Recording of MercB set to music, performed by the Vasari Singers, "Recorded 2016 February 12–14 Church of St. Judeon-the-Hill, Hampstead Garden, London."
Score of musical setting for MercB, with text in Middle English, and an introductory note by Michael Kennedy. The score was published originally in 1922.
Martin, Carol Ann Nearpass.
Dissertation Abstracts International 54 (1993): 172A.
In light of Gerald Brun's investigations into historical hermeneutic theories, Chaucer may be seen as employing messenger figures throughout his oeuvre, from BD to CT. This role applies especially to Alys of Bath (despite her claims on Venus and…
Martin, Carol A. N.
Chaucer Review 28 (1993): 95-116.
Throughout his works, Chaucer employs "mercurial figures" who appear as "emblematic escorts, to lead readers safely past narrative fissures." In BD, these figures appear not only as Mercury himself but also as the whelp (d-o-g for g-o-d), who…
Smarr, Janet Levarie
Jane Chance, ed. The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1990), pp. 199-214.
Examining erotic elements, "identifications of the pear tree and the garden," and Mercury's role and attributes, Smarr analyzes similarities between Chaucer's and Boccaccio's handling of the pear-tree tale--similarities greater than those found in…
Hoffman, Richard L.
Notes and Queries 210 (1965): 129-29.
Reinforces previous arguments that the immediate source of Chaucer's description of "Mercury the slayer of Argus" in KnT is Ovid's "Metamorphoses" 1.671-72, adding that, like Argus, Arcite finds death by listening to the "persuasive and deceitful…
Bachman, W. Bryant,Jr.
English Language Notes 13 (1976): 168-73.
The appearance of Mercury in Arcite's dream is usually thought to be derived from Ovid's 'Metamorphoses', I. A more probable source, however, is Virgil's 'Aeneid', IV, where Mercury commands the hero to hasten on to Italy, just as in Chaucer Arcite…
Calabrese, Michael Anthony.
Dissertation Abstracts International 53 (1992): 804A.
Ovid and the Ovidian tradition provided Chaucer with a poetic ranging from the "game" of Ars Amatoria to the "ernest" of Tristia. Chaucer uses rhetoric to various ends with the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, and the Canon. In Ret, however, Chaucer…
Calabrese, Michael A.
Chaucer Review 27 (1993): 277-92.
The fourteenth-century "Antiovidianus," a satire on Ovidian art, provides a convenient way to view Chaucer's CYPT. The works share chemical, theological, and scatological imagery,illuminating Chaucer's constant exploration of the "tension between…
Vance, Eugene.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
That "the major thread of coherence in medieval culture was its sustained reflection...upon language as a semiotic system--more broadly, upon the nature, the functions and the limitations of the verbal sign as a mediator of human understanding" is…
Vance, Eugene.
New Literary History 10 (1978): 293-337.
The Middle Ages had developed a sophisticated semiotic theory. The legend of Troy permitted poets to explore language as the living expression of the social order. The principal sphere of action of TC is words, not swordblows or even kisses.
Jordan, Robert (M.)
Chaucer Yearbook 1 (1992): 135-55.
Contrasts TC and ManT as examples of metafiction, showing that in each the narrative persona is not a character in any traditional sense but a voicing of the author's concerns with language and fiction. ManT overtly declares the instability of…
Explores how some poststructuralist contributions to the theory of narrative enable a feminist rereading of two of the tales and suggests that Chaucer presents a bleak view of male-female relations.
Pizzorno, Patrizia Grimaldi.
Patrizia Grimaldi Pizzorno. Metaphor at Play: Chaucer's Poetics of Exemplarity (Alessandria: Edizioni dell'Orso, 1997), pp. 31-51.
Argues that exempla should be regarded as essentially metaphorical rather than didactic, and reads NPT as an exemplary tale that parodies the uses of exempla in the other tales of fragment 7, especially MkT.
Collection of essays on classical Persian literature. Includes an article by F. D. Lewis, "One Chaste Muslim Maiden and a Persian in a Pear Tree: Analogues of Boccaccio and Chaucer in Four Earlier Arabic and Persian Tales" that links linking Arabic…
Stadnik, Katarzyna.
Merja Stenroos, Martti Mäkinen, Kjetil Vikhamar Thengs, and Oliver Traxel, eds. Current Explorations in Middle English: Selected Papers from the 10th International Conference on Middle English (ICOME), University of Stavanger, Norway, 2017 (New York: Peter Lang, 2019), pp. 249-64.
Adopts a "grounded approach to cognition" that combines awareness of embodiment, physical environment, and sociocultural situatedness. Discusses "selected cognitive-cultural aspects of diagrammatic iconicity" that structure ParsT and constitute a…
Four essays by Pizzorno on Chaucer's epistemological uses of metaphor, exempla, and allegory, with an appendix (pp. 111-31) on figurative thinking in classical and medieval tradition and in modern theory. Chapter one (pp. 5-29) was previously…
Trim, Richard.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Describes the historical evolution of figurative language, especially metaphors, identifying patterns of development. Metaphors depend on images in the past; new metaphors are created through linkage to core concepts or "underlying conceptual…
Woods, William F.
Jean E. Jost, ed. Chaucer's Humor: Critical Essays (New York and London: Garland, 1994), pp. 207-28.
The conversion of all to "mercantile exchange" underlies a comic displacement of roles in ShT. The merchant and the monk switch roles, and the wife paradoxically gains a sense of self-worth, a comic transformation of her economic and sexual…
Pizzorno, Patrizia Grimaldi.
Patrizia Grimaldi Pizzorno. Metaphor at Play: Chaucer's Poetics of Exemplarity (Alessandria: Edizioni dell'Orso, 1997), pp. 79-109.
In BD, Chaucer combines a series of sustained unconventional allusions to the Narcissus exemplum from the "Roman de la Rose" with the narrative of Ceyx and Alcyone from Ovid's "Metamorphoses" to produce a "moral lesson against suicide" with a…
Wawrzyniak, Agnieszka.
Michael Bilynsky, ed. Studies in Middle English: Words, Forms, Senses and Texts (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 311-28.
Analyzes the metaphors, metonymies, and "metaphors based on metonymies" used in descriptions of love and of heart in CT, exploring the cultural dependence and/or universality of the figures, particularly differences between medieval and modern usage
In The General Prologue, Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women Prologue, The Friar's Tale, and The Summoner's Tale, Chaucer probes the indeterminacy of language and his own precarious use of words as means to truth. Discusses Diomede's use…
Hordis, Sandra M.
Kathleen A. Bishop, ed. Standing in the Shadow of the Master? Chaucerian Influences and Interpretations (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), pp. 46-64.
Hordis argues that Henryson's poem aggressively explores Chaucer's authorial authority. The text was produced in a time of emergent efforts by the Scots to construct a national identity, and it questions English literary influence.
