Browse Items (16012 total)

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]pproaches the Canterbury Tales through the lens of humor theory, responding to a much-noted gap in existing scholarship by focusing primarily on the structures and mechanisms of humor in the text.”

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…

Places the medieval "Jaloux tale" in "its philosophic and historical framework," rooted in the marriage controversies of Sts. Augustine and Jerome with the Pelagians, Manichee, and Jovinians Traces the tradition in French humanists of the twelfth and…

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…

Examines May of MerT as a version of the motif of the healing woman, familiar "across medieval literary genres from romance to hagiography." The fabliau setting of the tale, however, inverts a range of "courtly and religious hierarchies" as May…

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 insertion of "prolaciouns" in Bo 2.pr.1 was intended as a technical clarification of the preceding "moedes," potentially misleading to English readers who could read it as either "mood" or "mode." The insertion may evince the…

Examines music as a coequal to rhetoric and a branch of medieval philosophy to argue that Chaucer's beast fable traces and complicates three major tenets of Boethian and medieval music theory.

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

Reads NPT as the teller's attack on the "anti-monastic" Monk (as well as the "indifferent" Prioress), contrasting the "sacerdotal demeanor" of the two clerics and arguing that the NPT is opposed to MkT in both theme and technique, focusing on their…

Comments on the interdependence of innovation and imitation in Chaucer's poetry, and explores how Spenser's depictions of Chaucer and his poetry are part of the early modern concern with this dynamic, particularly evident in Luke Shepherd's reformist…