Browse Items (16039 total)

Texts and translations facing, preceded by a full introduction and followed by appendices of musical works and miniatures, as well as notes to the text that explicate textual questions and "specify relationships between Machaut's and Chaucer's…

Explores the origins of Boccaccio's "Decameron" 10.10 and some Finnish analogues, without direct consideration of ClT.

Considers FranT in light of Epicurean philosophy, arguing that Dorigen's Epicurean efforts to seek perfect tranquility are thwarted by those who seek honor (Arveragus), impossible love (Aurelius), illusion (Aurelius's brother), and riches (the clerk…

In English literary tradition before Chaucer the concept of the devil has great vitality. But in CT, only in SumT and ParsT does the term "devil" have its traditional force; for the most part, one finds a transition away from the medieval idea.

Focuses on the rich meanings and implications of fragment in PardPT.

Comments on Chaucer's ventriloquist complaints (in LGW and TC) and examines the length, structure, position, tone, and function of the genre in FranT. While they were initially types, major characters gain dimension. Dorigen's second soliloquy…

French translation of WBT.

Compares and contrasts courtly love in Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and Chaucer's TC.

Considers BD as a partition between the mythical and fictional worlds and reality, as a textual space of transition where poetic experience and real life are intertwined.

After a short survey of France's discovery of medieval English literature, especially Chaucer, in the nineteenth century, Dor describes the main features of Chatelain's first complete translation of CT into French, published in London from 1857 to…

Considers the dates of BD and Jean Froissart's "Dit dou Bleu Chevalier" and explores their similarities, arguing that Froissart's poem inspired the central idea ("l'idée centrale") and many other features of Chaucer's poem—aspects of…

The language used to describe Hippolyta in KnT undermines the praise of Theseus and exposes "the dramatic irony in the Knight's perception of Theseus's military exploits and subsequent exchange of ethnic women."

Suggests that Chaucer's CT, the "Lais" of Marie de France, and the "Book of Margery Kempe" include "theopolitical" ideas and thus are informed by the Church's influence on these ideas and on the notion of identity.

Constructs a model for the reception of Gower's "Confessio Amantis" that accommodates its combination of English, marginal Latin glosses, and very difficult Latin prefatory verses. Clerk-prelectors probably studied the work before performing…

Rice studies late fourteenth-century vernacular prose devotional guides, with attention to their relationship with works by Chaucer and Langland. Wycliffite writings and changes in religious discipline affected notions of how to live the "best life,"…

Caie describes how lay people gained access to the Bible in the late Middle Ages through sermons, compendia, and florilegia. Explores how Chaucer characterizes speakers through their uses of the Bible in CT (e.g., quotation, misquotation, selection,…

An exhaustive study of sexual practices and attitudes (both "official" and "popular") and the attempted regulation of sex and marriage under canon law. Chapter 10 deals with the period from 1348 to the Reformation.

Demonstrates that in Lydgate's "Disguising" the wives' use of Chaucerian "performative and legalistic speech acts" is set in evocative conflict with the "theatricality of monarchical justice," arguing that Lydgate learned from Chaucer's WBPT how…

Suggests that behind several legal maxims found in RvPT stands the broader principle of measuring one law by another: "the old by the new, the Continental by the English, the private by the public, the Mosaic by the Christian."

Reprints twelve of Kelly's studies that pertain to Chaucer and his historical contexts, with an introduction, some addenda and corrigenda, and a cumulative index. The essays are reproduced in their original typefaces and with their original…

Discusses Chaucer as the first English poet laureate in a larger argument for the political impetus behind the selection of Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, Samuel Rogers, and Alfred Tennyson as laureate poets of the Victorian period.

So rarely does medieval poetry combine comedy and allegory that superficially the two modes seem irreconcilable: for some, humor undermines allegory's decorum of high seriousness; for others, it provides (at best) only badly needed comic relief. …

Response to saints' legends is normally sober, but "Legenda Aurea," Chaucer's source for SNT, exhibits flashes of humor. In a reading of SNT that accepts the natural response of laughter, Valerian, Tiburce, and Almachius are seen to play the fool,…

Suggests the "possible influence" of Horace's Ode 1.9 on Alisoun's laugh in the dark in MilT, observing similarities in erotic setting, imagery, and opposition between youth and age.

Comments on the legacy of Chaucer's humor in English literature, and includes a brief introduction to CT and selections from GP (descriptions of Wife Bath, Miller, Summoner, and Pardoner) in modern English translation (by Nevill Coghill), accompanied…