TC indicates that love letters were written on paper in England as early as the 1380s. Uses TC to frame connection of paper with verse love epistles and their fictions.
Georgianna, Linda.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 12 (1990): 85-116.
CT examines such religious practices as pilgrimage, pardon, and penance within medieval soteriological traditions, which often analyzed redemption in commercial language. Particularly in GP and PardT, "Chaucer's understanding of the terms of…
Allen, Peter Lewis.
Dissertation Abstracts International 45 (1985): 2516-7A.
Although classical and medieval rhetorics stress conventional "topoi," love poetry also supposedly emphasizes originality and sincerity. Certain classical and medieval poets including Chaucer ironically play off convention against their own ideas.
Lynch, Andrew.
Corinne Saunders, ed. A Concise Companion to Chaucer (Malden, Mass.; Oxford; and Victoria: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 113-33.
Lynch explains the centrality of the legend of Troy to European narratives as a symbol of human instability and as a mirror of the present, especially in late medieval London. In comparison to its sources, TC keeps war on the periphery of the love…
apRoberts, Robert [P.]
Chaucer Review 7.1 (1972): 1-26.
Suggests that Chaucer purges "sensuality" from Boccaccio's "Filostrato" when he adapts it as TC, and demonstrates in detail where the quality is consistently present in the Boccaccio's poem.
Simmons-O'Neill, Elizabeth.
Modern Language Quarterly 51 (1990): 389-407
Unlike its analogues, MerT develops themes and images associated with the myth of Proserpine's rape and Ceres's search for her daughter. As a result, both May and January are presented as culpable and victimized.
Discusses Chrétien's "Knight of the Cart," including several points of comparison with TC: the poems as command performances, their inclusion of songs of love, and the possibility that the heroes are presented as humorous.
Sidhu, Nicole Nolan.
Literature Compass 6 (2009): 864-85.
Sidhu surveys recent attention to gender in medieval studies and assesses the "continuing marginalization" of gender studies. Recurrent references to Chaucer studies.
O'Callaghan, Tamara Faith.
Dissertation Abstracts International 59: 2014A, 1998.
These works use the language and motifs of love to distinguish gendered passion. In particular, the diction and imagery of love associated with Criseyde in TC show her, unlike the male characters, to be motivated more by fear and a sense of honor…
Cooper, Helen.
Helen Cooney, ed. Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 25-43.
Before TC and KnT, most romances in England were Anglo-Norman and largely uninfluenced by the conventions of courtly love and the Petrarchan tradition. The reputation of Chaucer's works overshadows that of these other works and their more practical…
Ruszkiewicz, Dominika.
New York: Peter Lang, 2021.
Considers relations between moral virtue and courtly love in a variety of Chaucer's works and Scottish Chaucerian works, analyzing a series of pairings--Rom and William Dunbar's "Golden Targe," Chaucer's Boethian poems and "The Kingis Quair," HF and…
Saunders, Corinne [J.]
Corinne Saunders, ed. A Concise Companion to Chaucer (Malden, Mass.; Oxford; and Victoria: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 134-55.
Saunders traces elements of Chaucer's "rarefied treatment of love" to Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes, troubadours, trouvères, and Ovid, arguing that Chaucer developed a notion of "fin' amors" to treat philosophical questions as well as the…
Fyler, John M.
Mediaevalia 13 (1989, for 1987): 295-307.
Ovid's views on humanity's decline from the first age influence Chaucer's "Former Age": Chaucer's use of Lamech in WBT, SqT, and Anel; and his distrust of rhetorical ornament (as evidenced by the Franklin and BD, for example).
Bayley, John.
John Bayley. The Characters of Love: A Study in the Literature of Personality (London: Constable, 1960), pp. 51-123.
Explores the characterizations in TC of Troilus, Pandarus, and, most extensively, Criseyde, explaining how Chaucer modifies their antecedents in Boccaccio's "Filostrato" by adapting the conventions and rhetoric of courtly love and creates rich…
Archibald, Elizabeth.
Claire Vial, ed. 'Gode is the lay, swete is the note': Résonances dans les lais bretons moyen-anglais / Echoes in the Middle English Breton Lays (Etudes Epistémè, no. 25, 2014): n.p. (web publication).
Despite the widely accepted claim that French and Middle English Breton lays are concerned primarily with love, argues that the English poems pay relatively little attention to romantic love, and are more concerned with identity, family separation…
Kelly, Henry Ansgar.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975.
Assesses the meaning and status of "courtly" love and its relation to marriage in medieval traditions and critical commentary on these traditions. Considers a wide range of medieval Latin and vernacular representations of love and marriage, and…
Lipton, Emma.
In The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. https://opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu, 2017. Relocated 2025 at https://opencanterburytales.lsusites.org/
Explores how and to what extent the WBP "presents both the challenges to women's agency posed by medieval marriage and, conversely, the ways existing practices of medieval marriage could be manipulated to empower women." Designed for pedagogical use,…
Saunders, Corinne [J.]
Helen Cooney, ed. Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 45-61.
Apart from Chaucer's works, most romances in Middle English "rewrite" their French and Latin analogues, representing the virtuous aspects of love rather than the conventions of the courtly game. Chaucer's writing exemplifies the "extremes of fin…
Bryson, Michael, and Arpi Movsesian.
[Cambridge]: Open Books, 2017.
Surveys depictions of love, from the Bible to English Renaissance literature, exploring poetic representations of love and the effects of efforts to sublimate or suppress it. The section on Chaucer (pp. 280-94), labeled "Post-Fin'amor English…
In the allusions to infernal sufferers in medieval poems, the lover and the miser are often linked: both have lost their rational capacity, and the sins of both proceed from cupidity. Hence, such reference in BD and TC show that the Black Knight…
Moser, Thomas C., Jr.
James M. Dean and Christian Zacher, eds. The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays on Chaucer and Medieval Culture in Honor of Donald R. Howard (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), pp. 243-64.
Analyzes a lyric with the invented title of "Inordinate Love Defined," which appears uniquely on the final leaf of a fifteenth-century manuscript, Copenhagen Thott 110, in the Royal Library. Also discusses briefly a lyric fragment of TC (1.400-406).
Gilles, Sealy.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 25: 157-97, 2003.
Reads the depiction of Troilus's love-sickness against "new theories of contagion" that resulted from the devastations of the plague. Criseyde internalizes the anti-feminist "logic of disease" and names herself the "infective other." Troilus's…
Arveragus is a more fully developed character if we acknowledge his relatively low degree (compared with that of Dorigen). Class status also clarifies the teller's own status and his admiration for rhetoric.
