Browse Items (16318 total)

Seeks to understand BD as an exploration of (male) grief beyond its presumed historical occasion and to relate the subject and structure of the poem by explicating the recurring references to literal and metaphorical nakedness--especially that of…

Explores the possibilities of "transhistorical feeling" for assessing what "Chaucer's 'persone', and especially his face" mean to "post-medieval audiences." Argues that "intersubjective" perception of "geniality" in visual and verbal Chaucer…

Suggests that authors including Chaucer, Langland, Hoccleve, and Johannes de Caritate employed Aristotelian and pseudo-Aristotelian sources (many derived from Arabic sources) in the course of exploring types of literary and cultural authority.

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]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.

Maintains that Pearson's novel for juvenile readers "A Perfect, Gentle Knight" (2007) "earns the quotation that provides its title" from GP, 73, identifying echoes of the father–son relationship of Chaucer's Knight and Squire, even though the novel…

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.