascivious discourse" in "Tom Thumb," the "pre-modern prurience" of…
Phillips, Helen.
Rosalind Field, Phillipa Hardman, and Michelle Sweeney, eds. Christianity and Romance in Medieval England. Christianity and Culture: Issues in Teaching and Research (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), pp. 3-25.
Surveys the treatment of classical material in medieval romances (arranged by topic), exploring where and how the romance authors engage the status and validity of their pre-Christian material. Comments on KnT and TC.
Kaske, R. E.,with Arthur Groos and Michael W. Twomey.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988.
Bibliography including the following divisions: biblical exegesis, liturgy, hymns, sermons, visual arts, mythography,commentaries on major authors, and miscellaneous.
Beidler, Peter G.
Chaucer Review 44 (2009): 186-204.
Reading ShT in the context of fabliaux in which children witness their mothers' infidelity, Beidler recalls that the Tale was originally intended for the Wife of Bath. He argues that the placement of a prepubescent girl on the scene of another wife's…
Orme, Nicholas [I.]
New Haven and London : Yale University Press, 2001.
Orme surveys medieval childhood, from the seventh to the mid-sixteenth century, with emphasis on England. Topics include birth and family life, danger and death, children's literature, learning to read and reading for pleasure, play, children and the…
