Rowland, Beryl.
English Language Notes 6 (1968): 84-87.
Explores the implications of the name "Malle" that is given to the widow's sheep in NPT 7.2831: the sheep is a ewe and suggests the widow's "simplicity, her poverty, and one of the ways in which" she is a dairy woman.
Aligns details of GP 1.361-78 with historical evidence to argue that the five tradesmen or "Burgesses" described by Chaucer belonged to a "craft fraternity [rather than a parish fraternity] and that the Drapers' Fraternity (or Brotherhood of St. Mary…
Taylor, Jamie K.
Studies in the Age of 39 (2017): 249-74.
Explores the "ideological work" of children in Chaucer's literature, commenting on Sophie in Mel, Virginia in PhyT, Maurice in MLT, and Lewis in Astr. Treats the latter as a metonym for vernacular readers and for the potential of technological…
Reads FrT as "one of Chaucer's more carefully worked and closely unified poems, and, . . . one of his most dramatic." Focuses on the poem's "Faustian situation," its '"unusual withholding of the denouement," and "its moral implication," exploring…
Syme, Alison.
Nancy Rose Marshall, ed. Victorian Science and Imagery: Representation in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), pp. 56-78.
Focuses on Edward Burne-Jones's illustration of HF in the Kelmscott Chaucer (1896) to show "that Burne-Jones was attuned to the scientific discourse of his time," arguing that the book "provided the context and impetus to visualize, in distilled…
Lochrie, Karma.
Karma Lochrie and Usha Vishnuvajjala, eds. Women’s Friendship in Medieval Literature (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022), pp. 177-96.
Identifies three ways to illuminate female friendship in CT, disclosing "identity of feeling" among women (Custance, the Sultaness, and Hermengild in MLT), "enclaves . . . afforded by misogynistic discourses" (the Wife, her gossip, and female…
Boldrini, Lucia.
Gerald Gillespie and Haun Saussey, eds. Intersections, Interferences, Interdisciplines: Literature with Other Arts (Brussels: P. I. E. Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 35–46.
Describes the "Night Lesson" chapter of James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" and argues that it shares a number of features with Astr.
Haresnape, Geoffrey.
English Academy Review 32.2 (2015): 152-59.
Translates ABC into modern English verse, retaining Chaucer's original meter, stanza form, and rhyme scheme. Includes brief introductory description of the poem and a biographical eulogy for Professor John van der Westhuizen, to whom the translation…
Steadman, John M.
Notes and Queries 207 (1962): 6.
Suggests that the Miller's tuft of hairs in GP 1.555 may associate him with a folklore tradition about honesty and might be read "he was honest, as millers go."
Argues that the right use of anger in proper, hierarchical social relationships in SumT affirms aristocratic authority while undermining the pretenses of Friar John and Jankyn the clerk.
Considers why the tale of the Mongol Empire is allocated to the young Squire. Points out the Squire's idealistic representation of the royal family of the Empire and discusses Chaucer's possible attitude toward SqT, taking fourteenth-century…
Ruszkiewicz, Dominika.
Barbara Marczuk and Iwona Piechnik, eds. Discours religieux: Langages, textes, traductions (Kraków: Biblioteka Jagiellonska, 2020), pp. 305-17.
Argues that Chaucer's alterations to Boccaccio's "Filostrato" in TC, I.22–49, were influenced by liturgical "bidding prayers," and that the God-centered Boethianism of the passage works with the ending of Chaucer's poem to "frame" its recurrent…
Explores what we know about Chaucer's earliest audiences, and how his work was used and discussed in his lifetime. Considers use of manuscripts by Hoccleve and Chaucer's named addressees, Bukton, Scogan, and de la Vache. Lists contemporary references…
Strakhov, Elizaveta.
Isabel Davis and Catherine Nall, eds. Chaucer and Fame: Reputation and Reception (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), pp. 57-74.
Reviews the presence of Statius's "Thebaid" in TC, exploring in detail the juxtaposition of Statian and Ovidian material in Cassandra's explanations of Troilus's dream of the boar, explaining Chaucer's elision of Boccaccio from his poem as Chaucer's…
Stone, Charles Russell.
Review of English Studies 64, no. 266 (2013): 564-73.
Considers Chaucer's attention to the city of Troy in TC, focusing on the Palladium festival in Book 1 and Troilus's ride through the city in Book 5, arguing that the scenes reflect the influence of Virgil's "Aeneid" and associate the fall of Troy…
Examines the parallels between Cresseid and the narrator showing Cresseid's eventual transformation while the narrator fails to understand the moral point. Includes comments on Chaucer's narrator in TC.
Star, Sarah.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 115, no. 4 (2016): 442-62.
Connects the shapeless mass of flesh, which Christian baptism miraculously reforms into a baby in the Middle English romance "The King of Tars," with a bloodless mass described by Chaucer's contemporary Henry Daniel as an "elvysch cake." Claims that…
Traces the tension between reading ecocritically and figuratively, highlighting moments of grafting in MkT and Rom, and reads these moments of horticulture more literally.
Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, Melissa Mayus, and Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis.
Suzanne Conklin Akbari and James Simpson, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 494-526.
Reassesses "anti-clericalism," reframing what has been "a concept useful within very real limits" as a kind of inter-clerical polemic, as most of these examples of so-called anti-clericalism are clerically authored. Treats MkT and PardT as examples…
Schanzer, Ernest.
Notes and Queries 205 (1960): 335-36.
Argues that the Cleopatra legend in LGW is the source of details in Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra." Also argues that Chaucer derived information about Cleopatra's marriage to her brother(s) from Vincent of Beauvais' "Speculum Historiale," not…
