Little, Katherine C.
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36 (2006): 103-34.
Little reevaluates the Christian iconography in SNT in light of the Wycliffite debate over the use of images and their potential to become idolatry. Despite the importance of visual images, SNT shows a shift toward words and texts.
Brown, Peter.
Peter Brown, ed. A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c. 1350--c.1500 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 307-21
Explores relations between the late-medieval debate on religious images and imagery in literature, including detailed assessment of the portrait of Chaucer that is included in manuscripts of Thomas Hoccleve's "Regiment of Princes." Assesses the…
Rust, Martha Dana.
New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Explores relationships between texts and their paratexts in English and Scottish books produced between 1400 and 1490, considering a "variety of pre- and extralinguistic modes of interacting with and thinking through books." Examines letter-forms,…
Kruger, Steven F.
Chaucer Review 28 (1993): 117-34.
Movement in HF is simultaneously inward and self-reflexive and outward and upward, toward a world of "eternal phenomena" and a realm of "abstract ideas." The poem is thus poised between two worlds, and its incompleteness may indicate Chaucer's…
Reichl, Karl.
Andre Crepin, ed. L'imagination medievale: Chaucer et ses contemporains (Paris: Publications de l'Association des Medievistes Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Superieur, 1991), pp. 157-76.
Surveys meanings of "ymaginacioun" and "fantasye" in Chaucer's time and discusses his exploitation of their ambivalence.
Includes introductions to seven authors and works of western literature, keyed to texts in translation or modernization available in the "Great Books of the Western World" series. The "Sixth Reading" here (pp. 139-66) pertains to Chaucer and CT,…
Zeeman, Nicolette.
Paul Strohm, ed. Middle English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 222-40.
Zeeman treats the "chanson d'aventure" as an imaginative (rather than expository) articulation of literary theory, focusing on use of the device in BD, LGWP, the opening of Piers Plowman, and other works.
Benson, C. David.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019.
Studies "ancient Rome as a major theme in the works of late medieval English poets": Chaucer, Gower, Langland, Lydgate, and the anonymous authors of "Stacions of Rome" and the interpolated "Metrical Mirabilia." Chapter 3, "Heroic (Women) in Chaucer's…
Lavezzo, Kathy, ed.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
An introduction by the editor and ten essays by various authors consider the presence and nature of nationalism in medieval England. Medieval scholarly tradition and political structures anticipate the nation state and the nationalist discourses of…
Koff, Leonard Michael.
Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen, eds. The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), pp. 278-316.
Examines what the relationship between The Clerk's Tale and Decameron 10.10 might be without the intervening sources: Petrarch's "De insigni obedientia et fide uxoris" and its French translation, "Le livre Griseldis." Chaucer does not reduce the…
Breen, Katharine.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Describes late medieval efforts to "formulate vernacular languages that could stand in for Latin grammar as a first and paradigmatic 'habitus'," i.e., as a rule-based discipline of the mind that shapes cognition and moral action. Dante, the…
Crowley, James Patrick.
Dissertation Abstracts International 61: 602A, 1999.
Although many editors and critics of medieval literature assume a single authoritative text, literary authority may be diffuse. Crowley examines in detail the B and C versions of "Piers Plowman." Also treats the frame of Gower's "Confessio Amantis"…
Prescott, Anne Worthington.
Santa Barbara, Calif.: Fithian, 2003.
Prescott introduces HF to the general reader as simple to read, yet full of Chaucer's mischievous fun. In HF, Chaucer reveals the way fame was viewed by his contemporaries, plus the way he thinks they and we should see it. He gives readers much to…
Davis, Alex.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Explores ho inheritance was imagined between the lifetimes of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Examines medieval writings, including CT and TC, and Renaissance writings, such as Edmund Spenser's "Faerie Queene" and William Shakespeare's "As You Like It,"…
Machan, Tim William, ed.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Thirteen essays by various authors consider new and traditional conceptualizations of medieval English language and literature. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Imagining Medieval English under Alternative Title
Turner, Marion.
In Holly A. Crocker and D. Vance Smith, eds. Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debates (New York; Routledge, 2014), pp. 398-406.
Investigates magical objects in late-medieval English literature that express relations between secrecy and identity (both political and individual), exemplifying various authors' attitudes, and maintaining that in HF Chaucer poses questions rather…
Focuses on the poetic form made famous by "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and Th, but also considers poetic form in the scorpion passage of BD and alliteration in ParsP. Discusses myths surrounding the "bob and wheel" form that are often…
Within the context of an examination of the English Renaissance, submits that the 1598 edition of Chaucer connects manuscripts and print culture, while lending Chaucerian authority and canonicity to print editions.
Galloway, Andrew.
Tim William Machan, ed. Imagining Medieval English: Language Structures and Theories, 500–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 210-37.
Contemplates the category of "the literary" in medieval English texts, surveying prior attempts to define or describe the category and indicating their utility. Comments on a range of Chaucerian topics, including the "cunningly self-authorizing…
Pigg, Daniel F.
Albrecht Classen, ed. Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: The Material and Spiritual Conditions of the Culture of Death )Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016(), pp. 263-76.
Discusses the intersection of death, money, and elements of the Catholic mass in PardT. In the wake of the plague, the mass became closely associated with death because of the spreading practice of saying masses for the souls of the dead. The…
Rentz, Ellen K.
Dissertation Abstracts International A71.02 (2010): n.p.
Considers writers such as Chaucer, Robert Mannyng, John Mirk, and, most extensively, William Langland in examining the medieval understanding of the parish and its associated individuals and phenomena. As a traditional center of religious practice,…
Storm, William M.
In The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. https://opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu, 2017. Relocated 2025 at https://opencanterburytales.lsusites.org/
Thinks about Thopas "in the context of medieval maps," and considers the Tale's pointers and misdirections in plot and genre, assessing them in light of the traditional Chaucer-Pilgrim / Chaucer-Poet distinction. Designed for pedagogical use,…
Gaylord, Alan T.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 12 (1990): 215-38.
Review article evaluating Chaucerian videotapes distributed by Films for the Humanities and tape cassettes of the Chaucer Studio produced subsequent to Betsy Bowden's guide to recorded Middle English (Garland, 1988). Ford Madox Brown's painting…
Discusses temporality and "cultural imaginings" of time in Lydgate, Hoccleve, and Chaucer. Refers to Chaucer's use of narrative and seasonal time and memory in CT, BD, PF, HF, and Astr.
