Browse Items (16364 total)

Tallies various instances from GP where Chaucer "shows in his deployment of nonce-words, key-words, status-terms and moral terms, that character and language are inseparable, that words and values change as societies change, that the only true value…

Describes medieval coins referred to in Chaucer and other Middle English literature, particularly the florin, noble, 'écu' or shield, 'mouton d'or,' and ducat. Comments on the designs, values, and usage of these coins and corrects several…

Explores the implications of three interrelated allusions in Chaucer's works (TC 2.55ff., KnT 1.1462ff., and NPT 7.3187ff.), observing connections "between Friday, May 3, Venus, the May festival season, and the Invention of the Cross," connections…

Discusses the long-standing view of Chaucer as a fun, perhaps obscene writer, suggesting that readers "are invested in protecting their ability to enjoy Chaucer freely." References Kate Manne's notion of "himpathy," or the "excessive sympathy" felt…

Explores how the Pardoner and his interruption of WBP challenge the heteronormativity of CT. The opening lines of GP and WBT establish a heterosexual norm that the presence of the Pardoner challenges by making clear the constructed and contestable…

Analyzes the medieval features of the characterization in Eilis Ni Dhuibhne's "The Wife of Bath" (Dublin, 1989).

In LGW, Chaucer asks, "Can women be faithful in love?" Christine asks, "Does virtue recognize gender?" Chaucer's "good women" are judged according to their relationships with men; Christine's are considered as separate beings.

Recounts Kirchenbaum's career and thoughts as an innovative teacher who uses creative design to inspire her students, arranged as a series of examples from international history and personal experience. Includes "Measuring the Immeasurable: Chaucer"…

Explains PardT 6.406 to mean "to be damned" in light of the figurative associations of brambles with sins and the picking of fruit with spiritually dangerous activity, corroborated in exegetical commentary and other medieval literature.

For his worldly, depraved clerics, Chaucer draws not on the actual world but on "crabbed Latin texts monkish in their aspirations and unworldly in their doctrines," i.e., upon scriptural exegesis and ascetic theology, as in GP's Summoner, Friar,…

Gossip transgresses the servant-master relationship in CYP, and CYT indicates that gossip underpins the discourse of official culture as well. Gossip is also fundamental to the exemplarity of Robert Mannyng's Handlyng Synne.

Gossip, its meaning shifting from idle woman to idle talk, was treated as sinful and suspect in much clerical literature, including ParsT. Gossip in HF, WBP, and ShT provided Chaucer not only narrative techniques but also a method of experimentation…

Exemplifies a variety of "inconsistencies and discontinuities" in Chaucer's works, particularly CT, presenting them as typical of the poet's "Gothic" aesthetics and consistent with contemporaneous art and the "complex cultural pluralism" of his age,"…

Analyzes three types of pleats or folds in CT: graceful or classical drapings of the cloak of the Prioress; artificial folds "pynched" on her wimple, characteristic of Gothic art; and "wyndynge," which the Parson reproaches as a waste of cloth and…

Gothic aesthetic combines opposing propensities for regularity and embellishment. These features are manifest in Dante's Commedia, while CT is more irregular and improvisatory.

Describes and illustrates the "visual arts as a whole" in late medieval England. The index records some twenty references to Chaucer, including a section on HF (pp. 345–48) that shows that "the two largest passages of writing about architecture at…

PhyT treats appearance and reality, fraud and honesty at the individual, familial, political, and cosmic levels of governance. Virginius' pardon of Claudius can be seen as an act that, on the cosmic level, affirms God's charitable governance and…

By adding forty-five lines in "quasi-Langlandian" alliterative personification allegory to CkT, the Bodley scribe creates a second distinctive narrative voice that competes with Chaucer's own. The deliberate moral ending "governs" both Perykn and…

Argues that Gower was "emulous and rivalrous," and eager to better the work of Ovid, Chaucer, and even his own early poetry. Compares Chaucer's use of the Ovidian tale of Ceyx and Alcyone, in BD and HF, with Gower's use of the same material in the…

Offers recommendations for teaching Gower in relation to Chaucer's CT.

Chapter 3, "Gower and Estates Satire before Chaucer," includes brief mention of Chaucer in situating and analyzing Gower's uses of estates satire in his "Mirour de l'Omme," "Vox Clamantis," and Confessio
Amantis.

Unlike their biblical source, Chaucer's and Gower's allusions to Jephthah's daughter indicate concern with pain and emotional suffering. Also considers the illustration in Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.126 that accompanies Gower's tale of Virginia in…

Briefly surveys uses of Ovid in late-medieval England, and compares Chaucer's and John Gower's engagements with Ovid's works and moralized version of them. Focuses on creative uses of Ovid in Gower's "Vox Clamantis" (Book 1), in the Pyramus and…

Describes four aspects of the critical tradition of exploring relations between Gower's and Chaucer's poetry--"biography, common literary sources and analogues [especially in WBT, MLT, and Philomela in LGW], thematic issues, and…

Compares Gower's art and skill in using rhyme royal stanzas with Chaucer's, arguing that Chaucer's are superior and more flexibly adapted to narrative, largely because the "fetters of the ballade stanza" constrain Gower's dexterity. Originally…