Butterfield, Ardis.
Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), pp. 20-36.
Butterfield surveys the French literature available to Chaucer and argues that French language and literature pervade Chaucer's entire career. The French influence is a fundamental "habit of mind" that resides in the deep and surface structures of…
Palmer, R. Barton, ed.
New York : AMS Press, 1999.
Fourteen essays by various authors on French poets Machaut, Froissart, Deschamps, Christine de Pizan, Charles d'Orelans, and Villon. The essays emphasize the determining material effects of the courtly mode of production, especially the roles of the…
Beidler, Peter G.
Holly A. Crocker, ed. Comic Provocations: Exposing the Corpus of Old French Fabliaux. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 149-61.
When Chaucer used Boccaccio's "Decameron" 8.1 as his source for ShT, he was also influenced by French fabliaux, particularly a garden scene in the thirteenth-century "Aloul" and, more generally, the animal euphemisms typical of the genre in French…
Chaucer drew from more than one segment of Filocolo to design FranT. He incorporated the larger frame narrative of Florio and Biancafiore, a tale of Byzantine origin that allowed him to draw on various elements of the copious and complicated…
Posits FranT as a major source for Shakespeare play, focusing on similarities between the two magicians. Revised version published as "Deceiving Appearances: Neo-Chaucerian Magic in 'The Tempest'," in Hillman's Intertextuality and Romance in…
Compares FranT with the tenth tale (Madassena and Her Rash Promise) of the "Vetalapachisi," identifying common motifs (rash promise, promise to return, and noble theft) and differences in frame, characterization, and setting. Observes relations with…
Discusses the Franklin "class" of late-medieval England: etymology, legal status, land tenure, wealth, rank, and social position. Adducing contemporary evidence, some of which is here discussed for the first time, the author explores the clues…
Wurtele, Douglas J.
English Studies in Canada 13 (1987): 359-74.
Arveragus's choice between allowing himself to be cuckolded or making Dorigen break her promise to Aurelius is a false dichotomy: he could have found a "tertium quid" in leaving the choice to her and thereby acting as lover rather than husband, as…
Surveys the literary tradition of the term "vavasour" and explores the implications of its use to describe the Franklin in GP. Focuses on encounters between vavasours and knights in French Arthurian romances, the juxtaposition of FranT and SqT, and…
Eckhardt, Caroline D.
Modern Philology 87 (1990): 239-48.
Chaucer's descripiton of the Franklin as a "vavasour" (GP 360) reflects his acquaintance with the Vavasour family. Like Chaucer, Sir William Vavasour testified in the Scrope-Grosvenor controversy; other Vavasours held offices similar to the…
Characterizes the Franklin in light of his social status, administrative and judicial offices, his "Epicurean concern for externals," and his association with the Sergeant at Law. Then reads FranT as an ironic indictment of the narrator's foolish…
Distraint, established in the thirteenth century, required that landholders whose lands produced 20 pounds a year must become knights, the rank involving both military and civil service. The remark that he would rather have a son with the Squire's…
Boffey, Julia.
Anne Marie D'Arcy and Alan J. Fletcher, eds. Studies in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts in Honour of John Scattergood (Dublin: Four Courts, 2005), pp. 53-64.
Discusses William Calverley's "Dyalogue Bitwene the Playntife and the Defendaunt" (ca. 1530-35?) in light of the "Boethian motif of the prisoner of fortune," discussing Chaucer's influence, especially among printers interested in religious or…
Considers vernacular change and development in Chaucer's work through the lens of a suggested parallel to fourteenth-century Italian poetry that "inspired scribes and translators to develop sophisticated methods of using form to reflect historical,…
Rather than consider the forests and woods in Chaucer's work symbolically, offers an eco-materialist reading of Chaucer's work as Clerk of the King and as forester of North Petherton. Argues that these positions inform Chaucer's settings and…
McKinley, Kathryn L.
English Language Notes 30:2 (1992): 1-4.
Criseyde's niece Flexippe is named after Plexippus in Ovid's story of Meleager. The reference to Flexippe in TC 2 is clarified in TC 5 by Cassandra's relating this very story and giving it an allegorical interpretation.
McCann, Garth A.
Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 27 (1973): 10-16.
Reads the first three tales in CT as a gradated and "symmetrical" treatment of love that moves from the non-physical idealism of KnT to the mixture of emotion and action in MilT and on to the revenge and "physical realism" of RvT.
Hanning, Robert W.
Leigh A. Arrathoon, ed. Chaucer and the Craft of Fiction (Rochester, Mich.: Solaris Press, 1986), pp. 121-63.
In BD, the "Metamorphoses" provides a positive paradigm for exploring the relationships of grief and poetry, whereas Ovid's work yields a negative paradigm for the representation of Fame in HF. Deals with the creative process in dream visions; and…
Like the "Gawain" poet, Chaucer manipulates tense for narrative purposes, often using the historical present to accentuate "key events, characters, and descriptions." Some of Chaucer's endings may have been added by scribes, making his exact…
Eliason, Norman E.
In O. B. Hardison, Jr., ed. Medieval and Renaissance Studies: Proceedings of the Southeastern Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Summer, 1969 (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 1971), pp. 103-21
Explores the emphases and nuances of early critical praise and imitation of Chaucer's poetry among writers such as John Lydgate, Stephen Hawes, the author of "The Book of Curtysye," and others. Focuses on their assessments of the "craftsmanship" of…
Strohm, Paul.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 4 (1982): 3-32.
Few of Chaucer's primary audience (men like Sturry, Clifford, Clanover, Montagu, Vache, Scogan, Bukton, Gower, Strode, and Usk) survived him or were still active after his death. His fifteenth-century audience was more broadly dispersed but more…
Reiss, Edmund.
Leigh A. Arrathoon, ed. Chaucer and the Craft of Fiction (Rochester, Mich.: Solaris Press, 1986), pp. 97-119.
Chaucer's ludic use of language reflects the contemporary attitude toward "translatio" (the transformation of meaning and content and the creation of ambiguity) and the emphasis in logic and grammar on the limitations and inadequacy of language and…
