Cawley, A. C., ed.
New York: Barnes & Noble; Edinburgh and London: Oliver & Boyd, 1969.
Ten essays by various authors, six of them previously published. For the newly published essays, search for Chaucer's Mind and Art under Alternative Title.
Several motifs and verbal echoes among MilT, RvT, and "The Decameron" strengthen the case for "memorial borrowing" and invite the invention of a new critical term for Chaucer's poems: "metrical novellas."
Hatton, Thomas J.
Proceedings of the Medieval Association of the Midwest 02 (1993): 81-89.
Both the Miller and characters in his "Tale" exhibit "curiositas," defined by medieval Church fathers as the exercise of curiosity in pursuit of idle knowledge, i.e., knowledge not directly leading to salvation.
Explores associative and metaphoric links between Chaucer's Miller (GP and MilP), the devil, and Pilate, who was "traditionally an agent of the devil."
Mullany, Peter F.
American Notes and Queries 3.4 (1964): 54-55.
Suggests that the assigning of "Pilates voys" to the Miller (MilP 1.3124) may be due in part to the apocryphal notion that Pilate was the son of a miller's daughter, as recorded in the "Legenda Aurea."
Horobin, Simon.
In The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. https://opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu, 2017. Relocated 2025 at https://opencanterburytales.lsusites.org/
Introduces Chaucer's language as a dialect and a stage in the development of English. Designed for classroom use, includes sections on vocabulary, grammar, style and register, and the opening eighteen lines of the GP.
Though we cannot recover the facts of Chaucer's versification,his lines in CT are basically iambic pentameter. Of the first hundred lines of GP in the Ellesmere MS., eighty may be so scanned with little difficulty.
Cole, Kristin Lynn.
Clíodhna Carney and Frances McCormack, eds. Chaucer's Poetry: Words, Authority and Ethics (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013), pp. 92-106.
Questions the idea that Chaucer's relationship with the alliterative verse of his contemporaries, such as the "Gawain"-poet and Langland, was antagonistic. Instead, suggests that the alliterative and the London poets participate in a shared metrical…
Solopova, Elizabeth.
Norman Blake and Peter Robinson, eds. The Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers, Volume II (London: King's College, Office for Humanities Communications, 1997), pp. 143-64.
The metrical and stylistic habits reflected in the variants of WBP manuscripts Hengwrt, Ellesmere, Gg, Ha4, CP, and Dd indicate scribal rather than authorial origins. In comparison with Hengwrt, Ellesmere does not reflect a consistent effort to…
Stanley, E. G.
Notes and Queries 234 (1989): 11-23, 151-62.
Reviews scholarship on meter and suggests that the verse of Chaucer's followers is more interestingly variant in context than is sometimes thought; emphasizes the central role of Hoccleve, some of whose work is available in holograph.
Owen, Charles A., Jr.
Modern Language Notes 72.3 (1957): 164-65.
Accepts that the manuscript of Equat is Chaucer's own draft, with revisions, and suggests that evidence from TC indicates that "Chaucer did not wait till he had finished his work to have parts of it copied out fair by his scribe."
Li, Xingzhong.
Dissertation Abstracts International 57 (1997): 3948A
Surveys the history of approaches to Chaucer's meter and critiques individual approaches. Proposes principles of Chaucer's tetrameter and pentameter, focusing on syntactic inversions and phrase boundaries. Chaucer's verse developed from rough…
Pearsall, Derek.
Tim William Machan, ed. Medieval Literature: Texts and Interpretation. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies,no. 79. (Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1991), pp. 41-57.
Most Chaucer criticism fails to mention that Chaucer's poetry is written in verse. The way we read that verse and respond to its musicality, whether in our heads or when reading aloud, is an important part of our interpretation of and response to…
Mann, Jill.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23: 71-107, 2001.
Recent editors have privileged the Hengwrt (Hg) manuscript by attributing metrical and morphosyntactic features of Ellesmere (El) to editorial intervention rather than to scribal error. Mann traces the development of the "myth of the El editor,"…
Martindale, Wight, Jr.
Chaucer Review 26 (1992): 309-16.
Fourteenth-century business practices, financial transactions,and fluctuating currency rates illuminate the characters of the ShT monk (a cloth merchant) and the GP Merchant, who probably would have chosen to travel in April, when the relative values…
Cahn, Kenneth S.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 2 (1980): 81-119.
Demonstrates that the Merchant engages neither in usury nor in illegal speculation. Selling "sheeldes" (imaginary coins "of accounts" employed in Flanders) is simply a means of "borrowing" English sterling through foreign exchange. The Merchant is…
Argues that MerT should be read in light of MerP (for which there is strong manuscript evidence) and that the two are unified by a "cool, controlled, acidulous" tone and a "persistent interest in sexual activity . . . that frequently borders on the…
Keiser, George R.
Studies in Short Fiction 15 (1978): 191-92.
The use of the word "glad" (E2412) and its repetition (E2416) makes clear the moral point of the tale: happiness in marriage is possible for men, but only if they follow January's example of ignoring reality.
Rudat, Wolfgang E. H.
Explicator 35, iv (1977): 25-26.
The botanical-physical sense of May's appraisal of January's sexual "playing" as "nat...worth a bene" (E 1854) indicates that January has not impregnated May. May's expectancy of impregnation by Damian is frustrated when January interrupts…
In light of the mythological tradition of Janus and connections between January and Adam, January's self-deception in MerT is less bitter than funny. In general, the Tale "is one of the great literary celebrations of marriage, albeit a comic one."
Wentersdorf, Karl P.
Studies in Philology 63 (1966): 604-29.
Anatomizes motifs in the sources and analogues of the pear tree episode in MerT, focusing on several modern Irish analogues that have details of characterization which parallel those in MerT and have an intervention by male and female fairies.…
Stillwell, Gardiner.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 57 (1958): 192-96.
Examines the syntax, rhetoric, and emphases of GP 1.280 in comparison with similar locutions elsewhere in Chaucer (especially ShT) to argue that it means, emphatically, " If he [the Merchant] was in debt, the spectator would certainly never know it!"
Considers evidence that January's knife-image ("Ne hurte hymselven with his owene knyf"; MerT 5.1840) when commenting on sexual relations with his wife may have indicated to some members of a medieval audience that he was "a sexual pervert of the…
