Browse Items (16318 total)

Surveys several classical, oriental, and exegetical traditions of the symbolic or exemplary value of the cock, variously an emblem of wisdom, pugnacity, or stupidity. Chauntecleer of NPT is unusual in combining many qualities, for later literary…

For individual essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Wisdom of Poetry under Alternative Title.

In the Wife of Bath, Chaucer radically remakes La Vieille from the Roman de la Rose, granting her true wisdom and authority. The Wife of Bath successfully uses Latin tradition and academic techniques in WBP, and WBT reflects the profound wisdom of…

Chaucer uses "the winds of Fortune" as a metaphor to organize the genre and to define the characters. Troilus' perception of Fortune shifts from the divine to Criseyde, assuring his fall. The narrator opposes Pandarus' attitude in accepting the…

The diptych (1398-99), an English work that once belonged to Richard II, shows "God, the Blessed Virgin, and Richard's ancestors" conferring upon him "absolute, unlimited sovereignty." As the king's altarpiece, it "proclaimed the religious mystery…

Explores de Worde's multiple uses of the same woodcut (a depiction of an exchange of rings) in various books he produced. Found twice in de Worde's TC, the woodcut may reflect his reception of TC via the summary of it in John Skelton's "Phyllyp…

Considers various tamed and untamed wild women in medieval literature, including two of Chaucer's characters: the Wife of Bath, and Emelye of KnT.

Explores the sources of several details and attitudes in poems by A. E. Housman, including discussion of the impact of KnT and TC on "A Shropshire Lad," particularly their depictions of love sickness ("amor heroes") and the ennobling effects of…

Textual evidence suggests that the friar may be the father of the dead child--rendering the squire Jankyn (little John, the diminutive of the friar) the projection of the central character's sinfully fathered child.

Verse-drama adaptation/translation of WBPT and Ret in decasyllabic rhyming couplets and north London dialect, with Jamaican patois, and multiple actors. WBP is set in a contemporary London pub; WBT, in eighteenth-century Maroon Town, Jamaica, under…

Normandin argues that a "surplus of urine in the absence of fecal matter affects the tone" of WBP. Chaucer "associates the Wife of Bath with urine because antifeminist traditions often represented females as liquid, dripping creatures and because…

Suggests that a portion of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5.23-24) is a source for the Wife of Bath's comments on precedence at the offertory (GP 1.449-522).

Despite Chaucer's efforts to create a stable "poetic self-fashioning," WBPT takes different forms in its different redactions in the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts and in Thynne's 1532 edition.

WBT is sometimes felt by critics to betray Chaucer's latent feminism by ending harmoniously. With its representation of the triumphant heroine and the defeated rapist, the Tale should instead be read as a subversion of traditional male discourse.

A "creative-production" thesis, comprising the first half of a work of historical fiction titled "The Jerusalem Tales," focusing on the Wife of Bath; analysis of the narrative based on Elizabeth Fowler's theory of "social persons"; and analysis of…

Examines WBPT for internal contrasts, attributing them to the Wife's comic inability to see the implications of her own tale. WBT is a "tale of wonder" or "folktale" in which the rape is merely a plot device and the education of the knight…

Item not seen. The WorldCat record offers the following notes: "Issued in a case./ Illustrators' notes (2p.) laid in./ Limited ed. of 20. Made entirely by hand, printed on 'Tovil' hand-made paper, and signed by the illustrators."

The Wife's "long-winded autobiography" in WBP--a "wishful, wistful self-serving fantasy" and "long, stupendous performance" that seems to "thrill to the idea" of rape--reflects her personality through its "touchiness and pugnacity," "garrulous…

Interlinear Modern English translation of WBPT, with accompanying introduction and commentary presented as a pastiche of observations and reactions.

Study guide to WBPT that includes commentary on their place in the CT, their sources and backgrounds, and medieval and modern ways of assessing the Wife's character. Includes a summary/commentary of the narratives, arranged in segments, followed by…

Compares the knight's decision in the marriage bed of WBT to that of the analogous one in the more mythic "Marriage of Sir Gawain," arguing that in the context of Chaucer's relatively realistic Tale, the decision to return the choice to the loathly…

Item not seen; the record in WorldCat states: "The text and a commentary for the use of Senior High School students."

Argues that WBP 3.21 should be emended from "fifthe" to "sixte."

During the nineteenth-century construction of the fabliau as a distinct genre, scholars grouped ShT with other "coarse" tales and theorized that Chaucer had reassigned it from the Wife of Bath to the Shipman, assuming that the fabliau form was not…

Contains original-spelling transcripts of all fifty-four manuscripts and four pre-1500 printed editions of WBP, with digitized images of every page of text contained in these sources (1,200 images in all). The transcripts are linked with two…