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…
Robbie, May Grant
California English Journal 3.1 (1967): 47-54.
Argues that Pandarus is "honorable and well-intentioned in each of his three roles" in TC: traditional friend to Troilus, courtly friend to Troilus, and protective and loving kinsman to Criseyde. Chaucer's efforts to "knit together" these sometimes…
Argues that Chaucer had direct knowledge of Vendôme's text and suggests a possible manuscript source of it: Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Pluteus 33.31.
Lawler, Traugott.
Simon Horobin and Aditi Nafde, eds. Pursuing Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts: Essays in Honour of Ralph Hanna (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), pp. 225-39.
Claims that line 11 is not parenthetical and that "so" is an adverb of degree, in "They sleep all night with their eyes open, nature pricks them so in their hearts." In line 176, "the space" means "in the meantime," and not the object of "held." As…
Vaughan Williams, Ralph.
Franklin Lakes, N. J.: Desto Records, 1970.
Side one includes a recording of Chaucer's MercB, set to music by Vaughn Williams, and sung by Lois Winter (soprano), accompanied by Marvin Morgenstern (violin), Hiroko Yajima Rhodes (violin), and John Goberman (cello). An inner sheet includes the…
Black, Merrill.
Diane P. Freedman and Olivia Frey, eds. Autobiographical Writing Across the Disciplines: A Reader (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2003), pp.85-95.
An autobiographical reading of WBPT by a woman who was for a time an abused wife. Black records three different responses to Chaucer's materials at three different stages in her life, focusing on the Wife's responses to abuse by her husbands.
Bowers, John M.
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2004): 279-307.
Three variants of KnT--Sir John Clanvowe's reading of the story of Palamon and Arcite, Chaucer's KnT, and "The Kingis Quair" of James I--provide insight into the shifting ideologies of chivalric performance and the establishment of Chaucer as a…
Similarities to Ovid's young Medea give Criseyde's character innocence; to Helen, guile, and reluctance to decide; while references to Oenone prefigure treachery in the connection to Paris' betrayal and the war. Ovidian references undercut the…
Pratt, Robert A.
Speculum 47 (1972): 422-44, 646-68.
Argues that several French works are clear sources of NPT: Chaucer's poem is based on Marie de France's fable "Del Cok e del Guple," but also has significant parallels with Pierre de St. Cloud's Branch II of the "Roman de Renart" and the anonymous…
Sargent, Michael G.
Wilfried Haslauer, ed. A Salzburg Miscellany: Emglish and American Studies 1964-1984. 2 vols. (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1984): 2:131-80.
The third of the three "notes" is entitled "III. Religious Form, Amorous Matter: Chaucer's 'Legend of Good Women' and Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'" (pp. 157-80); it documents a number of similarities of form, theme, and occasion between the two works…
Manzalaoui, M. A.
Note and Queries 207 (1962): 85-86.
Corrects F. N. Robinson's claim that F. C. Riedel identified the man of great authority (HF 2158) as John of Gaunt; conjectures that the man may be a "Chaucerian counterpart" to Musaeus in Virgil's "Aeneid"; and observes parallels between HF 1520ff.…
Cline, Ruth H.
Huntington Library Quarterly 26 (1963): 131-45.
Clarifies references to St. Neot, St. Frideswide, and St. Thomas in MilT; provides historical and topographical information about Oseney Abbey and Oxford as setting for the tale; and explores Absolon's habit of not wearing a tonsure, despite the…
Brogan, Terry Vance F.
Dissertation Abstracts International 43 (1983): 3917A.
Models for English prosody have been seen as Latinate, Romance, and Germanic, but eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reevaluations of Old English Verse, popular ballads,and Chaucer's poetry led to the "standard theory" of accent and foot.
Peyton, Henry H.,III.
Interpretations 8 (1976): 47-53.
Hector, Antigone, and Deiphebus are all instrumental to the development of the poem, particularly to Troilus' initial elevation on the wheel of Fortune. Though their personal integrity remains unblemished, each is manipulated by Fortune into using…
Williams, Michael E.
Chaucer Review 20 (1985): 144-57.
The three metaphors are the machine, the organism, and opposite poles of attraction. Applied to WBT, each reveals a truth about the narrative--the third of them resulting in a challenge to our assumptions and a reminder that "our 'truth' about a…
Maresca, Thomas E.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979.
Chaucer explicitly identifies TC as an epic. Like most epics,it uses the structural and thematic device of the "descensus." It also contains many reminders of and allusions to other epics, but also frees him from the confines of Christian allegory…
Stanisoara, Codruta Mirela.
Philologia: Naučno-stručni časopis za jezik, književnost i kulturu/Academic Journal for Language, Literature and Culture 18 (2020): 97-107.
Advocates an "anthropological" approach to reading Chaucer's works, especially CT, in which the reader observes the writer's roles as not only poet, narrator, and social historian, but also an anthropologist who crosses borders and invites us to…
Wood, Chauncey.
Juliette Dor, ed. A Wyf Ther Was: Essays in Honour of Paule Mertens-Fonck (Liege: University of Liege, 1992), pp. 282-90.
The Wife of Bath's preference for experience, marriage, and governance contrasts with the displays of innocence, chastity, and submissiveness by the Prioress and Second Nun. The triumphs of the Wife and of the "lusty bacheler" are losses, while "the…
