Cooper, Lisa.
In Holly A. Crocker and D. Vance Smith, eds. Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debates (New York; Routledge, 2014), pp.183-91.
Explores late-medieval literary "intermingling of craft, memory, and loss" in representations of known or knowable facts or truth, arguing that in Adam, HF, KnT, and BD Chaucer, unlike some of his contemporaries, is generally "skeptical" about the…
Krummel, Miriamne Ara.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Provides postcolonial reading of history of Jewish communities and anti-Semitic discourses in medieval England. Chapter 5, "Text and Context: Tracing Chaucer's moments of Jewishness," discusses Jews in CT, focusing on Th, and PrT.
Tripp, Raymond P., Jr.
Michio Kawai, ed. Language and Style in English Literature: Essays in Honour of Michio Masui. The English Association of Hiroshima (Tokyo: Eihosha, 1991), pp. 141-58.
Argues that the difference between the mechanical powers of humans and the essential power of God is central to the literary discussion of craft. Concern with craft as natural religion and with faith as the canonical craft provides a strong thread…
Fields, Peter John.
Lewistown, N.Y. : Edwin Mellen Press, 2001.
Chaucer's interest in craft goes far beyond mere technical process. In CT, the word and its derivations emblematize human efforts to control the world through personal expertise and learned tradition. Fields challenges notions of Chaucer's pluralism,…
Finger, Roland.
Exit 9: The Rutgers Journal of Comparative Literature 5 (2003): 65-74.
Assesses the sexual relations between the Wife of Bath and her husbands in WBP as a dynamic between her sadism and their masochism. Through her sadism the Wife "avenges herself on the medieval patriarchal subordination of women."
Bennett, Alastair.
Yearbook of Langland Studies 28 (2014): 29-64.
Shows that the "blered" eye image in CYT (7.730) and "Piers Plowman" indicates covetousness, associated with "unkynde" or unnatural separation from community and knowledge.
Lochrie, Karma.
Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
Explores the implications of secrecy represented in several topics and depicted in medieval texts: confession in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, gossip in WBPT and HF, occulted science in Pseudo-Aristotle's Secret of Secrets and Pseudo-Albert's The…
Sell, Jonathan P. A.
Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 48 (2004): 193-204.
Sell identifies "verbal parallels" and "ontological similarities" between Criseyde and Chaucer's version of Boethius's Fortune. Association with Fortune undermines "sentimental views of Criseyde" that Chaucer the narrator may share though Chaucer…
Brand, Ralph.
Historical Research: The Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 60 (1987): 147-65.
The Inns of Court did not serve as places of legal instruction before the fifteenth century. Evidence from legal manuscripts suggests that such instruction was handled not only through attendance at court but also by means of lectures, annotated…
Windeatt, Barry.
Corinne Saunders, ed. A Concise Companion to Chaucer (Malden, Mass.; Oxford; and Victoria: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 90-109.
Windeatt examines how the court and elements of courtly writing are represented and function in BD, HF, PF, and LGWP, with some attention to SqT. Comments on Machaut as Chaucer's model and how the dream vision gives Chaucer the liberty to examine…
Burnley, David.
Poetica: An International Journal of Linguistic Literary Studies 24 (1986): 16-38.
Discusses the sociomoral and aesthetic qualities that constitute courtly speech, including social attitude, voice quality, brevity, plainness of speech, and sensitivity and understanding. Based on passages spoken "curteisly" in Chaucer, Burnley's…
Bjork, Lennart A.
Mats Ryden and Lennart A. Bjork, eds. Studies in English Philology, Linguistics, and Literature Presented to Alarik Rynell 7 March 1978. Stockholm Studies in English, no. 46 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1978), pp. 1-20.
The courtly love interpretations of TC are not plausible; TC offers a burlesque of courtly love. In support of the exegetical promotion of "caritas," serious flaws in Troilus's character are revealed in animal imagery.
Although courtly love is central to TC, it is parodied or viewed as dangerous in CT. Evidently Chaucer no longer found it a viable way of revealing the human heart.
Megna, Paul.
In Russell Sbriglia, ed. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Žižek (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 267-89.
Uses Slavoj Žižek's analysis of privilege and courtly love to assess the major characters of TC: the "servile aggression" of the narrator; Pandarus's "patriarchal privilege"; Crisyede's "ethically heroic" decisions about loving her husband,…
Chism, Christine.
In Robert DeMaria Jr., Heesok Chang, and Samantha Zacher, eds. A Companion to British Literature. Vol. I, Medieval Literature 700–1450 (Chichester: Wiley, 2014), pp. 130-45.
Surveys the meanings, origins, and theories of courtly love, asking how it "works" in medieval texts, what light it can "cast upon medieval cultural practices, and why it comes to matter." Includes discussion of secrecy in TC, a text that animates…
Jeffrey, David Lyle.
Christianity and Literature 59 (2010): 515-30.
Chrétien's "Erec and Enide" does not celebrate courtly love but provides a "model for rightly ordered desire." Chaucer highlights the "social and spiritual value" of marriage in CT, PF, TC, and various lyrics. Henry VIII's own theatrics, however,…
Busby, Keith, and Erik Kooper, eds.
Amsterdam : John Benjamins, 1990.
Forty-five selected papers on courtly literature. For an essay that pertains to Chaucer, search for Courtly Literature: Culture and Context under Alternative Title.
Lerer, Seth.
Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Assesses various aspects of Tudor political and literary culture (e.g., privacy and voyeurism, theatricality, letter-writing and -reading), discussing Pandarus and the Renaissance reception of TC as tropes for understanding such concerns. Tudor…
In BD, Chaucer, working in a tradition of courtly style, composes a poem of consolation. Within a beautiful poem of human sympathy, Chaucer effects a critique of courtly language and exposes the inability of such language to express profound…
Canitz, A. E. Christa.
A. E. Christa Canitz and Gernot R. Wieland, eds. From Arabye to Engelond: Medieval Studies in Honour of Mahmoud Manzalaoui on His 75th Birthday (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1999), pp. 131-53.
Argues that LGW critiques the rigidity of highly conventionalized literary genres for failing to represent human experience adequately. Chaucer's conflation of hagiography, courtly romance, and epic myth reveals the "flaws" in each genre, especially…
Burnley, David.
London and New York: Longman, 1998.
Historical survey of the language and actions of courtly behavior as evident in Anglo-Norman and Middle English writings, with some corroboration from Latin. Traces the emergence of aristocratic courtliness in the eleventh century through to its…
Examines how the careers of several courtiers-diplomats-poets can help us reconstruct the "nature of literary transmission" from Italy to France to England. Discusses Philippe de Mézières, Honorat Bovet, Jean Muret and Giovanni Moccia, and…
Brewer, D. S.
John Lawlor, ed. Patterns of Love and Courtesy: Essays in Memory of C. S. Lewis (London: Edward Arnold, 1966), pp. 54-85.
Examines the meaning and significance of "courtesy" in the works of the "Gawain"-poet, and includes comments on characterization (as a matter of role rather than personality) in Chaucer's works, along with an excursus on "hende" that focuses on…
