Pitcher, John A.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Analyzes how Chaucer's rhetorical constructions decenter self-disclosure and resist simplistic notions of gender in WBPT, ClT, FranT, and PhyT. Figurative or allusive speech cannot adequately represent subjectivity and desire. Chaucer's treatments of…
Saraceni, Madeleine L.
Chaucer Review 51.4 (2016): 403-35.
Explores what Chaucer's use of genres strongly associated with female readers--such as vernacular devotional writing, conduct literature, and hagiography--suggests about his attitudes toward women. Examines the significance of the catalogue of…
Bentley, Joseph.
South Atlantic Quarterly 64 (1965): 247-53.
Maintains that the details and description of astrology in MilT along with its foreshadowing imagery establish a theme of Boethian determinism in the Tale. Accordingly, the character of each of the three male actors determines his unforeseen fate and…
Irvin, Matthew W.
Chaucer Review 55, no. 4 (2020): 379-96.
Examines pity and the construction of pity in KnT in particular to show how Chaucer's use of and changes to the "Teseida "produce a desire for female autonomy that doesn't threaten male patriarchy.
Quinn, William A.
Susan Yager and Elise E. Morse-Gagné, eds. Interpretation and Performance: Essays for Alan Gaylord (Provo, UT: Chaucer Studio Press, 2013), pp. 185-98.
The Squire's digressive, complex tale may be understood as a reenactment of the creative process. Critics may be mistaken in trying to explain the significance of the four gifts, the falcon's distress, and other details, if the center of the tale is…
Boswell, Jackson Campbell, and Sylvia Wallace Holton.
New York : Modern Language Association of America, 2004.
Tallies 1,378 "references to, allusions to, and echoes of Chaucer and his works in printed books published between 1475 and 1640," updating and correcting a portion of Caroline Spurgeon's landmark bibliography. Entries are arranged chronologically by…
Boswell, Jackson C.
Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2021.
Tallies 1,060 entries that identify references to, allusions to, and echoes of Chaucer and his works in books published from 1641 through 1700, with an appendix of 131 references and allusions from 1475 through 1640, all in addition to or expansions…
Corrigan, Matthew.
Western Humanities Review 23 (1969): 107-20.
Describes Chaucer's depictions of Criseyde and the Wife of Bath as "marred" by unconscious "psychic blinders" of his male-dominated age, each lacking a "life all her own." Alison is one of Chaucer's "great comic actors," but not psychically a woman,…
Hertog, Erik.
Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1991.
Explores the phenomenon of literary analogues through a pragmatic and structuralist analysis of four salient components of narrative, each illustrated with examples from Chaucer's fabliaux and their analogues in various European languages. The…
Reis, Huriye.
Edebiyat fakültesi dergisi (Hacettepe University) 29.2 (2012): 123-35.
Comments on the role and status of women in the fabliau genre, and argues that May of MerT and Alisoun of MilT are "women of resistance . . . concerned with regaining partial control over their own bodies through adultery." The two characters produce…
Taylor, Paul Beekman.
Chaucer Review 28 (1993): 67-77.
In Bo, Chaucer's substitution of "the eye of the lynx" for the original "eye of Lynceus" points to his philosophy of vision. The lynx is sharp sighted and can perceive "the imperfection of things apparently fair." The poet's task is also to see…
MLT, ClT, and PhyT address the same question: how can God allow the innocent to suffer and the wicked to go unpunished? Although in each case Chaucer enhances the virtue of the protagonist and the pathos of her suffering, he tests diverse…
Henderson, Jeff.
Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association 14 (1988): 13-24.
Argues that Chaucer perhaps intended to allow the GP pilgrims to serve as the "'dramatis personae' of the Tales themselves" and to move among the complicated levels of reality in CT.
Defines "exemplum" and describes the history of the genre before Chaucer; then focuses on Chaucer's innovative uses of the device to produce comedy in MilT, SqT, and SumT, also commenting at length on exempla clusters in HF and FranT.
Stone, Gregory B.
Gregory B. Stone. The Death of the Troubadour: The Late Medieval Resistance to the Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 143-98.
Deconstructs BD as an example of a work that resists the Renaissance impulses to individualism and the rise of narrative. In BD, lyricism is asserted by the failure of narrative to console, and individualism is undercut by recurrent verbal play on…
Murton, Megan.
Clíodhna Carney and Frances McCormack, eds. Chaucer's Poetry: Words, Authority and Ethics (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013), pp. 48-60.
Argues for an "ethical" reading of Chaucer's view of poetry in CT distinct from didacticism, examining Chaucer's engagement with sententiae of Plato and St. Paul and suggesting that, for Chaucer, poetry's value is in the process of interpretation it…
Cox, Catherine S.
In Nicole Nyffenegger and Katrin Rupp, eds. Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2918), pp. 97-118.
Reasons that just as a parchment leaf bears traces of its animal origins and can bear evidence of writing and rewriting, Chaucer writes the Summoner, the Cook, and the Wife of Bath with attention to their skins and the ways in which they communicate…
Norton-Smith, J[ohn].
Roger Fowler, ed. Essays on Style and Language: Linguistic and Critical Approaches to Literary Style (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), pp. 157-65.
Explores Chaucer's "reading and use" of the genre of verse epistle, drawing on evidence from LGW, the two letters in TC, Scog, and Buk. Considers the influence of Ovid's "Heroides" and Horace's "Satires" to argue that Chaucer was adept in the Ovidian…
Horvath, Richard P.
Chaucer Review 37 : 173-89, 2002.
Rather than personal comments to private friends, Buk and Scog may be seen as Chaucer's experiments with "[t]urning the relationship between writer and reader into a poetic subject of its own." The characteristic sense of play and seemingly…
Haigney, Catherine Reisky.
Dissertation Abstracts International 50 (1990): 2046A-2047A.
Although earlier dream visions aimed at revelation of universal truths, Chaucer's poems in this mode present individuals who achieve no direct answers to their questions. William of Ockham, not necessarily a direct influence, provides methods for…
KnT offers a reflection of several problems in late fourteenth-century society and of a judge and commentator, Theseus, who is free because he can rationally interpret history. Through KnT and its inversion in MilT, Chaucer offers a mythos of peace…
Bertolet, Craig E.
Chaucer Review 33 (1998): 66-89.
Chaucer's envoys should be examined not within the context of history but within the context of the art of letter writing, the medieval concept of friendship, and the description of late medieval diplomacy. Chaucer's is a "public stance," which…
Besserman, Lawrence [L.]
New Literary History 22 (1991): 177-97.
Chaucer intended to entertain and edify Bukton by means of a network of biblical allusions that also provide an oblique comment on late-fourteenth-century biblical interpretation.
Wuest, Charles.
Studies in Philology 113 (2016): 485-500.
Argues that the enigmatic "thing" thrice referred to in PF is a "structuring device" but also a "reflection on the process of translation, specifically Chaucer's translation of Boethius's 'Consolation of Philosophy'." PF depicts "translation as an…
