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.
Miliaras, Barbara.
Liana De Girolami Cheney, ed. Pre-Raphaelitism and Medievalism in the Arts. (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1992), pp. 127-57.
Burne-Jones's use of the grotesque was influenced by Chaucer, among others. In KnT, Emelye unwittingly inspires destructive passion in Palamon and Arcite, creating disorder in society and leading to a "grotesque denouement."
Buckler, Patricia Prandini.
JoAnna Stephens Mink and Janet Doubler Ward, eds. Joinings and Disjoinings: The Significance of Marital Status in Literature (Bowling Green Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991), pp. 6-18.
Composed in the context of the bubonic plague, BD encourages rejection of despair.
Durham, Lonnie J.
Chaucer Review 3.1 (1968): 1-11.
Explores the imagery of nature and death in TC, arguing that Criseyde is "representative of a principle of life" and "best understood in terms of her cyclical or seasonal progression through the poem." Pandarus is associated with mutability, and…
Coghill, N. K.
John Lawlor, ed. Patterns of Love and Courtesy: Essays in Memory of C. S. Lewis (London: Edward Arnold, 1966), pp. 141-56.
Explores the attitude toward sexual love expressed in Andreas Capellanus's "De Arte Honeste Amandi," contrasting it with the "innocent sincerity in sexual love" that is characteristic of Chaucer's Troilus (and Shakespeare's), also considering the…
Beidler, Peter.
Studies in American Indian Literature 15 (2003): 92-103.
Comments on the possible influence of CT on the frame-tale structure of Erdrich's "Tales of Burning Love" and considers to what extent parallels between the Wife of Bath and Lulu Nanapush ("Love Medicine") indicate that Chaucer's work is a source for…
Summit, Jennifer.
Chicago and London : University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Historicizing the "commonplace" conception that women writers stand in opposition to literary tradition, Summit assesses how the conception itself "dialectically fashioned both 'the woman writer' and 'English literature' in the medieval and early…
Renevey, Denis, and Christiania Whitehead, eds.
Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009.
Twenty-five essays by various authors on topics that pertain to translation in the Middle Ages and the translation of medieval literature; the volume includes an index that lists many references to Chaucer. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer,…
Influenced by the conventions of Renaissance Petrarchism, Jonathan Sidnam's seventeenth-century translation/paraphrase of TC suppresses Chaucer's intimations that his poem may be read by both men and women in a way that transcends gender. Observing…
Risden explores how several medieval narratives "subvert" readers' expectations and "hint at the loneliness of the moral act." Includes comments on WBP, as well as on "Beowulf," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," "Piers Plowman," and other works.
