Browse Items (16048 total)

Assesses literary references and allusions to alchemy as an aspect of the transition from the medieval to the modern age, focusing on works by Chaucer, Bacon, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Milton, and Samuel Butler, but also considering a…

Studies the poem "Chaucer" by Benjamin Brawly, an early twentieth-century African-American poet.

A collection of essays highlighting "dark," unsettling, and culturally unsavory elements across the Chaucer canon. For individual pieces, search for Dark Chaucer under Alternative Title.

An anthology of translations from Greek and Roman by English writers, including a section on Chaucer (pp. 32-33) with a brief (and erroneous) biography and a selection from Chaucer's Dido legend (LGW 1180-1209), from Virgil's "Aeneid" 4.129-50,…

Studies the reception of Dante in England, 1370–1450, focusing on ecclesiastical concerns about the "Divine Comedy" (DC) and literary responses to the poem and its worldview. Includes assessment of possible routes for Chaucer's initial access to DC…

Assesses the general or "public" familiarity with Dante and his works in British culture, acknowledging his impact on poets such as Chaucer, Milton, and T. S. Eliot, but exploring instead a more pervasive presence. Includes references to Chaucer's…

Modern literary theory is concerned with the problem of "how language 'refers' in the critical text that has lost faith in the communion between language and reality." Shoaf observes this faith, which was stronger in the Middle Ages, at work in the…

The eagle in HF, pt. 2, with its immediate source in Dante's "Purgatorio," also parallels a passage in the "De vulgari eloquentia" (2.4) that cautions poets not to follow the "astripetam aquilam" ("star-seeking eagle"). The eagle is a parody of the…

Unlike Dante, who recognizes his poetic "fathers" in the Divine Comedy and sees himself as surpassing them, Chaucer in TC adopts the stance of the translator of an ancient text but questions the value of its tradition.

"Courtly love" is a critics' term that was never used by medieval poets. To understand Chaucer's treatment of love, we must turn not to the principles of courtly love but to medieval philosophy and the treatment of love by poets such as Dante.

The last eighteen stanzas are doomed attempts to forge a fixed moral for the tale--the reader must do it himself. The "contemptus mundi" theme is tried unsuccessfully to unify it. The last nine stanzas are compared to "Paradiso's" cantos 13 and 14…

After an introduction, "The Discourse of Man 'By Nature a Political Animal,'" follow three parts: "Dante's 'Commedia' and the Promise of Reference," dealing with Narcissus--damned ("Inferno" 30), purged ("Purgatorio" 30), and redeemed ("Paradiso"…

Entry into heaven and the approach to God properly conclude a pilgrimage, as represented by Dante and Alain de Lille. In ManPT, Chaucer inverts the topos to show logic and language vitiated (not transcended) as the Cook becomes literally drunk (not…

The Loathly Lady's lecture on "gentilesse" in WBT goes beyond sexual sovereignty to encompass dominium, a concept central to Wyclif's challenge to authority. Without naming his source, Chaucer channels orthodox, Boethian ideas about "gentilesse"…

Details the historical record of Chaucer's Italian connections and surveys the influence of Dante on English poetry from Chaucer to the twentieth century. Likens Dante's influence on English to a love story.

An anthology of selections from Dante's works adapted or translated into English, including several examples from Chaucer's works (WBT, MkT, SNT, HF, and TC). Focusing on the Commedia and arranged chronologically, the selections range from Chaucer to…

Surveys engagement with Dante by writers in English, from Chaucer to Seamus Heaney. Discusses Dantean influence on the Hugelyn section of MkT, and on other portions of CT, HF,Lady, and TC.

The first two in a series of essays Dédéyan published on Dante in England in Les Lettres Romanes, volumes 12-15 (1958-1961). The first surveys references, allusions, and uses of Dante in TC, PF, and HF. The second continues the discussion of HF,…

Identifies ways Dante influenced the invocations in TC, as well as TC's depictions of love and hell. Also explores the words that Chaucer invented to rhyme with "Troie" and with "Criseyde."

An analysis of the end of TC that reads Troilus's ascent (itself inherently meaningless) as a stage in the progress of the narrator's recognition of the relations between Christian poetry and classical tradition.

Maps out Dante's depiction of the infernal city and traces the "infernal mode of representation of urban experience," by suggesting that Dante describes the city
with an "urban variation on the vertical cosmos of the Last Judgment." Documents the…

Argues "that far from being occasional, accidental, or haphazard, Boccaccio's engagement with Dante structures the authorial interventions in the frame of the "'Decameron/." Traces Boccaccio's use of Dante to demonstrate how Chaucer uses Boccaccio in…

Rejecting unity theories and reductive allegorization, Tambling draws on "medieval theories of reading and understanding a text" and compares them with Derridean critical theories and hermeneutics (with several references to Chaucer).

Jeffrey explores Chaucer's allusions to the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), arguing that they reflect Chaucer's distrust of glossing and that the Sermon underpins theological themes of CT most evident in Mel and ParsT: peacemaking and obedience.

Published in 1767-69, Schiebeler's thirty-six-page adaptation of John Campbell's article in Biographia Britannia is the earliest known German essay on Chaucer, a product of Enlightenment thought.