Browse Items (16012 total)

In ManT, Chaucer gives us no information about the crow's personality, motives, or style. He and the Manciple have paradigmatic significance as users of speech and tellers. However, the poet does focus on the narratorial personality of the…

Argues that the Clerk is characterized as a "middle-aged scholar and professional logician," distinct among the other clerks of CT for his age (probably "more than thirty and less than fifty years of age") and wisdom, and unique in the GP as a…

Evidence suggests Pandarus is a peer to Troilus and hardly older than Criseyde, probably around thirty. The younger age eliminates harsh judgments on his involvement in their love affair and on behavior deemed lecherous in an older man.

Drawing techniques from biology, the authors gauge the reliability of several aspects of textual stemmata: whether separate sections of a given text have separate histories, the quantity of text necessary for a reliable stemma, the levels of…

Addresses queer readings and the asynchrony of time within medieval tales in relation to "amateur medievalists" and scholars. Study includes discussion of temporality, queer historicism, and autobiographical anecdotes, providing a fresh way of…

Analyzes varying treatments of the "sergeant" character in Chaucer, the Anonymous French, Petrarch, and Boccaccio by considering the character's rhetorical effect in each. Rather than imitating a character either cruel (as in the French) or not-cruel…

Seen in light of external texts that establish the medieval rhetoric of feminine virtue, Criseyde's betrayal reflects betrayal of the patriarchal culture that sets up expectations for feminine conduct and that uses a woman such as Criseyde for its…

Attitudes toward grief are revealed in the way the speakers talk. Diction at the end of the poem suggests a resolution of divergent perceptions.

Applies understanding of literary texts, including Chaucer's CT, to ideas of everyday life. Chapter 1, "Chaucer: Ambiguity and Ethics," addresses the benefits of using NPT, in particular, to teach ethics and issues of morality.

Assesses the "multilayered constitution" of TC "as a polysemous text" that celebrates "the flesh and the divine simultaneously," reading the poem as the recreation of the "suppressed sexual experience" of Chaucer's youth in his old age, an…

While we cannot be sure of Chaucer's pronunciation of "Berwyk" (CT 1.792), one manuscript version of Bradwardine's memory treatise may suggest the loss of medial (w).

Maintains that "medieval thought was continually pushed toward true contradictions . . . despite [the] impossibility imposed by classical logic," citing Aristotle, Abelard, Jean Buridan, Aquinas, and modern thinkers such as Hegel and Graham Priest…

Considers the relationship between the Wife of Bath and the Clerk, focusing on their shared approach to self-presentation through the words of other writers and their interrelationship as speakers. Highlights the Wife's use of clerical authority and…

The portrayal of "faire White" in BD reflects the double vision--physical and metaphysical--of rhetorical description in Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Joseph of Exeter, and Alain de Lille.

Originally published in 1988. Designed for examination preparation, this guide poses a series of issues for GP and the individual tales in CT; TC; and the dream poems, especially PF: kind of work, what it is about, characterization, the argument,…

Describes "the author's work as a translator" of CT "and how she uses this translation in the classroom."

Explores the "kinship" between hypertext theory and the mode of analysis in Donald Howard's The Idea of the "Canterbury Tales" (1976), commenting on memory and associative thinking, nonlinearity and closure, and the technology of the book. Also…

Surveys the medieval mythographic accounts about Little Hugh (e.g., Matthew Paris, Chaucer's PrT); transformation into popular ballads, nursery rhymes, and Romantic verse (Child, Arnim, Brentano, Heine); and modern appropriations in A. Zweig's…

Describes aspects of Hughes's "imaginative encounter with the Middle Ages," particularly his reading of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Chaucer’s works, and those of Dante, exploring how these works influenced his poetry and thoughts on…

Attitudes toward earthly and heavenly love in Chaucer's TC and Gower's Confessio Amantis, Chaucer's and Gower's references to each other, and the presence of phrasal similarities in the two works suggest that Chaucer's ending to TC "is to be…

Boardman traces Chaucer's humanism in BD, HF, and PF, "where he evolved a language capable of serving both tradition and experience while reserving a critical, even skeptical, attitude toward them.... Chaucer is 'involved yet objective, detached yet…

Although fools hardly appear in Chaucer, in his own self-caricature the poet often plays the clown, as in CT and TC. Italian influence on Chaucer's comic vision is greater than that of the French "fabliaux."

Explores "reading habits" in fifteenth-century England and the extent to which they are part of the humanist movement, examining how manuscript glossing, responses, and other forms of commentary reflect philological, stylistic, and political…

Observes structural and thematic parallels between ClT and its Envoy, arguing that both refute the Wife of Bath's attitudes, one through alternative perspective and the other through mockery.

Explains Chaucer's humor as the "healthy expression of a spiritually sound man" faced with a decadent world and surmises that Chaucer was publicly cuckolded by Philippa and John of Gaunt.