LGW illustrates the importance of fidelity to one's pledges. Chaucer shows that "act, speech, and writing, when captured by image, text, and imagination, preserve love beyond its transitory moment of existence" (50). The written experiences of the…
Wentersdorf, Karl P.
Leigh A. Arrathoon, ed. Chaucer and the Craft of Fiction (Rochester, Mich.: Solaris Press, 1986), pp. 35-62.
The complex meanings of the pear tree are achieved by means of a pervasive ironic technique whereby material with favorable connotations is introduced only to be qualified and undercut at a later stage. Treats biblical and classical sources, lust,…
Violato, Claudio,and Arthur J. Wiley.
Adolescence 25 (1990): 253-64.
Studies images of youth and adolescence in eleven major authors, including Chaucer, showing that adolescence is portrayed as a time of "turbulence, excess, and passion." Chaucer's GP Squire fits the pattern.
Considers critical assessments of Chaucer's attitudes toward Arthurian literature in WBT and argues that Chaucer may have known only nontraditional Arthurian materials such as "Libeaus Desconus" and "Sir Perceval of Galles." This notion is…
Brewer, D. S.
D. S. Brewer, ed. Chaucer and Chaucerians: Critical Studies in Middle English Literature (University: University of Alabama Press; London: Nelson, 1966), pp. 240-70.
Surveys the reception of Chaucer as a poet, century by century, commenting recurrently on the understanding and appreciation of his rhetoric and meter, humor and moral seriousness, linguistic obscurity, relations with sources, characterization, and…
Harris, Neil Shettron.
Dissertation Abstracts International 35 (1975): 4429A
The reasons for Chaucer's low reputation in the seventeenth century were as much aesthetic as linguistic. He was a pawn in the battle over enrichment of the language; his works violated the principles of decorum; the medieval genres he used had…
An introduction to the influence of Christian thought and history on Old and Middle English literatures. A chapter on "Piers Plowman" and CT (pp. 101-38) surveys late-medieval ecclesiastical offices, the theology of salvation, penance and…
Vial, Claire.
Michel Bitot, ed., with Roberta Mullini and Peter Happe. Divers Toyes Mengled: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Culture in Honour of Andre Lascombes (Tours: Universite Francois Rabelais, 1996), pp. 43-54.
Chaucer's accounts of royal entries in KnT, Anel, MLT, and LGWP indicate how the confluence of historical records and literary practice influenced the idea of kingship in the late Middle Ages.
Examines depictions of kingship among the Ricardian poets--Gower, Langland, the Gawain poet, and Chaucer--as reflections of common concerns in a time of turbulence, considering royalty in several of Chaucer's works. In BD, the royal birds are…
Explores images and metaphors in various works in Middle English to disclose their "implicit theories of language," with numerous references to Chaucer and his works throughout, including discussion of birdsong as oral language in PF and comparison…
Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate, and Timea Szell, eds.
Ithaca, N. Y: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Adopting a variety of critical approaches, the fourteen essays range from detailed analyses of religious discourse to theoretical inquiries into the forces that shaped ideas of sanctity. Essays discuss representations of sainthood in the Middle…
Includes commentary on depictions of Islam and Muhammad in MLT and GP: despite the pejorative naming of the Prophet in MLT, GP is "the inaugural English text which set in motion cross-cultural understanding between the West and the Muslim world."
Neuss, Paula.
Review of English Studies 32 (1981): 385-97.
For Chaucer poetry and love are closely related: both are creative arts to which the verb "make" is applied. Chaucer uses writing and book imagery to symbolize a creative love act.
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…
