Surveys two medieval attitudes toward marriage (pro-matrimonial [Aquinas] and anti-matrimonial [Jerome] and their depictions in various tales of virgin martyrs, analyzing SNT most extensively.
McCarthy explores how marriage is represented in medieval English literary and legal texts and the "relationship of these representations to actual practice." Subjects range from Beowulf and Old English laws to late medieval ecclesiastical statutes…
Jacobs, Kathryn.
Gainesville : University Press of Florida, 2001.
Four chapters explore the influence of contemporary marriage law on Chaucer's imagination, and three investigate similar influences on religious and Renaissance drama. Chaucer did not merely reflect his society's concerns with marriage and its…
Chaucer evinces awareness of marriage law, in particular the necessity of a church ceremony to secure property rights. Wives with a legally unassailable right to property (May in MerT, the Wife of Bath, Alisoun in MilT, Cecilie in SNT) are in a much…
Stapley, Ian Bernard.
Dissertation Abstracts International 57 (1996): 1154A.
Aware that their husbands (as chosen by their families or communities) will determine the nature of their lives, women have sought to choose their own husbands, a daring assumption of sovereignty in a patriarchal society. The Wife of Bath,…
The lack of a defined perspective from which to judge exposes a profound ambivalence in the Merchant, an ambivalence that manifests itself in a series of confusing and disconcerting shifts in narrative viewpoint, suggesting a narrator who is quite…
Seah, Victoria L.
Dissertation Abstracts International 38 (1978): 4151A.
PF, "Temple of Glas," and "Kingis Quair" deal not with courtly love but with marriage. The idea underlying all three works is that one should be free to marry whom one loves.
Glasser, Marc D.
Tennessee Studies in Literature 23 (1978): 1-14.
Contrary to Donald Howard, who found in SNT the church's "highest ideal" of marriage and Chaucer's final answer to the Marriage Group, the tale actually denies the basis of true wedlock as subordinating the wife's personal concern for her husband to…
Goodman, Jennifer R.
James Muldoon, ed. Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), pp. 115-28.
Examines MLT as one of several historical and literary accounts of princesses who marry husbands of a different religion and either convert themselves or persuade their husbands to convert. In addition to Constance, Goodman considers accounts of…
Dramatic adaptation for the stage of portions of GP, WBPT, MilPT, and RvPT, in a single plot, with Author's Notes and stage directions. The play was "first produced by Theatre Antigonish, Antigonish, Nova Scotia in March 1982."
In a section exploring "epic masculinity" in the age of Marlowe, suggests that Chaucer's depiction of Aeneas in LGW and HF anticipates humanist "rethinking" about the hero, that Chaucer "greatly influenced" Marlowe's depiction of him in "Dido, Queen…
Bradbrook, M. C.
Aspects of Dramatic Form in the English and the Irish Renaissance: The Collected Papers of Muriel Bradbrook (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1983): 3:156-79.
Traces parallels between Marlowe's 'Hero and Leander' and TC 3.
Dubs, Kathleen E.
Tibor Fabiny, ed. "What, Then, Is Time?": Responses in English and American Literature. Pázmány Papers in English and American Studies, no. 1 (Piliscsaba, Hungary: Pázmány Péter Catholic University, 2001), pp. 71-81.
Dubs considers medieval notions of simultaneity; describes Boethius's concept of eternity; explores Chaucer's uses of the zodiac in CT (FranT, MLT, GP, NPT) and Astr; and considers spring as the natural and spiritual season of renewal connected with…
Finke, Laurie, and Martin Shichtman.
Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh, eds. Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the "Canterbury Tales" (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), pp. 251-65.
Explores the "ghostly presence" of WBPT in the first three episodes of the television show "Mad Men," updating and remediating the "parody of Western misogynist tropes" in WBP, refashioning from WBT the question of what women want, and reframing…
Although Chaucer does not divert from the pattern of Troilus's tragic fall from the top of the wheel of fortune, he employs ironic twists and ambiguities that diffuse the rigidity of the tale. The transitions in TC subvert attention from rigid…
Wurtele, Douglas J.
Proceedings of the Third Annual Symposium of Ottawa-Carleton Medieval-Renaissance Club 1 (1976): 56-74.
The "sponsa" of the "Song of Songs" is traditionally interpreted as Mary, and thus through January's aubade (4.2138-48) May becomes an ironic echo of the Virgin. The deep ironies of this association reflect the more straightforward presentations of…
Using numerous small allusions to TC, Spenser situates himself within the English literary canon through a strategy of association with an "uncouthe, unkiste" Chaucer.
Olson, Mary C.
William K. Finley and Joseph Rosenblum, eds. Chaucer Illustrated: Five Hundred Years of the Canterbury Tales in Pictures (SAC 27 [2005], no. 105), pp. 1-35.
Olson describes the visual features of the Ellesmere manuscript and assesses its illustrations as schematic, metonymic, and stereotypic-representations of character types rather than realizations of fictional individuals. The juxtaposition of Th and…
Guardia Massó, Pedro.
Mercedes Brea, ed. Marginales e marginados en la Época Medieval. Cuardernos del CEMYR, no. 4 ([La Laguna, Canary Islands]: Universidad de La Laguna, Centro de Estudios Medievales y Renacentistas, 1996), pp. 107-24.
Guardia Massó examines ecclesiastical and sexual suppression in Lollardy, "Piers Plowman," and CT (especially in WBP).
Johnson, Lynn Staley.
Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22 (1992): 159-84.
Like Chaucer, Margery Kempe constructs a narrative context for the self she creates. Kempe uses autobiographical details to shape "Margery" into a representative type and to analyze communal values and practices. Kempe employs Chaucer's strategy of…
Takamiya, Toshiyuki.
Reports of the Keio Institute of Cultural and Linguistic Studies (Tokyo) 15 (1983): 199-212.
Margery has much in common with Alisoun: middle-class status, outspokenness, avid interest in or obsession with sex, devotion to Christianity, and passion for pilgrimages.
