Adamson, Peter.
Medieval Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 495-501.
Comments on Chaucer's and Langland's engagements with philosophical debates of their age, especially determinism and voluntarism. Includes discussion of the tensions between KnT and MilT as Chaucer's poetic expression of philosophical concerns.
Traces the figure of the "sursanure" in FranT, demonstrating that this superficially healed wound is an apt metaphor for Chaucer/s soft or "sunken" sources.
Uses HF, which sets "archival totality" in an uncertain relation to the experience of reading, to introduce a discussion of how in our reading "discursive systems, rather than particular texts, become objects of knowledge." Aims to theorize a…
Reads HF as an example of how a literary work constructs "discursive scale," making us self-conscious about how we read and interpret, when we read closely, and when we distance ourselves and see the text in relation to genres and systems, history,…
Scala, Elizabeth.
Medieval Feminist Forum 30: 27-37, 2000.
Assesses "gossip" about an emotional or sexual relationship between Rickert and John Matthews Manly, co-editors of "The Text of the Canterbury Tales" (1940).
No criticism has dealt satisfactorily with Chaucer's versification. This is because prosody cannot be studied in isolation. It must consider the literary and linguistic effects as well as the specific form and the mode of performance.
Utley, Francis Lee.
MacEdward Leach, ed. Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Albert Croll Baugh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961), pp. 109-36.
Anatomizes and analyzes "some eighty-three scenes" in TC that "reveal" in the poem "the role of dialogue, the role of visual scene and image, the role of structural contrast, and the role of tempo and movement" and create "skillful ordering" and…
Website designed for students, teachers, and school districts, with emphasis on preparation for college study; includes a search engine. Its Learning Guides includes numerous pages that pertain to Chaucer and his works, each with multiple internal…
Evans, Ruth.
Frank Grady, ed. The Cambridge Companion to "The Canterbury Tales" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 238-43.
Discusses public-facing writing about Chaucer and his texts and argues that "this writing's engagement with contemporary politics speaks to our and our students' experiences, and is already changing the direction of both classroom practice and…
Wilson, William S.
Chaucer Review 1.3 (1967): 181-84.
Suggests that the three books of HF reflect the three medieval "linguistic arts," or trivium, focusing on how book 3 reflects the techniques of logic or dialectic, depicting the pros and cons of fame and "refining it into a philosophic idea." The…
Roney, Lois Yvonne.
Dissertation Abstracts International 39 (1979): 5498A.
KnT is a scholastic romance whose primary subject is universal human nature conceived in varying combinations of will and intellect, and its overriding concern is human freedom. From its position as the first Canterbury tale, one might infer that…
Courtenay, William J.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Chapters on the fourteenth-century educational framework, schools of the religious orders, higher education, patronage of ideas, English ties with Continental education, English scholasticism, Oxford after the plague, and "Piety and Learning in the…
Rezunyk, Jessica.
Dissertation Abstracts International A77.06 (2015): n.p.
Uses HF, among other texts, to demonstrate a versatile permeability between "science and the humanities" in the medieval period, in contrast to current more isolated approaches to these disciplines.
Grennen, Joseph E.
Annuale Mediaevale 8 (1967): 38-45.
Interprets the eagle's descent on the narrator in HF in light of medieval medical theory, contending that it is "actually an apoplectic seizure in 'visionary' form—a 'stroke'." Also, the eagle's oration on sound evinces Chaucer's familiarity with…
Grennen, Joseph E.
Chaucer Review 6.2 (1971): 81-93.
Argues that ClT reveals the teller's "professional, speculative turn of mind" in contrast with the Wife of Bath's "rigorous sort of pragmatism," commenting on the Clerk's "academic terminology," his academic "awkwardness," and Walter's trial of…
Tobias, Sheila, and Lynne S. Abel.
English Education 22 (1990): 165-78.
Reports on a 1988 pedagogical experiment designed to explore differences between scientific and humanistic study and the implications of such differences for the teaching of poetry. Poetic language is a "code" not unlike mathematics, although it…
Burnley, David.
Geoffrey Lester, ed. Chaucer in Perspective: Middle English Essays in Honour of Norman Blake (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), pp. 28-46.
Reassesses details of Chaucer's Scog and of Scogan's Moral Balade in light of their historical context, intertextual relations, manuscript variants, and scribal graffiti, arguing that Scogan's poem reflects familiarity with several of Chaucer's…
Explores Sir Walter Scott's knowledge of Chaucer and the novelist's use of themes and techniques reminiscent of those in BD and the apocryphal "Flower and the Leaf." Alluding to these works in "The Antiquary," Scott emphasizes their concerns with…
Mitchell, Jerome.
Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987.
Catalogues romance and Chaucerian sources (BD, HF, TC, and especially CT) for Scott's work, showing analogues, parallels, and likenesses. Extensively indexed.
Ives, Carolyn, and David Parkinson.
Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline, eds. Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400-1602 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), pp. 186-202.
Political and religious struggles of the late sixteenth century encouraged Scottish misogyny and treatment of Chaucer as a "misogynist authority." As is most clearly evident in the Bannatyne manuscript, Chaucer's works and his apocrypha were used to…
Dwyer, Seamus.
Roman Bleier, Brian Coleman, and Clare Fletcher, eds. Memory and Identity in the Medieval and Early Modern World (New York: Peter Lang, 2022), pp. 193-208.
Surveys critical attention to Adam and reads the poem as an exhortation to "moral and professional penitence." Focuses on "corect," "rubbe," and "scrape" as scribal activities and as metaphorical links to penitential erasure in Chaucer and other…
Kline, Barbara.
Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline, eds. Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400-1602 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), pp. 116-44.
Examines scribal interventions in the CT portion of British Library MS Harley 7333 (produced at Leicester Abbey) as examples of "ideological editing." Its corrections, variants, and omissions indicate efforts to suppress Chaucer's criticism of the…
