Browse Items (16035 total)

Although PF clearly treats love and courtship, its most central or motivating problems is the relationship between choice and will or understanding. Chaucer demonstrates a more thoroughly informed engagement with contemporary philosophy than critics…

Explores American fascination with Dante as a way to get "some purchase on Dante," e.g., K. Taylor's contrast of "Dante with Chaucer to erect Chaucer the 'anti-Dante'." Examines the influence of Dante on LGWP and briefly on HF. Shoaf concludes that…

Attempts a revaluation of LGW by viewing it as a stage--both a creative result and an important influence--in the tradition of female tragedy. Highlights the contribution of the new classicizing to a new presentation of women.

Examines the exemplum as a "speech act" in Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and in Chaucer's MLT, PhyT, WBT, and LGW. In WBT, "the motives of the hag in requesting marriage as recompense for her aid are central to matters of prudential action"; in LGW,…

Printed as a separate paperback volume.

Mentions HF 1321-22 as an early example of the role of heralds in the fifteenth century as "court publicists."

Analyzes HF as an antivision, a highly comic parody of "solemn medieval attempts to describe the otherworld." Rather than writing about human lives earthly or otherworldly, Chaucer restricts his theme to "the nature and destiny of human narratives,"…

Editions of HF, in emending the "laugh" of line 2018 to "languisshe," confuse rather than clarify the meaning of the Eagle's advice.

Familiar with the "visual and verbal labyrinth traditions" and their metaphorical significances, Chaucer incorporates in HF a controlling labyrinthine uncertainty, chaos, and obscurity in its "disoriented turnings back and forth, its paradoxical…

Twelfth-century lyric employs a generalized, nonhistoric "I"; thirteenth-century composition represses this voice in favor of a specific and individualized narrator. BD, though it seems to endorse the latter, actually returns to the songlike,…

Ryan discusses problems of unity in dream-vision poems, particularly the concepts of beginning and ending. She suggests that Joseph Frank's theory of spatial form may be applicable to analysis of the dream visions and tests this approach on BD.

Consolation can be effected in BD only by the creation of a radically "privatized" apocalyptic "moment" situated not only "outside the text itself" but also outside the historical world, a moment capable of giving mourners "imaginative space" to…

Chaucer's poetry of loss and reparation, exemplified by Anel and BD, reveals anxieties about isolation, change, and death through the defensive strategies generated by the poems both to remember and commemorate loss and to point toward a regenerative…

The interpretation in Bo of how the constellation Bootes rises and sets indicates Chaucer's reliances on commentaries; he did not have the expertise in observational astronomy he would have needed for a more accurate translation.

The text of Bo ("The Riverside Chaucer") retains inadequate punctuation marks from previous editions and leaves several passages quite difficult to understand, though the edition shows a number of lexical improvements. The article emends punctuation…

By adducing several Middle English prose texts prior to Chaucer's Astr, Hagge refutes claims that Astr represents the first piece of technical writing in English.

ParsT is a collage, drawing mainly on penitential materials, variously rendered in paraphrase, word-for-word translation,free idiomatic redaction, and adaptations that appear to derive from more than one source. Ssome sections are sermonlike,…

Penitential theology, as derived from St. Augustine and subsequent writers, holds humanity to be sinful yet possessed of reason and hence of responsibility. ParsT and Ruiz's Prologue examine this tradition with examples to reveal human nature; thus,…

A "Franciscan abridgment" of the Saint Cecilia legend, extant in two complete copies and numerous fragments, explains verbal details of SNT as well as omissions of episodes found in the "Legenda aurea" and Bosio's edition of "Passion S. Caeciliae."

Examining both ecclesiastical and societal patriarchies, SNT addresses medieval concepts of power, authority, and autonomy. It places Cecilia's spiritual vision in the context of a broader secular and sacred order.

Chaucer's tragedies, e.g. TC, are too complicated to allow easy categorization; likewise, his comedy. The first English author known to use the term, Chaucer uses "tragedy" to establish commonality between TC and MkT, both of which relate to Bo,…

Treats the concept of tragedy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, touching on TC and MkT.

Mel should be read in light of England's disrupted domestic state and especially of parliamentary dissatisfaction with Richard II in the 1380s. Thus, Prudence's advice, which emphasizes the contractual relationship between ruler and ruled but also…

Using concordances, the MED, and textual variants from the manuscripts, Gretsch clarifies ten passages in Th.

Proposing to assess "how our language of parody...acts to manipulate the literature it is intended to describe," Dane explores the relation of genre to politics. Part 4, "The Classification of Medieval Parody," contains a chapter, "The…