Browse Items (16012 total)

Includes seventeen essays on Chaucer, "Piers Plowman," pastoral literature, scripture and homilies, and lyric poetry; a dedicatory introduction; and a list of Wenzel's publications. For four essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Literature and…

Post-Wycliffite writing has a different character from that which preceded it. Writers of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, including Chaucer, produced works with this novel character, often defined as heretical. Cole connects…

Studies the "impact of judicial complaint on the formation of literary practice" in late medieval England, describing the "emergence and development" of the "literature of clamour" and exploring the influence of this literature on the rise of English…

Analyzes the relationship between conceptions of social class and literary representations of them in Britain from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. Chapter 2, "Perceptions of Class in the Late Middle Ages," addresses William Langland's…

Teskey explores the development of "story-telling" into "literature" in English tradition, including comments on Chaucer's place in this development.

Analyzes the tale-telling contract in the context of late-medieval English legal terminology. Explores Chaucer's use of legal diction and situation to establish both the telling of the tales as a form of pleading and the Host's role as judge until…

Focuses on Chaucer's position as lay controller of customs and argues that HF constitutes an attempt to change the field of literature to benefit--in socioeconomic and aesthetic senses--someone in his "liminal" professional position.

Discusses literary value and the value of continued interest in Chaucer's CT, focusing on parts 4 and 5. Argues that these parts function as a unified group, a framing that offers a new way to read and discover the value of the other CT tales.

Brief description of PhyT, accompanied by a Middle English version of lines 6.105-276, without notes or glosses.

In medieval studies, which are threatened by pluralism, medievalists can communicate the intent of the originals (now translated) by using literary theory to examine "punning, allusion, quotation, and voice." Examines puns, etc. in TC, Dante's…

Caxton's Chaucer is "moral," while Thynne's is "gentle." In their selection and rejection of texts both were guided by established critical principles.

Uses WBT as a case study in the development of circumcision's use as a metaphor for situations ranging from shifting of intellectual ground to the process of reading itself.

Medieval romances reflect changing attitudes toward social conflicts with chronologically developing alterations in their audiences. Chaucer's romances are studied briefly.

Treats prologues, frames, links, interruptions, pairing, and endings in BD, PF, HF, CT, Anel, Th, and Mel, with emphasis on CT.

Examines HF as a literary satire, a comic send-up of the love vision genre, evident in the naiveté of the narrator and his failure to attain love or information about it. The poem's "central structural idea" is "comic disillusionment," underscored…

Explores medieval literary representations of clothing, nudity, and fashion. Includes discussion (pp. 160-63) of how the Wife of Bath's clothing indicates her "personality" and "the crisis of legibility in the fashion system in England"; reproduces…

Surveys Chaucer's works and literary importance.

A collection of seven articles on late-medieval culture, literature, and the problems of historical interpretation. Treats Chaucer, Langland, and others.

Johnston discusses the treatment of political concerns in PF and Clanvowe's "Book of Cupid." PF defuses the political conflicts it conjures up through a conscious policy of aesthetic deferral, whereas the "Book of Cupid" openly shows the violence…

Symons compares and contrasts "literary" works (including Th and WBT) with popular romances, considering the differing appeals of the forms.

Claims that Chaucer, Spenser, and Dryden may be understood as a collective devoted to the project of "reviving or supplementing destroyed, deferred, and unfulfilled stories." Demonstrates the recursive, rather than linear, relations among these…

Surveys themes and plots in HF, comments on its sources, and discusses its "narrator-character."

Argues that recent attention to the late-medieval shift from realism to nominalism is attributable to a parallel shift in modern critical assumptions.

Ten essays address correspondences between late-medieval nominalism and literature, including Julian of Norwich, "Sir Gawain and The Green Knight," Jean Molinet, and Chaucer.

Nominalism and literature were never parts of a single, seamless discourse; influences between them are at best complex and indirect. Penn surveys research on literary nominalism in late-medieval (mostly Chaucerian) texts, arguing that sources other…