Critiques the Manly-Rickert text of CT for inconsistency in treatment of orthographic accidentals and failure to maintain a consistent, identifiable copy-text. Recommends, nevertheless, judicious use of the Manly-Rickert table of variants.
Investigates the "active tension" between the characterization of the Manciple and the nature of ManT, analyzing differences between the Tale and its sources and analogues (especially characterizations and moralizations) to show how Chaucer…
Written by various hands in the fifteenth century, the Bodleian MS Tanner 346, the earliest of the Oxford Group, is indispensable in establishing the canon of the minor poems, especially Anel, Mars, Ven, and Pity. In addition, it contains BD, PF,…
Bohne, Amanda Marie.
Dissertation Abstracts International A81.05 (2019): n.p.
Chapter 2 discusses the Wife of Bath's "unique approach to her fourth husband's death as she balances her postmortem responsibilities to him with her immediate remarriage,' acting with "concern" while also "tending to her own wishes."
Chaucer, possibly familiar with the concept of the "poeta-theologus" current in fourteenth-century Italian poetics, actually structures KnT "in a fashion which parallels or imitates divine creation"; perfection of structural order counters the…
Thompson, N. S.
Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds. The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 17-29.
CT and Boccaccio's Decameron depict a variety of social and moral transgressions committed by male characters; these transgressions constitute the ills of society. Female characters in the works are less likely to be transgressive, and only female…
Fyler, John M.
Robert R. Edwards and Stephen Spector, eds. The Olde Daunce: Love, Friendship, Sex, and Marriage in the Medieval World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), pp. 154-76, 276-84 (notes).
Argues that "Chaucer--drawing on a long tradition of Biblical commentary--is well aware of the sexual dimensions of word choice, even of the double meaning of 'man'." He "plays on the relationship between naming and sexual differentiation";explores…
The magical pageant of the Briton clerk (FranT) is imitated in Shakespeare's masque of Ceres ("The Tempest"); Humbert Humbert ("Lolita") is an analogue of Prospero. The image of the magician in each work points to the activity of the creative artist…
Sparrow, Edward Harrison.
Dissertation Abstracts International 57 (1997): 3952A.
The proof of masculinity by man-to-man combat continues to fascinate modern writers, though as early as Chaucer the duel had been perceived as inherently wrong.
Ridyard, Susan J., and Robert G. Benson, eds.
Sewanee, Tenn.: University of the South Press, 1995.
Fourteen essays from the seventeenth Sewanee Mediaeval Colloquium, on late-classical and medieval ideas of Nature, science, and human perception. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Man and Nature in the Middle Ages under Alternative…
Branch, Eren Hostetter.
Dissertation Abstracts International 35 (1975): 7861A.
Boccaccio's "Teseida" is about social relationships and its theme is the proper behavior of rational people in a rational society. The KnT also treats social behavior, but its concern is people's attitude towards irrational, superhuman forces.
Traces the history of the metaphor of Satan as a "fowler" who seeks to trap souls as he would trap birds. Discusses examples from the time of the Church fathers to Shakespeare, including three instances in which Chaucer employs related metaphors: WBT…
Norris tallies and assesses the major and minor sources of Malory's "Morte Darthur," suggesting that Malory was more widely read than is usually assumed. Chaucer's influence (especially WBT, FranT, and KnT) is neither close nor sustained in plot,…
Kennedy, Edward Donald.
Arthuriana 28.3 (2018): 51-65.
Argues that Malory downplayed his uses of the Stanzaic "Morte Arthur" and the Alliterative "Morte Arthure" in his "Le Morte Darthur" because the cultural prestige of native English romances was low--an attitude popularized by Chaucer in Th and…
Stevens, Martin.
Leeds Studies in English 1 (1967): 1-5.
Argues that "Malkyn" in MLP (2.30) refers not to a generic "lewd woman" as suggested by W. W. Skeat but to the character Malyne in RvT, Symkyn's daughter, hypothesizing that Chaucer intended to cancel CkPT and follow RvT with MLPT.
The discourse of "fin amor" places the male subject in a feminine position; in BD, the absence of White problematizes this feminization of the male, producing melancholia that endangers the Black Knight's psychic stability and the dominant fiction of…
Rossi-Reder, Andrea.
Peter G. Beidler, ed. Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde ( Cambridge; and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 105-16.
Like Boccaccio in Il Filocolo, Chaucer in FranT contrasts men and women by emphasizing men's mobility and women's fixity. Men are depicted as publicly and physically active, while women are privately and intellectually active.
As the competition between men intensifies in fragment A of CT, competition becomes an end in itself, and the women become increasingly objectified as persons.
Recent work on Chaucer influenced by poststructuralism can be roughly divided into two types: that which finds postmodern concerns already in medieval poetics and language theory, and that which approaches Chaucerian texts through postmodern…
Rudd, Gillian.
John Parham, ed. The Environmental Tradition in English Literature (Burlington, Vt.: 2002), pp.117-29.
Analyzes interactions between humans and nature (animals and environment) "through the lens of ecocriticism," exploring animal metaphors and the treatment of trees in KnT and representations of the sea and rocks in FranT. In KnT humans render nature…
Johnson, Ian.
Phillips, Philip Edward, and Noel Harold Kaylor, eds. A Companion to Boethius in the Middle Ages (Boston: Brill, 2012), pp. 413-46.
Explores the "special place at the commanding heights of literary culture" that Boethian translation held in Middle English, surveying the variety of translations and uses of the "Consolation," commenting on the importance of Jean de Meun and…
Assesses three of Sheila Delany's critical essays (including "Geographies of Desire: Orientalism in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women'") for the ways that they have "dramatically shifted the direction of critical discourse in emergent subfields of…
Hieatt, Constance B.
Martha Carlin and Joel T. Rosenthal, eds. Food and Eating in Medieval Europe (London and Rio Grande, Ohio: Hambledon Press, 1998), pp. 101-15
Corrects a number of misconceptions about medieval recipes and includes clarification of the meaning of "gyngebreed" in Th (CT 7.854).
Zimmerman, Erin Royden.
Dissertation Abstracts International A74.11 (2014): n.p.
Includes comments on Cassandra, Persephone, and Philomela as victims of "acquaintance rape" in Chaucer's works (TC, MerT, and LGW), treating his and other versions (classical, medieval, and modern) as adaptations of myths that create "metanarratives…
