Browse Items (16035 total)

Late-medieval instructional poetry presents children as adults saw them and with adults' worries about them. In late-medieval narrative poetry, children are almost entirely absent, apart from a few exceptions such as the Pearl-maiden, the clergeon…

Practical handbook to literacy training, with exercises that include using lines from GP to inspire literacy, from a chapter titled "Exploring Geoffrey Chaucer: A Start" (pp. 181-84).

Asserts without explanation that a reference to Chaucer in "To Mr. Creech on His Translation of Lucretius" by "J. A." derives from RvT 1.3992 and that it may help to clarify a crux in Alexander Pope's "Dunciad" Variorum.

Uses "lessons from trauma studies concerning silence, as well as new materialist and ecocritical approaches," to explore the resistance of Griselda's patient silence. "[T]hrough a preponderant use of negative words"--a "poetics of negation"--Griselda…

Assesses the Pardoner as a "puzzle" posed by Chaucer to challenge his audience to consider the relationship between morality and story-telling. The Pardoner's dazzling rhetoric, his relics, and the tensions between his immoral prologue and moral tale…

Examines fifteenth-century scribal responses to sexual language in the CT, noting that some manuscripts either replaced obscenities or added to sexual language. Observing that female narrators in the CT are restricted in their use of vernacular…

A topically arranged survey of female same-sex desire in Western literature, with a brief discussion (p. 6) of MLT as "perhaps the earliest example in English" where "mutual passion between two women . . . moves the story along."

Eleven essays examining the reciprocity between literature and history in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Inscribing the Hundred Years' War under Alternative Title.

Examines the vice of curiosity, arguing that Chaucer both expands its application from the realm of the intellectual to the realm of the physical, and suggests that poetry may be a cause and a remedy for the desire to inquire into private matters.…

Chaucer was not an inept translator in Bo, as some contend, but an innovator who expanded the vocabulary of English ideological writing by some 500 constructions, anglicizing new Latin and Romance terms and extending the meanings of existing English…

The extensive and apparently authorial glosses that accompany MLT often underscore contradictions-spiritual against material, internal against external, ascetic against monetary-between Innocent's treatise and the narrator's perspective; these…

Medieval literature uses pathos of innocent suffering to relate physical to spiritual. The humanization of Griselda highlights her Christian virtues; the Prioress emphasizes the spiritual; the Physician stimulates audience self-awareness.

Knutson examines medieval ideas of innocence associated with penitential forgiveness in CT, "Pearl," and medieval pageant plays, suggesting that a later concept of innocence—a lack of "knowledge or experience"—shaped William Godwin's and Mary…

Identifies the "sense of middleness" found in Middle English verse that rejects "received concepts of poetic form and offers alternatives.” Includes a reading of HF "in which Chaucer presents a radically unconventional definition of 'poetic voice'…

Chancery highlighted problems posed in the medieval common law courts by failures in jurisprudence. MLT raises questions about injustice that reflect critically on the Sergeant of Law. Though he is shown to be an expert in jurisprudence, he is…

Establishes that scribes are less likely than otherwise to introduce their own spellings of words that occur in initial position in verse lines, exploring why in psycholinguistic terms, and suggesting several implications for manuscript study. The…

Argues that playwright Thomas Dekker, influenced by John Stow, refashioned the Chaucer legacy in the theater.

Anastasopoulos argues for mediated influence of Benoît's "Le Roman de Troie" on characterization, didactic message, and acknowledgement of sources in TC.

Explores the influence of Eustache Deschamps on the development of non-musical fixed forms in the English lyric tradition, commenting on poems from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D. 913; the poems of "Ch"; and works by Chaucer and John Gower,…

Inflexional final -"e" is well preserved in earliest Chaucer MSS. Hengwrt is conservative; Ellesmere is less correct and thus probably later.

Tallies uses of "that" clauses and "to" clauses after the verb "command" in Chaucer's works, documenting their frequencies in various syntactic contexts.

Uses trauma theory to read KnT as a "meditation on catastrophe and survival."

Examines the "rhetoric of pestilence" as a "powerful contemplative tool" that urges readers to "self-examination, penitence, and a more active, strategic approach to death" in five texts: PardT, John Lydgate's "Danse Macabre," "The Castle of…

Surveys translations and bowdlerizations of The Canterbury Tales from ca. 1870 to the present, identifying variations on the tendency to present the work as morally regulatory or innocent. Focuses on adaptations by Mary (Mrs. H. R.) Haweis, Charles…

Argues that Chaucerians should assess more explicitly the consequences of critical readings: for instance, interpreting Alison of Bath as a murderer or Criseyde as having an incestuous affair with Pandarus.