Duggan, Hoyt N.
C. B. McCully and J. J. Anderson, eds. English Historical Metrics. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996): pp. 219-37.
Comments on Dryden's and Tyrwhitt's views of Chaucer's meter as background to assessing editorial treatments of the meter of "Pearl." Argues that editors need to emend the manuscript of "Pearl" more aggressively to minimize scribal interventions and…
In CYT, Chaucer's comic use of technical terms related to alchemy or to alchemists (e.g., "craft," "disciplyne," "emprise," "experience," "labour," "loore," "maistrie," "multiplicatioun," "philosophie," "science," "travaille," "wirkyng,"…
Nakao, Yoshiyuki.
English and English Teaching: A Festschrift in Honour of Prof. Hisashi Takahashi and Prof. Jiro Igarashi (Hiroshima: Department of English, Faculty of School Education, Hiroshima University, 1993), pp. 177-85.
Discusses "slydynge" and related words (such as "kynde" and "pite") with regard to Criseyde's characterization. Examines also the syntactic structures containing those words.
Thomas, Susanne Sara.
Dissertation Abstracts International 58 (1998): 2645A.
Examines how Chaucer and the Gawain poet explore the legal power of written and spoken words. "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" challenges the potency of oral oaths, WBT parodies courtroom rhetoric, the GP sketch of the Sergeant of Law exposes legal…
Reisner, Thomas A.,and Mary E. Reisner.
Modern Philology 75 (1978): 385-90.
Newly discovered Spanish document reports 400 gold "fortes" paid to Lewis Clifford, Chaucer's friend, on behalf of Carlos II of Navarre, thus connecting Clifford with the Black Prince's Spanish campaign, and explaining some of his other connections…
Yager, Susan.
Ann W. Astell and J. A. Jackson, eds. Levinas and Medieval Literature: The "Difficult Reading" of English and Rabbinic Texts (Pittsburgh, Penn.: Duquesne University Press, 2009), pp. 35-56.
Examines parallels between Levinas's writing and medieval allegory. Yager reads ClT in a Levinasian mode to generate an open-ended reading or "an exercise in ifs." ClT can be read as an ethical allegory; Chaucer, as an ethical allegorist. Yager…
Astell, Ann W., and J. A. Jackson, eds.
Pittsburgh, Penn.: Duquesne University Press, 2009.
Twelve essays by various authors, plus an introduction by the editors, consider interactions among Christian allegory, talmudic hermeneutics, and the interpretive theory of Emmanuel Levinas. For three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for…
Pappano, Margaret Aziza.
Robert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior, eds. Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), pp. 248-70.
Pappano characterizes late medieval craft guilds and the roles they play in CT, particularly the recurrent concern with "male artisan identity." Through MilPT, Chaucer critiques the exclusionary nature of "craft fraternalism."
McKinnell, John.
Mary Salu, ed. Chaucer Studies III: Essays on Troilus and Criseyde (Cambridge: Brewer, 1979), pp. 73-89.
Trevet's commentary on Seneca's "Hercules Furens," which Chaucer may have known, reveals that medieval theorists gave weight to the "formal cause" of tragedy. In TC, the interpolated songs, dreams, prayers, and letters may be analyzed as elements…
Medieval vernacular literature, which inherits and deeply re-elaborates themes and modes of Latin culture, is at the origin of "European" literary production. Italy followed soon after France in establishing a vernacular literary tradition, anchored…
Examines law and literature in the works of Chaucer, Gower, and Langland, focusing on three major topics: marriage, crime, and covenants. An introductory chapter explores the relations between law and literature. Throughout, there is comparison of…
The open-ended frame of CT derives ultimately from Indo-European rather than Arabic aesthetic; Arabic influence on medieval Europe is nonetheless significant.
The "fragmentary state" of CT and its lack of definitive ending may reflect external circumstances, yet its "open-endedness" may be part of its structural plan.
Carruthers, Mary (J.)
Journal of Narrative Technique 2 (1972): 208-14.
Argues that FrT and SumT "explore the question of true meaning in far-reaching ways." Concerned with "externals" only, the Friar's summoner ignores intention, while the Friar himself (a "false glossator" though described as worthy) "cannot properly…
In her essay Gittes overemphasizes generalizations about Arabic mathematics, architecture, and literature, especially its "atomization" into component units.
"Glossa Ordinaria" and NPT demonstrate the medieval tendency to accompany a base text with another, more interpretive one, generating further discourse, discouraging closure, and resulting in compound, sometimes conflicting, interpretations or…
Focuses on Ovid’s post-exilic poem "Ibis," now nearly forgotten in scholarship but once central to medieval readers. Catalogues the extant manuscripts of Ibis and compares this to the higher number of mentions in manuscript inventories, before…
