Browse Items (16087 total)

Medieval universities taught "perspectiva," or optics, important in literary realism. Chaucer's use of light, vision, and space parallels passages in optical texts and becomes thematic in CT, fragments G and A. Jean de Meun, Dante, and Boccaccio…

Crocker investigates how the visibility and invisibility of gender in Chaucer are linked to performativity and cultural privilege, especially for men. Discusses the figurative tradition of engendering sight as background to how Prudence in Mel is the…

Although ParsT relies heavily on Raymond de Penaforte's "Summa de poenitentia et matrimonio," Chaucer extracts one chapter from the treatise and substitutes a "tree of life" for Raymond's pilgrimage metaphor. By indicating that one can live a life of…

Argues that Chaucer favors the popular idea that Brittonic literature and history are primarily oral. By doing so, Chaucer distances his contemporary England, with its reliance on Latin textual and cultural authority, from the political reality of…

Considers three of the CT that contain 'virago' figures and focus on an encounter between East and West at the heart of the tales. Chaucer's attitude to the set of viragos is enigmatic. By discrediting the reliability of his narrators, he blurs the…

Concludes that the three female voices of Dorigen, Griselda, and the Wife of Bath ironically expose Chaucer's hierarchical idea of women.

Passages from ShT and MLT suggest that men have a right to beat their wives; furthermore, MilT and passages from Mel and WBT (in the wife's marriage to Jankin) seem to suggest masochism in female characters. MkP suggests that women are naturally…

Traces broad similarities between FrT and the Robin Hood ballads to suggest that Chaucer knew early forms of the ballads and adapted them for comic effect.

Outlines the "kinds of ambiguities in Chaucer's verbal and narrative technique" based in his commitment to epistemological "indeterminacy." Then examines MLT and its changes to its source in Nicholas Trevet to show that the "theme of the limitation…

Kanno examines instances of "mesure" and its synonyms in Chaucer's works, comparing those meanings with the virtue of moderation in Confucianism. The meanings range from "calculation" to "moderation." Generally, Chaucer's distinction between good and…

Explores women in Chaucer's LGW, HF, SqT, and Anel who are "cynically seduced and heartlessly betrayed, the innocent victims of masculine duplicity," and concludes that Chaucer's attitudes toward women and love differed radically from those of his…

Describes Chaucer's metrical line as a "series of five iambs" and the beginning of "modern English verse," and provides examples from across Chaucer's corpus of dominant practices, variations in feet and line-lengths, rhyme patterns, and stanzas.…

Combines "generative" metrical analysis with statistical sampling, synchronic and diachronic comparisons, and attention to the history of metrical criticism to proclaim Chaucer the "father of English poetry's metrical artistry." Describes native…

Putter compares Chaucer's techniques to the "close control" of syllable counting by alliterative poets. Although the metrical goals of these poets differ from those of Chaucer, the means whereby alliterative poets achieve control are similar to…

Chaucer puts the allegorized Latin epic to various uses in five works: HF, TC, KnT, MilT (as comic and unsuccesful rebellion against the hierarchies of KnT), and LGW

Surveys and analyzes Chaucer's phonological, lexical, grammatical, and discourse ambiguities.

In Chaucer's works, the wide spectrum of Venus's portrayals, from mythographical Venus to planetary Venus, represents "some profound human problems in the relations of men and women" and contributes "significantly to the rich variety" with which…

Considers Chaucer's repeated engagement with a passage from Boethius's "Consolation" in Bo, several shorter works, PF, and TC, leading to an argument that Chaucer ultimately suggests that some limits of translation are insurmountable.

Tabulates and analyzes the scribal variants of modal auxiliaries in CT, commenting on the implications for understanding late-medieval English usage.

A thirteen-line love-lyric that opens with quotation of the first line of PF and refers to a "wood, all thrilled with birds" and "early English words."

Reads the garden in PF as a "picture of the world in a fallen state," in contrast with Scipio's "celestial paradise." The contrast is highlighted by different "time-schemes," and the work leaves unresolved the paradoxes of love's varieties.

TC may usefully be regarded as a utopian fiction that attempts to repress undesirable historical events by situating itself at a time before those events, thus opening up a moment of freedom in which the hope for a different, better future is…

Tallies Chaucer's uses of words and phrases derived from Old Norse, suggesting that they indicate Norse permeation of Chaucer's London dialect.

TC is Chaucer's only fully realized tragedy. Interrupted by the Knight to show its limitations, MkT satisfies only the "minimal medieval expectations" of the genre, lacking elevated subject matter. Kaylor explores the term "tragedy" by reference to…

Contends that Chaucer introduced into the plot of MLT (2.463-504) the motif of the help of God, helping to explain Constance's survival at sea at the beginning of Part 2 of the Tale; the motif is not found in Nicholas Trevet at this juncture.