Suggests that saints' lives, "in which demons converse with saints," provide a context and structural pattern that informs the dialogue between the Summoner and the devil. The tale inverts the usual threefold pattern of the saint's victory over the…
An iconographic analysis suggesting that the illustration of Chaucer reading to the court of Richard II benefited the Lancastrian campaign to recognize "English as the national language of England" (exemplified by Chaucer as supreme "user and…
Olson, Mary.
Enarratio 14 (2010, for 2007): 118-38.
Surveys classical uses and techniques of ekphrasis and explores how Chaucer uses it in HF to comment on the shifting nature of communication. In descriptions of the House of Fame, House of Rumor, and especially the House of Glass (Aeneas and Dido),…
Elmes, Melissa Ridley.
Carolynn Van Dyke, ed. Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 233-47.
Compares the birds of PF to birds in medieval scientific texts, in sources or analogues (especially Alan de Lille's "De planctu Naturae"), and in the observable environment. Chaucer fills PF with birds known in England, classifying them by diet but…
Collette, Carolyn. P.
Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2001.
Medieval ideas of psychology and cognition underlie the concern with sight, imagination, and "fantasye" in select tales of Canterbury, wherein Chaucer demonstrates that the only certainty in human relations is uncertainty. The male characters of KnT…
Crespo-García, Begoña.
English Studies 89 (2009): 587-606.
Crespo-García gauges the "scientific register" of Astro and Equat in contrast with medical handbooks, examining etymology and specificity in the common nouns and nominalized forms in these works. The astrological treatises reflect a specialized…
Fradenburg, Louise O.
Poetics Today (Jerusalem) 5 (1984): 493-517.
Examined in terms of Lacanian psychology and the concept of the king's two bodies, Chaucer's PF and Dunbar's "Thrissill and the Rois" reveal how patronized poets deal with sovereign discourse and their relation to it through bodily figuration. …
D'Agata D'Ottavi, Stefania.
Donatello Izzo, ed. Il racconto allo specchio: 'Mise en abyme' tradizione narrative. Testi & Studi, no. 2 (Rome: Nuova Arnica, 1990), pp. 37-66.
Surveys medieval literary uses of "mise en abyme" and assesses how the interpolated tales of NPT break up the linear narrative and produce a "mise en abyme" effect. The contrasting structures of NPT and MkT parallel the contrast between text and…
Reinecke, George F.
Larry D. Benson, ed. The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature. Harvard English Studies, no. 5 (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 81-93.
Confronts several questions or matters of internal inconsistency in CT (1.164; 1.361; 3.45; 4.1222; 5.673; 2.96; 6.443) and speculates about possible resolutions and their usefulness in the Chaucer classroom.
Arthur, Karen Maria.
Dissertation Abstracts International 56 (1996): 2671A.
Warfare and plague made English people of the later fourteenth century unprecedentedly aware of death. The Black Prince and John of Gaunt's first father-in-law, despite their heroic image in chronicles, died of unromantic diseases.
Green, Eugene.
Rosanne G. Potter, ed. Literary Computing and Literary Criticism: Theoretical and Practical Essays on Theme and Rhetoric (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), pp. 167-87.
Examines the exemplum as a "speech act" in Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and in Chaucer's MLT, PhyT, WBT, and LGW. In WBT, "the motives of the hag in requesting marriage as recompense for her aid are central to matters of prudential action"; in LGW,…
De Gaynesford, Maximilian.
Peter Robinson, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 617-37.
Explores poetic speech acts (following the lead of J. L. Austin), treating Chaucer's dedication of his book in TC 5.1856-62 as an exemplary type of performative speech act--"the Chaucer-Type"--characterized by having three explicit constitutive…
Blake, N. F.
Yearbook of English Studies 25 (1995): 6-21.
Surveys interrelations between speech and writing in the history of English, drawing on KnT and RvT to illustrate features of late-medieval lexis and syntax. Features of KnT may reflect "oral residue," while dialect features of RvT are better seen…
Seaman, Myra.
Dissertation Abstracts International 59 (1998): 1156A.
Medieval romance generally assumes that action is inherently a masculine activity and speech feminine, with both supporting patriarchy. Various English romances examine these assumptions (sometimes ambiguously). WBT employs them to subvert not only…
Pugh, Tison.
Allison Gulley, ed. Teaching Rape in the Medieval Literature Classroom: Approaches to Difficult Texts (Amsterdam: Arc Humanities, 2018), pp. 77-90.
Maintains that attention to speech and silence is crucial to literary analysis and to understanding medieval notions of gender difference, exemplifying how the speech/silence binary can be explored in complex ways to help analyze rape as a plot…
The principle of contraries provides a method for relating pairs of tales. ManT and ParsT offer paradigms for improper and proper use of speech. The Manciple uses and misglosses the tale of Phoebus and the Crow, while the Parson speaks the truth…
Examines how the form and ideology of Thomas Speght's Renaissance editions of Chaucer contribute to the monumentalization of the man and his works. Speght's critical apparatus, his expansion of Chaucer's corpus, and even the size and title pages of…
Ransom, Daniel J.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 118 (2019): 517-43.
Observes that the glossary of Speght's 1598 edition of Chaucer's works lists "yape" for "jape"/"iape," meaning "trick," "joke," or sexual activity, but the 1602 edition does not; historical and contemporary word lists do not include "yape" unless…
Pace, George B.
Studies in Bibliography 21 (1968): 225-35.
Shows that the first printed version of ABC (in Thomas Speght's 1602 edition of Chaucer's works) is essentially a copy of the version found in Cambridge University Library MS Gg.4.27. Also considers Speght's treatment of his source, the "significance…
Smith, J. J.
J.J. Smith, ed. The English of Chaucer and His Contemporaries: Essays by M.L. Samuels and J.J. Smith (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), pp. 96-113.
Working from an "archetypal" corpus of Gower's spelling forms,Smith explores the continuity and dissolution of these forms in manuscript tradition, as well as the relation of the corpus to the progress of Standard Written English and to practice in…
Assesses graphic representations of selected features of spoken language to show the "dialectical homogeneity" of the Ellesmere manuscript (London), Cambridge Gg 4.27 (East Midland with Northern elements), and British Library Additional 5140 (East…
Blake, Norman, and Jacob Thaisen.
Special issue, Nordic Journal of English Studies 3.1 (2004): 93-107.
Evaluating two CT manuscripts--Christ Church, Oxford, MS 152 (single exemplar) and British Library MS Harley 7334 (two exemplars)--the authors contend that analysis of spelling can be used to determine changes in exemplars in textual study. Because…
