Holsinger, Bruce.
In The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. https://opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu, 2017. Relocated 2025 at https://opencanterburytales.lsusites.org/
Outlines "Chaucer's lives as poet, public figure, and literary persona," with recurrent reminders of the limits of what can be known from surviving evidence. Designed for pedagogical, includes suggestions for further reading.
ManT reflects Chaucer's awareness of the dangers of challenging authority, yet he repeatedly challenges Christian and Boethian orthodoxies concerning evil. KnT does not reconcile the existence of evil, and the orthodoxy of Christian Providence in MLT…
Ellis, Deborah S.
Chaucer Review 27 (1992): 150-61.
Both in the GP portrait of the Reeve and in RvPT, Chaucer draws on medieval devil iconography and folklore, deepening the sinister character of this pilgrim and helping to explain his particular hair style, his thinness, his home in the North, and…
Chaucer's depiction of the legendary battle of Actium likely reflects both his understanding of contemporary naval warfare technology and his awareness of military treatises by Vegetius and Giles of Rome.
Jimura, Akiyuki.
English and English Teaching, Vol. 2: A Festschrift in Honour of Kiichiro Nakatani (Hiroshima: Department of English, Faculty of School Education, Hiroshima University, 1997), pp. 57-69.
In TC, descriptions of nature, including natural objects, plants, and animals, reflect the characters' emotions. When characters "act in harmony with nature," things go well; when they act against nature, they are destroyed by its "uncontrollable…
Dor, Juliette De Caluwe.
Andre Crepin, ed. Linguistic and Stylistic Studies in Medieval English. Publications de l'Association des Medievistes de l'Ensignement Superieur 10. (Paris, 1984): pp. 63-79.
Reconsiders Fisiak's survey of Chaucer's derivational affixes in function of her corpus of French loan words in the conversational sections of CT. Distinguishes between wholesale borrowings and French words onto which morphemes had been attached,…
Jimura, Akiyuki.
The Ohtani Studies (July 30, 1980): 1-20.
The admirable and delicate precision with which each character works depends on the poet's skillful use of adjectives and similes. The writer illustrates this fact with particular reference to the descriptions of Troilus and Criseyde.
Sanders, Barry.
Studies in Medieval Culture 4 (1974): 437-45.
WBP/WBT are best read as one woman's satire of both preachers and their anti-feminist propaganda. Attacking antifeminism in medieval preaching, she uses the structure of the medieval sermon.
Especially in the Eagle's speech on sound in HF, Chaucer's verse reflects his concern not with the monological, authoritative, written aspects of speech but with speech as an exploratory, vital, interactive process, recently explored by such…
Boyd, Beverly.
Florilegium 10 (1991, for 1988): 99-105.
Chaucer is more attentive to the noises produced by people and their actions than to those of natural phenomena. He often suggests noises rather than describing them directly. His noisiest passages involve tournaments, chases, and music.
Morris Halle and Samuel J. Keyser, through careful computer analysis, seem to have put down the myth of the hundred-year-hibernation of Chaucer's decasyllabic line. By studying the stresses and their positions in the line, Halle and Keyser have…
Whearty, Bridget.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 40 (2018): 331-73.
Identifies a "pray for Chaucer" trope in fifteenth-century commentary on the poet, observing a "metaphor of literary history" that is based in "guild-like community," underpinned by notions of purgatory, intercession, and friendship. Rooted in Thomad…
Close comparison of passages in TC and their sources in Boccaccio's "Filostrato" discloses how Chaucer "sets in motion" early in his poem "a train of events whose implications go far beyond the immediate moment, perhaps beyond the love story itself,"…
Prendergast, Thomas A.
New York and London : Routledge, 2004.
Invoking a medieval association of book and body, Prendergast examines the cultural history of Chaucer's remains. The study assesses fifteenth-century attempts to mourn Chaucer's death, traces early modern ambivalence toward the poet's body-as-relic,…
Maintains that the characterizations of the Monk in GP and in MkPT are consistent, and attributes their differing tones to the Monk's decision to "change his image" in the eyes of his fellow pilgrims while requiting the Host's derision with the…
White, Robert B. Jr.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 70 (1971): 13-30.
Characterizes the Monk as the "satiric consummation of all possible monastic faults," analyzing him in light of the "seven points of disciple" of the Rule of St. Benedict (obedience, poverty, celibacy, propertylessness, labor, claustration, and…
Osborn, Marijane.
Vistas in Astronomy 39: 605-14, 1996.
When read "astrolabically" rather than astrologically, the "chronographia" of ParsP is accurate and ripe with spiritual meaning. It was inspired by Dante's presentation of the stars in the "Divine Comedy" and indicates the imminence of Easter.…
Neuse, Richard.
Berkeley. Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1991.
CT responds to Dante's Commedia in a "conscious attempt " to continue its "poetic tradition" of pilgrimage narrative. Chaucer's pilgrims "comment or focus on one or more aspects of the Dantean pilgrimage," and both works define the human image and…
Murphy, Russell E.
Yeats Eliot Review 28.1–2 (2011): 3-29.
Reconsiders CT as the source of the opening line of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," exploring intertextual relations with the opening of Dante's "Divine Comedy" as well. Also clarifies the importance of Chaucer's role in the English tradition of…
Challenges characterizations of the Wife of Bath that treat her as an icon or as a representative figure. Reads WBP for the ways that it may be regarded as a "modern case history" that reflects a complex personality rife with desires and regrets.
