Moseley, C. W. R. D.
Critical Survey 30.2 (2018): 1-5.
Notes that the canonizing of Chaucer can have the effect of making him less challenging, blunting the force of his concern for the all-importance of "trouthe" and compassion, issues that "every person in every age" must face.
Burger, Glenn D., and Holly A. Crocker.
Burger and Crocker, eds. Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 1-24.
Emphasizes how this essay collection presents "an intersectional approach to what medievals call affect and what moderns call emotions," and "speaks to the 'affective turn' in contemporary literary and cultural studies.” Introduction provides a…
Emerson, D Geoffrey.
Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Alabama, 2019. v, 202 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A81.03(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses and via https://ir.ua.edu/collections/ed5428de-61dd-4547-bb08-8be93f503728; accessed August 24, 2025.
Surveys "sixteenth-century writers [sic] from Chaucer to Spenser and from Copernicus to Bacon, showing how they construct authority and attempt to rewrite intuitions about nature and her students. My subsequent chapters on physics, chemistry, and…
Utz, Richard J.
Studies in Medievalism 8 (1996): 5-26
Uses Will Heraucort's "Die Werwelt Chaucer" (1939) as the focal point for examining the interplay between philology and ideology in German Chaucer studies between 1848 and 1945. Germanic elements were exaggerated, and French influence was…
Williams, Tara Nicole.
Dissertation Abstracts International 65 (2005): 4190A
In exploring development of the word/concept "womanhood," Williams discusses KnT and ClT, as well as works by Gower, Lydgate, Henryson, Kempe, and Julian of Norwich.
Williams, Tara.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011.
Argues that Middle English writers employ gendered terms at moments when they are probing new ideas about women's roles; writers "invented womanhood" to describe women's experiences beyond their relation to men. KnT and ClT use gendered language to…
Edwards, Robert R.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017.
Investigates the rhetorical and creative potentials of the idea of authorship as it developed in medieval English literature and established the basis of authorial "prestige and power" for future literary tradition. Individual chapters assess works…
Finlayson, John.
English Studies 89 (2008): 385-402.
In FranT, Chaucer reshapes the source material found in Boccaccio's "Filocolo" and "Decameron," adding the "pre-story" of a courtly love marriage, increasing the pathos of Dorigen, undercutting Arveragus's "self-serving" views of honor and truth, and…
Johnson, Lynn Staley.
Studies in Philology 87 (1990): 137-55.
Mel should be read in light of England's disrupted domestic state and especially of parliamentary dissatisfaction with Richard II in the 1380s. Thus, Prudence's advice, which emphasizes the contractual relationship between ruler and ruled but also…
Vines, Amy N.
Amanda Hopkins, Robert Allen Rouse, and Cory James Rushton, eds. Sexual Culture in the Literature of Medieval Britain (Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 2014), pp. 161-80.
Discusses the perception of sexual violence in medieval literature, using WBT and "Perceval" by Purcelle de Lis as primary case studies, and describes the medieval misconception that equates sexual assault with heroism.
DuBruck, Edelgard E.
Uwe Boker, Manfred Markus, and Ranier Schowerling, eds. The Living Middle Ages: Studies in Mediaeval English Literature and Its Tradition (Stuttgart: Belser, 1989), pp. 103-13.
After reviewing scholarly opinion of the Pardoner's character,DuBruck turns to the somewhat neglected exemplum of the rioters to analyze narrative speed and style, by which the Pardoner drives his text to an emphatic conclusion. DuBruck then…
Reconsiders the 127 Irish analogues to RvT cited in Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson's "Types of Folktale" and reduces them to four. Comments on the transmission of the various motifs in the Tale, suggesting that Chaucer may have gotten the Tale from…
Absolon's twenty manners of dance after the school at Oxford may be traceable to the Morris dance troupes in the Oxford area, whose repertoire numbered approximately twenty dances. Absolon is ironically linked to dances which cast him in the role of…
Pattison, Andrew John.
Chaucer Review 54.2 (2019): 141-61.
Contextualizes the barnyard chase scene of NPT alongside late medieval hunting treatises, and questions the juxtaposition between the chase and the medieval noble hunt. The parody of this hunt offers multiple layers of meaning, from criticism of the…
Roberts, Valerie S.
Chaucerian Shakespeare (Ann Arbor: Michigan Consortium for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 1983), pp. 97-117.
The gardens of MerT and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" are not idyllic "gardens of love" but "gardens of vanity," the setting for human deceit, folly, and cruelty.
Chickering, Howell D.
Nicolay Yakovlev, ed. Lecture Series (St. Petersburg: Linguistic Society of St. Petersburg, 2003), pp. 20-37. Rpt. from Yazyk i rechevaya deyatet'nost' (Language and Language Behavior) 4 (2001): Supplement.
Close reading of several GP descriptions (including the Knight, Monk, Clerk, Sergeant at Law, and Summoner) shows how Chaucer's shifting tones produce ironic implications.
Wurtele, Douglas (J.)
Chaucer Review 13 (1978): 66-79.
Alongside January's outright parody of "Canticum Canticorum," a web of allusions thereto sets up an ironic juxtaposition of May and the Virgin Mary, reinforcing the bitterness permeating MerT; these subtle allusions also reflect the Merchant's desire…
Lázaro Lafuente, Luis Alberto
Luis A. Lazaro Lafuente, Jose Simon, and Ricardo J. Sola Buil,eds. Medieval Studies: Proceedings of the IIIrd International Conference of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature (Madrid: Universidad de Alcala de Henares, 1996), pp. 207-15.
Surveys the kinds of irony and humor in PardPT for the ways they characterize the Pardoner.
Lawton, David.
Leeds Studies in English 14 (1983): 94-115.
Shifts of tone and tension between ironies of fatal necessity and fateful will create balance between appreciation of the lovers' nobility and pessimism about their frailty. The oxymoron functions thematically and modally: religious passion…
The narrator of BD, who sees in the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone an exemplum of the loss of their "golden age" love, realizes that the love of the knight is an analogue of the happy fulfillment of the couple's love. Thus, the actual consolation of the…
Hansen, Elaine Tuttle.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 82 (1983): 11-31.
LGW satirizes the narrator's perspective on women rather than examining feminine virtue. Obvious distortions of the legends reveal the deficiency of the narrator's attitude: he idealizes women in passivity, irrationality, and stupidity.
Pelen, Marc M.
Forum for Modern Language Studies 27 (1991): 1-22.
Just as the themes of liberality and magnificence are treated ironically in Decameron 10, particularly in the tale of Griselda (10.10), so ClT is as "poetically and morally suspect" as are WBT and FranT. Both poets use multiple narrators and…
Blanch, Robert J.
Lock Haven Review 8 (1966): 8-15.
Demonstrates the presence of three kinds of irony in MerT: verbal irony in the Merchant's double entendres and introductory comments on marriage, rhetorical irony in the deflation of courtly ideals by means of distorted or exaggerated figures and…
