Rigby, Stephen H.
Matthew Davies and Andrew Prescott, eds. London and the Kingdom: Essays in Honour of Caroline M. Barron. Proceedings of the 2004 Harlaxton Symposium. Harlaxton Medieval Studies, no. 16 (Donington, England: Shaun Tyas, 2008), pp. 316-34.
Orthodox notions of royal prudence and magnificence underlie the idealized figure of Theseus in KnT. Theseus embodies the traits that Richard II was accused of lacking.
Identifies the "broad patterns of ideology in the text," discusses sources and onomastics, and examines the way in which the poetic working out energizes and modifies the ideology.
Besserman, Lawrence L.
Chaucer Review 36: 48-72, 2001.
Throughout the decades, Chaucer critics have argued their own biases in interpreting Chaucer's ideology--seeing Chaucer as a "Christian poet"; as a "poet first and foremost"; as an "atheist"; as a writer who was "politically incorrect." Eschewing…
Simons, Christopher E. J.
Humanities: Christianity and Culture (International Christian University) 41 (2013): 31-70.
Clarifies what kind of poems William Wordsworth criticized as "idle and extravagant stories in verse" and examines four English narrative poems before Wordsworth, including WBT. All four turn out to be more or less "idle and extravagant" by…
Pelen, Marc M.
Forum for Modern Language Studies 31 (1995): 193-214.
Chaucer's mode of composition of SNT and CYT owes much to the structure of "Roman de la Rose," in which the theme of contradictions and contraries plays a major role.
Sadlek, Gregory [M.]
Washington, D.C. : Catholic University of America Press, 2004.
Bakhtinian analysis of the discourse of love's labor in classical and medieval love literature, focusing on two traditions: one, rhetorical, playful, and concerned with the labor of courtship; the other, serious, philosophical, and concerned with the…
Barootes, B. S. W.
In Jamie C. Fumo, ed. Chaucer's "Book of the Duchess": Contexts and Interpretations (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 29-50.
Considers the relations between BD and fourteenth-century devotional texts, particularly "Cursor mundi," that disparage "fable" as a form of idleness. Rejecting the popular association between consuming fiction and playing idle games, BD reclaims…
Steinberg, Glenn.
Theresa M. Krier, ed. Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), pp. 91-109.
Reads Spenser's "Daphnaida" as a "refiguration and response" to BD, modified by Spenser's Protestant outlook. Compares and contrasts the two poems, considering tone, idiom, and faith in the ability of art to console.
Lynch, Kathryn L.
Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh, eds. Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the "Canterbury Tales" (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), pp. 130-48.
Interprets Pier Paolo Pasolini's "I racconti di Canterbury" as a "profound" engagement with CT, analyzing four instances of adaptation that reflect subtle appreciation and understanding of Chaucer's themes and techniques: a latrine scene at the…
Torabi, Katayoun.
Matthew Davis, Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel, and Ece Turnator, eds. Meeting the Medieval in a Digital World (Amsterdam: Arc Humanities, 2018), pp. 27-44.
Describes two projects that use digital research tools: one using Lexomics to compare passages in "Beowulf" and "Blickling Homily XVII" and another using Lexomics and Voyant to 1) examine verbal clusters in GP to "see if Chaucer wrote differently"…
Explores how Chaucer capitalized on extrinsic and intrinsic connotations in his ape metaphors. Kelly provides backgrounds to the metaphors from other medieval texts and, following Michael Riffaterre, theorizes about how such metaphors can operate in…
Croll, Angus.
San Francisco: No Starch Press, 2015.
A collection of playful JavaScript programs, imitating or responding to well-known literary authors--Hemingway, Shakespeare, Austin, Woolf, Borges, etc.--and including
brief descriptions of each writer's style. The section on Chaucer (pp. 104–11)…
Sherwin, Michael S.
New Blackfriars 94 (2013): 456-74.
Compares the depictions and analyses of love in TC, Annie Dillard's "The Maytrees" (2007), Thomas Aquinas, and modern psychologies of love, arguing that their underlying concerns with conflicts between passions and choices indicate that sustained…
Promotional materials indicate that this essay analyzes a cryptic mystery of the encomium on marriage in MerT (1267ff.), considers previous critical studies, and discloses a new interpretation.
Boitani, Piero.
Francesco Bruni, ed. "Le Donne, i Cavalier, l'Arme, gli Amori": Poema e Romanzo, la Narrativa Lunga in Italia (Venice: Marsilio, 2001), pp. 71-83.
Describes the impact of Boccaccio's "Teseida" on Chaucer's works in Anel, PF, TC, and, especially, KnT, exploring Chaucer's adaptations, the later English adaptations of the story, and critical responses to Chaucer's uses of his source.
After a full review of criticism, Savoia explores Chaucer's use of motifs found in other romances. KnT exploits traditional romance only to transcend it, setting the "romance" of Palamon in the perspective provided by the "tragedy" of Arcite and…
Giordano, Roberta.
Avellino: Sinestesie, 2014. Open access ebook at https://en.calameo.com/read/005864328fc7b606cf080; accessed March 3, 2022.
Studies Chaucer's and Boccaccio's dream vision narratives and their references to dreaming in light of the history of the genre, focusing on the secularization of the genre, the rising importance of the poet as dreamer-viator, and aesthetic successes…
Chaucer's dream poems reflect the self-consciousness of "mise en abyme"--literally, "setting of the abyss"--used here to identify Chaucer's means of drawing attention to structural and thematic circularity and to poetics. …
Antelmi, Gerardina.
Estela González de Sande, ed., Interconexiones: Estudios comparativos de literatura, lengua y cultura italianas (Madrid: Dykinson, 2021), pp. 25-34.
Examines the "topos of the dream" in Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio and compares the dream vision in BD. Points to similarities with mystical and shamanic experiences toward ecstasy that go beyond the similarities and differences in the medieval…
Suggests that the "Loathly Lady" is an anthropomorphic representation of the land, linking human vagaries with the uncertain product of working any given land and underscoring the impossibility of human attempts to control and regulate the natural…
Turner, Marion.
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 46.1 (2016): 61-87.
Explores how John Arderne, Chaucer, and Thomas Hoccleve use the language of illness and healing in a wide range of texts, noting that the narrators present themselves as "flawed and sick" and that their narratives, like their bodies, are "not wholly…
Hilmo, Maidie.
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Maidie Hilmo, and Linda Olson, eds. Opening up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012), pp. 245-89.
Examines illustrations of CT in several manuscripts, including the Hengwrt; Ellesmere; Bodley 686; and Tokyo, MS Takamiya 24 (formerly Devonshire); and portraits of Chaucer, exploring how manuscript illustrations "serve to shape the text and its…
