Browse Items (15542 total)

Considers how PhyT prompts attention to "issues of female victimization and women's agency in litigation process," exploring Chaucer's alterations of his source material in Livy and the "Roman de la Rose," and examining how his tale evokes late…

Identifies several previously unnoticed biblical allusions in SumT: "narratives of divine wrath against false prophets, gift giving in apostolic ministry, and miraculous healing, all of which enrich the tale's comic irony and sharpen the satiric…

Describes similarities between medieval and modern uses of obscenity to establish homosocial identity and assert power, using evidence from CT manuscripts to clarify the "sexually explicit status" of the late medieval verb "swyven."

Traces the unifying theme of joy after woe in KnT, "brought about both by the plot and by Boethian Destiny," focusing on Arcite's achievement of "welfare" and Palamon's "wele" after both start in sorrow. Theseus similarly replaces Egeus's saturnine…

Argues that the "ongoing negotiations between experience and authority, flesh and spirit, nature and the divine, are fluid, bidirectional, and mutually dependent" in PF. The poem depicts a cacophonous set of voices and demonstrates that the…

Argues that PF--a poem {about which voices do and do not count"--"magines the potential for translatability between species." Engages scholastic discussions about the nature of "vox," and raises questions about phonetic and semantic translation,…

Explores the bird-talk and "interspecies communication" in PF as they dramatize the potentials and limitations of allegory, translation, "biotranslation," the "writeability" of bird sounds, and the relations between human and nonhuman subjectivities.…

Identifies a pun on "cul," meaning "the rump; a buttock," and the four uses of "kultour" in MilT, connecting it with the analogous "Bèrenger au lonc cul."

Analyzes Criseyde's "speaking face" in TC, along with similar depictions of suggestive facial beauty in BD, PhyT, and Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida." Attends most closely to Criseyde's "ascaunce" look in TC 1.288-94.

A discursive bibliography of Chaucer studies for 2010, divided into four subcategories: general, CT, TC, and other works.

Explains that Pertelote's reference to "lawriol" (7.2963) should be glossed as a vomit-inducer rather than a bowel laxative.

Edits "Le Bone Florence of Rome," accompanied by a facing-page translation that maintains the twelve-line, tail-rhyme stanzas of the original, with end-of-text explanatory notes, textual notes, and several appendices. Introduction includes commentary…

Explores textual and lexical ambiguities in the scene of Arcite's mortal fall in KnT (I.2684–91), discussing "furie" (forty manuscripts read some form of fire), "pighte," and "pomel" (neither of which is lexically certain). Suggests that emending…

Explores the etymology and pronunciations of "Lithuania" in English, including an explanation of why Chaucer renders it "Lettow" in the GP description of the Knight (CT 1.54).

Dialectical analysis of "listeth" in Middle English indicates that in using the term to mean "listen" in Tho (particularly at 7.833) Chaucer alters his source and strikes for his London audience the "right jarring note" since that meaning was "no…

Close reading of lines 33-41 (and E. K.'s commentary) of the February eclogue of Spenser's "Shepheardes Calender" exemplifies the "truancy of literary resonance" and discloses resonant intertextual play among the comic variety of HF, the monovocality…

Surveys how pity functions as a lover's emotional ploy that establishes a power relationship in CT. Focuses on MerT and FranT and explores to what extent May and Dorigen create agency for themselves by participating in the exchange of suffering for…

Describes the life and achievements of Manuel Pérez y del Rio Cosa, the first translator of CT into Spanish; discusses the quality of the translation and its role in Spanish understanding of Chaucer.

Uses the competing discourses of secrecy resulting from the play of genres in TC to ask questions about the power dynamics, knowledge, and narrative in the text.

Acknowledges the association of "lucre of vileyne" (PrT 7.491) with "turpe lucrum" (filthy lucre) found in the Vulgate 1 Timothy 3.8 and quoted in the Ellemere gloss, but specifies that the phrase, a "technical legal term" of canon law, was a matter…

Explores a Middle English scrapbook from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries that includes some Chaucerian love literature, and considers the book's role in a performance of gentility, particularly on the part of its women readers.

Explores ways that Chaucer plays with the "work of makyng" in Adam and Pr–ThL. Reinforces that Chaucer's "middleness," or ability to remain in the "process of making," is revealed in these rhyme royal works.

Proposes that Chaucer's commitment to "technical experiment" in fixed-form verse is marked by skepticism and ambivalence in comparison to classical and contemporary European models. Several of Chaucer's poems--BD, LGW, PF, and TC--reveal a concern…

Reads the House of Rumor in HF as "an echo object through which we can recover Chaucer's complex and dynamic view of human cognition." Reads the basket-like structure as Chaucer's "uncanny" anticipation of "neuroplasticity," the "capability of the…

Suggests that the "gate-metaphor" of PardT 6.729 derives from a Spanish proverb fused with Maximianus's "Elegy" I.