Yunck, John A.
Notes and Queries 205 (1960): 165-66.
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…
Rogers, Cynthia A.
Dissertation Abstracts International A76.11 (2015): n.p.
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.
Waters, Claire M.
Cristina Maria Cervone and D. Vance Smith, eds. Readings in Medieval Textuality: Essays in Honour of A. C. Spearing (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), pp. 31-46.
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.
Nuttall, Jenni.
In Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld, eds. Chaucer and the Subversion of Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 21-37.
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…
Zygogianni, Maria.
Medieval Feminist Forum 58 (2022): 106-27.
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…
Hollander, John.
Modern Language Notes 71.6 (1956): 397-99.
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.
Delasanta, Rodney K.
Tennessee Studies in Literature 13 (1968): 117-32.
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…
Archer, Harriet.
Rachel Stenner, Tamsin Badcoe, and Gareth Griffith, eds. Rereading Chaucer and Spenser: Dan Geffrey with the New Poete (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), pp. 224-42.
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…
Beichner, Paul E.
Mediaeval Studies 18 (1956): 135-44.
Includes examination of the verbal play on praying and belching in SumT 3.1934, arguing that the pun is effective satire even when manuscripts (including the Ellesmere) substitute "but" for the onomatopoetic "buf." Considers other puns…
Normandin, Shawn.
Texas Studies in Literature and Language 58 (2016): 235-55.
Reads ClT closely as a "fundamentally enigmatic parable" that, as part of the "glossing group" of the CT, focuses on interpretation and hermeneutic resistance. Chaucer alternately abbreviates and amplifies his Petrarchan source "so that interpretive…
Davis, Rebecca.
In Jamie C. Fumo, ed. Chaucer's "Book of the Duchess": Contexts and Interpretations (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 51-69.
Examines the "metafictional import of sleep," as distinct from dreaming, in BD. Influenced by Machaut's "Livre de la fonteinne amoreuse," BD aligns sleep, as an embodied process, with the "werk" of elegy.
Nisse, Ruth.
Suzanne Conklin Akbari and James Simpson, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 166-83.
Surveys the extant Anglo-Hebrew authors, lost to Chaucer and his readers, which are, "nevertheless, a productive memory for his current readers." Catalogues a range of authors and genres, showing the flowering of the Jewish literary environment in…
Long, Mary Beth.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 39 (2017): 159-89.
Considers the shift in "social and rhetorical roles" of Cecilia in SNT--from sweet wife to ardent polemical martyr--and argues that both are consistent with views of female speech in pastoral literature, particularly confessional manuals and…
Claridge, Alexandra.
Notes and Queries 265 (2020): 338-40.
Presents connections between the "epithet 'of bath'" in relation to the Wife of Bath and a character in the fifteenth-century play "Lucidus and Dubius," who also refers to himself as "a childe of bathe." Suggests that this understanding "has the…
Li, Xingzhong.
Don Chapman, Colette Moore, and Miranda Wilcox, eds. Studies in the History of the English Language VII: Generalizing vs. Particularizing Methodologies in Historical Linguistic Analysis (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2016), pp. 107-30.
Seeks to "account for constraints governing Chaucer's syntactic inversions with a purpose to uncover Chaucer's underlying metrical principles," employing a combination of "optimality theory" and "Maxent Grammars" and analyzing "every tenth line" of…
Green, Richard Firth, and R. F. Yeager, eds.
Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2022.
Collects eighteen essays on widely varied topics in Middle English, Anglo-Latin, French, and book production. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for under Alternative Title.
Renevey, Denis.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 42 (2020): 351-64.
Discloses how compilations of devotional literature such as "Disce mori" can help us to recognize a "female textual subjectivity," exploring the work's makeup as compilation, and commenting on how "references [in it] to passages and characters from…
Isaacs, Neil D.
American Notes and Queries 5.6 (1967): 85-86.
Explores the ambiguities of betting terminology and suggests that Pardarus's use of such terminology in TC 4.622 means that he is urging Troilus generally to "take his chances."
Sadlek, Gregory M.
Monika Fludernik and Miriam Nandi, eds. Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 17-39.
Offers background to late-medieval English literary notion of "otium" (idleness) and explores tensions between leisure and productivity in works by Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the "Gawain" poet, particularly their representations of the morality of…
Robinson, James.
Neil Roberts, Mark Wormald, and Terry Gifford, eds. Ted Hughes, Nature and Culture (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 143–59.
Assesses the lifelong development of Ted Hughes's attitudes toward Chaucer in published and archival materials, including comments on Hughes's view of Chaucer as the "perfect model of a public poet" and as a "presiding presence" in his relationship…
Phillips, Helen.
Yearbook of English Studies 53 (2024, for 2023): 36-51.
Addresses shouting in Chaucer's narratives, focusing on "the hue and cry," which, "strikingly frequent," engages "with questions about the reliability of narratives, and also with problems of rape and sexual consent, misogynistic narratives and…
Hoffman, Richard L.
Notes and Queries 209 (1964): 49-50.
Conjectures that the source of a recurrent glosses to MilT at 1.3381-82 (variously 3383) attributed to Ovid by the glossators resulted from a misreading of Ovid's "Fasti" 2.193.
