Browse Items (16089 total)

Looking at BD, HF, and PF, Robinson examines Chaucer's relations to his masters and his dilemma in connecting books and imagination with actual life, in creating puzzles for the demands he felt "of the poetry of the poem." Chaucer's dreamscapes are…

Chaucer self-consciously makes the reader aware of the achievement of the writer, of the reader as reader, and of the intelligent response he is asking the reader to make. All three point to Chaucer's fascination with the power of language as a key…

Analyzes Chaucer's notion of tragedy in TC against the background of classical and medieval conceptualizations of the genre and Chaucer's own rewriting of sources.

Surveys the sources of Chaucer's lists and examines them for the effects they create, for the rhetorical ends they accomplish in undermining or leavening the direction of a tale or poem, as in TC, Anel, FrT, Rom, WBT, PardT, MkT, MkPT, MerT, Mel,…

Links the use of "ferthyng" and the lisping of the Friar in GP 1.255 and 1.264 with the friar of SumT and his use of "ferthyng" (3.1967), suggesting that if that latter had a lisp like the former, his pronunciation may have inspired the "crude…

Provides a detailed account of Chaucer's life, with consideration of how his personality and experience contributed to his literary characteristics. In Japanese.

TC shows Chaucer's ambivalence about the language of courtly love; he uses it denotatively with romantic meaning yet reveals its duplicity through Troilus's idealism, Diomede's cynicism, Pandarus's manipulativeness, and Criseyde's combined sincerity…

Verse translations of all of Chaucer's poetry, with the exceptions of CT, TC, and Rom, based on Skeat's edition and arranged in his chronology. Each translation follows Chaucer's verse form and is preceded by a one-page foreword that comments on…

Assesses the anatomical deficiencies of Emelye of KnT and Cecilia of SNT as samples of one medieval model of lesbian sexuality.

Chaucer's LGW testifies to the disparate views of women prevalent in the Middle Ages. A complex medieval notion of Woman informs the structure of the poem: in the prologue, Chaucer praises conventional ideas of female virtue, while in the legends…

Palmer argues that LGW is not merely a collection of tales retold from Ovid; it is also the story of the narrator's problematic relationship to the God of Love.

Manuscript evidence shows that fifteenth-century female readers of LGW were urban and either household servants or daughters of the gentry, whereas the implied female audience of fourteenth-century manuscripts consisted of members of the nobility,…

Audio recording (on CD) of a lecture about the "inextricability" of religious and secular law in Chaucer's age as reflected in PardT, ParsT, and especially MLT. Heinzelman contrasts material and spiritual wealth in PardT and ParsT and explores the…

Chaucer as a court poet adapts himself to the pattern of sentiments of the court audience. He views the bourgeois pragmatism from the aristocratic standpoint. However, in his fabliaux he could deliberately make fun of the attitude of the…

Scrutinizes Chaucer's use of Latin, demonstrating that his intratextual and extratextual Latin terms, phrases, and sentences are "formulas" and "quotations," not his own inventions. Twomey briefly surveys the development of Anglo-Latin and its…

Argues that parts 1-5 of CT represent a "wholesale revision that Chaucer was engaged in at the time of his death," while parts 6-10 "represent an earlier stage of composition." Suggests that Chaucer "introduced dramatic interplay between narrator,…

LGWP may be viewed as the poet's last of four experiments in the dream-vision form and as a self-contained dream poem rather than a simple prologue. Chaucer affirms the visionary's initial views and attitudes but mocks the authority of its central…

Outlines the basics of Middle English orthography and pronunciation, and Chaucer's vocabulary and literary models for students. Claims that learning to read Middle English, and understanding concepts of manuscript study, editing, and translation,…

Hoad challenges critical discussions of specific words and syntactical emphases in Chaucer on the grounds that modern linguistic intuition is unreliable, comparison of medieval uses is often flawed, and medieval commentary can be misleading.…

For six articles that pertain to aspects of Chaucer's language, search for Chaucer's Language: Cognitive Perspectives under Alternative Title.

Exemplifies how Chaucer "frequently presents his characters as victims of a necessity that become meaningful not through its external operation as 'fortune,' but through its inner presence as an experience of 'emotional necessity'," illustrating this…

Examines the varying degrees and uses of multilingualism among the Canterbury pilgrims and the characters in their tales, commenting on the facile "linguistic posing" of several speakers (Pardoner, Parson, Wife of Bath, Summoner and his characters)…

Introduces elements of the English language that are particularly useful for teaching English, following the ordinary division of the language's development into five stages: Old English, Middle English, early modern English, late modern English, and…

The medieval tyrant "topos," with its lexicon and its various transformations, provides the means of studying Chaucer's moral vocabulary. The tyrant figure embodies passion, cruelty, injustice, and the heartlessness. Its antitype is first that of…

After briefly placing Chaucer's language in the history of the development of English, Peters describes Chaucer's vocabulary, phonology, morphology, and syntax. The study is presented as a "one-text description of Chaucer's language for the student…