Both Chaucer and Gower expressed the sentiment that the world had grown old and cast the passing of time in moral terms. But they also ultimately relied on personal sensibilty to render the feeling or experience of time passing because they were not…
Describes and assesses the influence of Chaucer's works on twentieth-century writer Jack Spicer, discussing Spicer's life, his poetics, and his uses of source materials, exemplified in his adaption of TC.
Krier notes the influence of early Chaucer works upon Spenser. Chaucer's early dream visions influenced Spenser and provide an example of linking plot to daily activity.
Describes the "typological" uses of time in the mystery cycles, the "biological time" of the heroes' actions in most romances, and the much more complex concern with time in TC, where "all action and characters" are placed in time and are given…
Humphrey, Chris, and W. M. Ormrod, eds.
Suffolk : York Medieval Press, 2001.
An introduction and eight essays explore various senses of time in the medieval world, assessing their influence upon life and culture. Topics include anachronism as a feature in earlier senses of time, perceptions of death and the Last Judgment,…
Taylor, Paul Beekman.
Exemplaria 7 (1995): 371-93.
The time of the Canterbury pilgrimage imitates the time and eternity of the cosmos. In the poem, time acts as a measurable conceptual principle for men, but it is embodied as a perceptual force in women such as the hag in WBT and Griselda in ClT.
Spearing, A. C.
Charlotte Brewer and Barry Windeatt, eds. Traditions and Innovations in the Study of Middle English Literature: The Influence of Derek Brewer (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), pp. 60-72.
Explores how Chaucer plays with the theme of time in TC.
Davis, Kathleen.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed. The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), pp. 105-22.
Contemporary orientalism is based on a paradoxical notion of the Middle Ages as both the precursor of modernity and an unchanging alterity. Davis identifies this paradox in Edward Said's "Orientalism" and Diane Sawyer's television documentary,…
Camargo, Martin.
Scott D. Troyan, ed. Medieval Rhetoric: A Casebook (New York and London: Routldge, 2004), pp. 91-107.
Camargo explores how time functions rhetorically in Chaucer's works, discussing duration as a feature of style (amplification and abbreviation), time as an attribute of action (time as cause) and person (time of birth as character), and several…
Explores differences between the narrator's depictions of the passing of time in TC. Books 1-4 record events consecutively, with little or no inference of simultaneity of action, and Book 5 shifts abruptly to an "outside-narrator time sequence"…
Osborn, Marijane.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.
Osborn explores how Chaucer used an astrolabe in his composition of CT and explains the use of the instrument in celestial navigation; includes a cutout astrolabe. Throughout most of CT, Chaucer's references to time and place are realistic. Such…
The ending of TC is unified with the rest of the poem. Its abrupt shift from pagan setting to Christian message is a structural imitation of the Boethian distinction between temporality and eternity.
Steenbrugge, Charlotte.
Clíodhna Carney and Frances McCormack, eds. Chaucer's Poetry: Words, Authority and Ethics (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013), pp. 121-33..
Enters the discussion about apparent temporal discrepancies in PF and reframes it with a reminder that the poem occurs in a dream vision, and need not correspond literally to English weather and bird behavior. Embraces contradictory references to…
Reassesses LGW through an examination of time, understood within a feminist frame, to see repetition and blurring of time and distance between dreamer and reader. Claims that this recursiveness of LGW offers open-ended possibilities for…
Situates Criseyde and her agency in discussions of freewill and the effect of secular society on Boethian notions of the highest good, and argues that Chaucer's depiction of Criseyde throughout the poem undercuts her apparent agency. The poem's…
Evans, Ruth.
Beatrice Fannon, ed. Medieval English Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 128-43.
Explores memory and gender in TC, focusing on the poem's deployment of the trope of the knot, as representative of both memory and the bond of love. Argues that the poem's use of knots and nets does not easily resolve itself into gender binaries or…
Owen, Charles A., Jr.
Studies in Philology 63 (1966): 533-64.
Surveys Chaucer's "use of rhyme as it contributes to poetic effect," examining rhymes in his complaints and balades, in Anel, and in Tho, and demonstrating his unobtrusive dexterity with rhyme royal in TC and with decasyllabic couplets in CT.…
Silvia, Daniel, Donald R. Howard, Beryl Rowland, E. Talbot Donaldson, and Florence Ridley.
Florilegium 3 (1982): 239-67.
Chaucer repeatedly depicts himself as a poet of love frustrated. Several critics look at the thwarted erotic elements in PF, TC, and CT, focusing on PardT, WBT, ShT, MilT, MerT, MkT, and PrT and the tellers of tehse tales.
Contains twenty-five essays, five of which are written in English; the rest, including the preface and epilogue, are in Japanese. The first group of essays centers on Chaucer and his works. The second series of essays ranges from the Old English…
Passmore, S. Elizabeth.
S. Elizabeth Passmore and Susan Carter, eds. The English "Loathly Lady" Tales: Boundaries, Traditions, Motifs (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), pp. 3-41.
Female counsel is a consistent theme in Irish and English versions of the loathly lady story, in which women offer advice or prophesy to aristocrats. This theme reinforces connections among the analogous tales, paralleling the visual motif of female…
Rowe, Donald W.
Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
Thinness of critical response shows modern failure to perceive LGW's intended complexities. The question of which version of the Prologue was written first has not been settled. In a discussion based on F, Rowe identifies the daisy and Alceste as…
Medieval iconography of the monkey physician examining a urinal reflects concern about contemporary physicians but may also evoke associations with Christ as salvific doctor. Hardwick briefly considers aspects of Phy-PardL and the Ellesmere portrait…
Fludernik, Monika.
David Herman, ed. The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), pp. 69-100.
Shows that modern understandings of and distinctions among speech, thought, and signifying gesture do not necessarily obtain in Middle English discourse, and that Middle English literature "displays much more extensive narrative depictions of…
Galloway, Andrew, and R. F. Yeager, eds.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.
Nineteen essays by students, friends, and colleagues of Winthrop (Pete) Wetherbee, along with an introduction by Galloway and a laudatory afterword by Robert Morgan. For seven essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Through a Classical Eye under…
Knapp, Peggy A.
Robert R. Edwards, ed. Art and Context in Late Medieval English Narrative: Essays in Honor of Robert Worth Frank, Jr. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 193-205.
Both the world and the language with which we try to render it intelligible are in constant flux. Tracing changes in the word "thrift" from pre-Chaucerian times through Shakespeare,Knapp stresses the necessity for developing strategies of capturing…
