Summarizes debates about the relative importance of logical explanation (authority) and practical experience in medieval medical theory, an opposition between doctors and surgeons. Presented as both doctor and surgeon, Chaucer's Physician embodies…
Positioned midway between aristocracy and the lower orders of society, the Franklin appropriately tells a story that emphasizes the necessity and correctness of the social order as he (and Chaucer) would have understood it. Thus, the…
Chaucer attempts to represent simultaneously three levels of reality in his three "confessional" characters (the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, and the Canon's Yeoman): actual life, idealized fiction, and higher truth.
Setting out to establish what medieval readers thought about romances and what they labeled romances, Furrow concentrates on a wide range of romances from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. Her discussion of romance and truth includes analysis…
Pedrosa, Jose.
Revista de Poetica Medieval 2 (1998): 195-223.
Explores analogues to PardT, including sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish versions. Focuses on a modern Andalusian legend from Priego de Cordoba.
Larson, Wendy Rene.
Dissertation Abstracts International 57 (1996): 206A.
Analysis based on Michel Foucault and Judith Butler shows that, in a wide variety of medieval texts including CT, the speakers' situations affect their social position and their ability to refashion genres.
Robertson, Kellie.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt, 2012), pp. 91-121.
Distinguishes between modern views of rocks as mere objects and medieval understanding of their "virtues," agency, and exemplary value, raising questions about objects in nature and in art. Assesses the tale of the cock and the rock in Robert…
Baker, Donald C.
University of Mississippi Studies in English 3 (1962): 35-41.
Explores how exempla and citations of authority--both largely via allusive names--are used by the Friar and the Summoner in order to compete with the Wife of Bath and criticize each other.
Wilson, William S.
English Language Notes 1.4 (1964): 244-48.
Reads Chaucer's summary of Virgil's "Aeneid" in Book 1 of HF as comic—a parody of several practices of "exegetical grammar," including translation, "dictiones ethicae" (soliloquies), paraphrase, and moral interpretation. The purpose of the parody…
Identifies "structural similarities" among BD, PF, and HF, arguing that each poem is an "elaborate narrative orchestrating a moral theme from some work of antiquity . . . foreshadowed in [its] preamble." Each is reminiscent of Macrobius's "enigmatic…
Petrina, Alessandra.
Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead, eds. Lost in Translation? (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009), pp. 121-31.
Explores the tension between the Chaucerian legacy of French influence and the Lancastrian concern with English in the works of John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve. Opens with an explication of details of Eustache Deschamps' praise of Chaucer as "grand…
Morrison, Susan Signe.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Morrison constructs a cultural poetics of excrement to suggest that Chaucer's treatment of fecal matter, in both its literal and figurative senses, illustrates the ways that the Middle Ages viewed excrement. This cultural poetics enables the modern…
Taavitsainen, Irma.
Jacek Fisiak, ed. Studies in Middle English Linguistics (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997), pp. 573-607.
Statistical analysis of Middle English exclamations in several literary modes and genres. Exclamations are a marker of fiction, and interjections are "particularly frequent" in Chaucer's works.
Adams, Jenny.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 26 (2004): 267-97.
Adams argues that the "discourse of gaming" underlies "Beryn" and its Prologue (a.k.a. "The Canterbury Interlude"), which offer "centralized regulation as a solution to the inequalities inherent in exchange and commerce."
D'Arcens, Louise, and Chris Jones.
Representations 121.1 (2013): 85-106.
Refers to P.R. Stephenson's deployment of Chaucer as a descriptor for early twentieth-century Australian poetry, noting his assertion of "Chaucerian" as shorthand for "a golden age of national self-confidence in which cosmopolitan sophistication…
Cigman, Gloria.
Leo Carruthers and Adrian Papahagi, eds. Jeunesse et vieillesse: Images médiévales de l'age en littérature anglaise (Paris: Harmatten, 2005), pp. 93-101.
Imaginative re-creation of the Wife of Bath's life and times from childhood onward, expanding on hints in WBP.
Duke, Elizabeth Anne Foster.
DAI 29.11 (1969): 3971A.
Examines "the relationships existing among the printed editions" of CT from Caxton through Tyrwhitt, based on comparisons of their versions of GP and considering their uses of prior texts, emendation policies, and editorial innovations.
DeVries, David N.
Nancy M. Reale and Ruth E. Sternglantz, eds. Satura: Studies in Medieval Literature in Honour of Robert R. Raymo (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2001), 248-62.
Assesses the intertextual relationship of Lydgate's "A Balade in Commendation of Our Lady" with TC and with Alan de Lille's "Anticlaudianus," exploring how aureate diction contributes to the poem's "connection between poetry and redemption in…
Lockhart, Jessica Jane.
Dissertation Abstracts International A79.07 (2017): n.p.
Examines the use of riddling and the structure of riddles as a means of representing "the wondrous in the everyday." Specifically considers Chaucer's use of this in BD and PF. Additionally suggests that the "Secretum philosophorum" is an intertext in…
Kennedy, Kathleen E.
In The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. https://opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu, 2017. Relocated 2025 at https://opencanterburytales.lsusites.org/
Introduces the social practices in Chaucer's age; designed for classroom use. Arranged by the cycle of the day, with commentary on food, clothing, shelter, marriage, childhood, days of the week, festivals, and more, with hypertext links (some broken)…
Houwen, Luuk.
Andrew James Johnston, Ferdinand von Mengden, and Stefan Thim, eds. Language and Text: Current Perspectives on English and Germanic Historical Linguistics and Philology (Heidelberg: Winter, 2006), pp. 97-111.
Exemplifies text/image relationships by examining a number of misericords depicting scenes from the beast fable tradition of Reynard and other sly foxes. Considers the role of NPT in the development of this visual tradition.
Comic novel cast as the first-person memoir of British academic who identifies with Shakespeare's Hamlet (p. 7) and alludes to Chaucer at least once, citing his own feelings as being similar to those of the "ghost of Troilus at the end of Chaucer's…
Fyler's assertion that Chaucer's ambiguous use of generic and gendered "man" is both self-conscious and consciously feminist assumes a false stability of meaning for the generic masculine and ignores the critical construction of authorial…
The mother-daughter bond appearing in medieval English poetry and hagiography is analyzed from a modern sociopsychological point of view, especially the surrogate mother-daughter, in which hags and crones advise young women. Deals briefly with WBT,…
