Highlights the utility of proverbs and offers them as a solution to the problem of knowledge in SqT. Emphasizes that proverbs provide new insights for late medieval textual cultures as a microgenre that transcends social and economic boundaries in…
An introduction to the study of proverbs (paremiology), covering definition and classification, several examples over time, scholarly approaches, and analyses of the contexts in which proverbs appear (e.g., song, advertising, cartoons, and…
Taylor, Karla.
Stephen A. Barney, ed. Chaucer's Troilus: Essays in Criticism (Hamden, Conn.: Shoestring Press, 1980), pp. 277-96.
In conflating love and poetics in TC, Chaucer uses proverbs both to validate truth and to express the limitations of traditional language. The attempt to secure stability through this language and the failure of the attempt are part of Chaucer's…
Cannon, Christopher.
Textual Practice 24 (2010): 407-34.
Explores medieval definitions and aesthetic responses to proverbs by examining "The Proverbs of Alfred" and Mel, exploring how each depends upon "acts of recognition that are produced by the repetition of well-worn truths." Both works are examples of…
Illustrates Chaucer's "comic misapplication" of "monitory elements" as a device of characterization in CT, discussing how the misapplied expressions of traditional wisdom can be used cleverly (as with Nicholas in MilT), foolishly (John in MilT and…
Whiting, Bartlett Jere, with the collaboration of Helen Wescott Whiting
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1968.
Lists proverbs, proverbial phrases, and sententia from early English writings, arranged alphabetically by topic, with quotations and citations of multiple occurrences in chronological order and indexes of important words and proper nouns. Chaucer is…
Pelen, Marc M.
Papers on Language and Literature 30 (1994): 132-56.
The narratives of Trevet and Gower turn the story of Constance into a secular moral fable. Similarly, "the Man of Law exposes himself to Chaucer's irony ...: it is this transcendent freedom from the moral content of the legend that the Man of Law…
Park, Youngwon.
Medieval English Studies 06 (1998): 163-95.
KnT reveals a providential pattern that is both Boethian and Pauline--"all things work together for the good." The gods of the Tale are pagan, but the outcome of the story shows Christian Providence.
Landman, James [H.]
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998): 1-39.
In MLT, the torment of Constance is explicitly linked with the judicial torture of Alla's messenger. A notion of a "single, certain truth" underlies the concern with torture in the Tale, also reflected in the attitude toward fiction expressed in MLP…
Brewer, Derek.
Danielle Buschinger and Arlette Sancery, eds. Mélanges de langue, littérature et civilisation offerts à André Crépin à l'occasion de son quatre-vingtième anniversaire (Amiens: Presses du Centre d'Études Médiévales, Université de Picardie-Jules Verne, 2008), pp. 59-62.
Considers friendly and hostile relationships, commenting on GP and TC.
The vivid association of the dramatic action of TC with its physical settings reflects a medieval rhetorical technique whereby architectural images ("loci") were employed as aids to organization and memory. The perception of the significance of…
Pakkala-Weckström, Mari.
Chaucer Review 35: 399-411, 2001.
The debate between Prudence and Melibee is the struggle for "maistrie" between husband and wife. Learned and sophisticated, Prudence exhibits "feminine powers of persuasion." She changes from being "humble and respectful" to being "impatient,"…
Mel resembles several other late-fourteenth-century retellings of this story as a proper model for wifely imitation. In using the form of the scholastic arts lecture, however, Prudence co-opts a masculine discursive style and its authoritative…
De Looze, Laurence.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997.
Defines a genre that "plays with questions of truth, authority, and the relationship between the life 'in' a book and life 'outside' a book," a genre that both asserts autobiographical verity and calls "into question the possibility that the…
Zhang, Lian.
American Notes and Queries 32, no. 2 (2019): 78–79.
Reports that two Taiwanese "translations" of CT (by fabricated translators) were actually reprints/adaptations of Fang Zhong's translation from mainland China.
Harwood, Britton J.
English Literary History 68: 1-27, 2001.
Examines the "unconscious content" of RvT through a number of Chaucer's own "identifications": with Sir Edmund de la Pole, owner of the mill at Trumpington and brother of Sir Roger de la Pole; with Symkyn and the exorbitance of his social…
Ebi, Hisato.
Hisao Turu, ed. Reading Chaucer's Book of the Duchess. Medieval English Literature Symposium Series, no. 5 (Tokyo: Gaku Shobo Press, 1991), pp. 171-200 (in Japanese).
Allegorical elements of BD are closely connected with the theory of melancholy in the late-medieval period. Emphasizes parallelism between mental diseases (melancholy) and the creative mind.
Matthews, David.
Gordon McMullan and David Matthews, eds. Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 74-88.
Matthews focuses on Thomas Speght's 1598 and 1602 editions of Chaucer and their role in re-imagining Chaucer as an Early Modern rather than a medieval author. The prefatory poem, "The Reader to Geffrey Chaucer," suggests that early editions had…
Robertson, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose, eds. Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 281-310.
Examines "the role rape plays in the formation of Criseyde's character," contrasting Criseyde with Helen of Troy and Lucretia. Criseyde is a "choosing subject," and the language of rape helps to define the ambiguities of choice she faces.
To understand Chaucer as a political court poet and a philosophical poet, we must read his prose as well as his poetry. Wong considers variations between Bo and its Boethian source, Mel as a model for how Chaucer treats his sources, Astr as a source…
Compares relations between cosmology and psychology in medieval and modern understandings of poetry, emphasizing the concentric and expanding perspectives prompted by Middle English imagery and world views, exemplified in several lyrics. Includes…
Because violated virginity must be read as a violation of social cohesion, the so-called digressions on guardianship in PhyT are central to the theme of guarding the public good.
