Browse Items (16012 total)

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…

Argues that Holcot and Chaucer "depict a world in which farce and deception are possible." Discusses how Chaucer's ironic humor and "Chaucerian misdirection" fuel the ambiguity in ClT and NPT.

Although Old English poetry always depicts Satan as supernaturally powerful (while doctrinally powerless), late-Middle English works show him as comic, the boaster who must fail--as in the mystery cycles followed by the morality plays. In Chaucer's…

According to Walker, the three males in MilT anticipate familiar types of masculine "fool" in English dramatic tradition: John as cuckolded senex amans, Nicholas as the punished "Priapic fool," and Absolon as the "squeamish, infantalised male."…

There are significant differences between Chaucer's and Gower's appropriations of the Roman de la Rose and its Latin antecedents. Gower's priestly Genius is an authority figure in the tradition of Boethius's Consolation. Chaucer's rejection of…

Considers marginal glossing in manuscripts of TC and CT as examples of actual reader experience of those texts, with an eye toward recognizing different interpretations and hermeneutic approaches from relatively contemporary readers.

Olsan makes a brief reference to ParsT and "charms for wounds and sickness."

The annotations from Virgil and Seneca in a copy (not previously discussed) of Stow's edition of TC act much like footnotes in modern editions to identify such things as analogues. They also demonstrate that classical tag-lines had become common by…

A complete list of the Latin and French loan words in GP, including proper nouns. Chaucer is indebted to earlier borrowings, especially to those in the "Ancrene Riwle." The number of Chaucer's own borrowings is indicated. A high ratio of the…

By exploring the uses of Latin quotations in the works of Langland and Chaucer, Furrow indicates late-Middle English readers' facility with Latin.

Comprises ten essays by various authors, with summaries by the editors in an introduction, a bibliography, and subject index. For six essays pertaining to Chaucer, search for Later Middle English Literature, Materiality, and Culture under Alternative…

A discursive bibliography of Chaucer studies for 2012, divided into five subcategories: general, CT, TC, other works, and reputation and reception.

A discursive bibliography of Chaucer studies for 2011, divided into four subcategories: general, CT, TC, and other works.