Dor, Juliette De Caluwe.
North-Western European Language Evolution 2 (1983): 73-91.
Classifies French conversational loan words (A-D) in CT by frequency, grammatical nature, and date of first occurrence. Only thirty-nine words are used first by Chaucer, who innovates less than previously thought.
Wallace, David.
Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 19-37.
Traces Chaucer's increasingly creative use of sources and development as a poet: his treatment of French materials in Rom, BD, and HF; his use of Dante in BD and HF; his adaptation of Boccaccio in Anel, PF, and TC; and his own developing,…
Kawasaki, Masatoshi.
Eigo Seinen (Tokyo) 135:9 (1990): 433-35.
Considers the conflict between "authority," which is based on higher culture, and "experience," characteristic of folk mode, emphasizing the significance of "game in ernest" in CT. "Game" derives from the festive storytelling contest.(In Japanese).
Ehrhart, Margaret Jean.
Dissertation Abstracts International 35 (1975): 7299A-300A.
Through study of Machaut's 'dits', we begin to get a sense of what Chaucer saw in Machaut's work. In addition to appreciation of his style, Chaucer must have recognized in Machaut's constant theme--human love, rightly and wrongly ordered--a sense of…
Bennett, J. A. W.
S. S. Hussey, ed. Piers Plowman: Critical Approaches (London: Methuen, 1969), pp. 310-24 and 352-53.
Explores the affinities and "common sympathies" between William Langland and Chaucer, including their "Englishness," their views of religion and virtue, their shared sense of human variety, and the possibility that Chaucer may have read "Piers…
Bennett, J. A. W.
J. A. W. Bennett. The Humane Medievalist (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura; Wolfeboro, N.H.: Boydell & Brewer, 1982), pp. 13-29.
Diffident comparisons point out the "Englishness" of both Chaucer and Langland (though Chaucer gives us little of London city life, his limits being Dartmouth, Strother, Oxford, and Cambridge). Bennett discusses the down-to-earth tones, association…
Constance is not, as Delany (1974) claims, a character who embodies and recommends self-degradation and abject submission to power in all its forms. What is important is that Constance discovers in the course of her experience that Providence, not…
Manning, Stephen.
Edward Vasta and Zacharias P. Thundy, ed. Chaucerian Problems and Perspectives: Essays Presented to Paul E. Beichner, C. S. C. (Notre Dame, Ind.: Univeristy of Notre Dame Press, 1979), pp. 13-23.
Constance is not the passive ninny she has been accused of being. She possesses a presence which demands and receives forcible response; she moves in her world with self-sufficiency; her virtue is heroic; her ability to accept what God sends gives…
Notes that the account of the Princess of Apulia found in some versions of the "Gesta Romanorum" has parallels with the biblical account of Jonah and with MLT, which alludes to Jonah.
Correale, Robert M.
Marian Library Studies 26 (1998-2000).
Correale traces allusions to Lamentations 1.12 in Marian "planctus" tradition, arguing that appeals for sympathy linked to Mary underlie Constance's prayer to the Virgin in MLT.
Ando, Shinsuke.
Key-Word Studies in "Beowulf" and Chaucer 1 (1980): 49-57.
Chaucer's Nature, when the term is explicitly used, is an "idee fixe" essentially based on the orthodox medieval conception. The writer, however, examines the interest and attitude with which Chaucer represented the various aspects of humanity, and…
Noguchi, Shunichi.
Toshiyuki Takamiya and Richard Beadle, eds. Chaucer to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of Shinsuke Ando (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992), 25-31.
Surveys background to Chaucer's idea of nature; identifies his uses of nature as a personification of divine ordinance, as in PF; and argues that Chaucer anticipates modern naturalism when he does not personify nature, as in KnT.
Huber, Joan Raphael.
Dissertation Abstracts International 28.04 (1967): 1397A.
Explores the attitudes toward death depicted in ABC, Purse, HF, and Bo, and studies CT for evidence of what Chaucer's own opinion of death may have been.
Glover, Kyle Stephen.
Dissertation Abstracts International 46 (1986): 3346A-3347A.
Covenants, a pervasive theme in CT, may bind guest and host, ruler and subject, spouses, kin, or God and humanity. The covenant supports a willingly assumed hierarchy, a model for order; yet these bonds may be reversed.
Yonekura, Hiroshi.
Raymond Hickey and Stanislaw Puppel, eds. Language History and Linguistic Modelling: A Festschrift for Jacek Fisiak on His 60th Birthday. 2 Vols. (Berlin and New York: Mouton, 1997), 1:229-48.
Documents that compounding was an active process of word formation in Middle English, tabulating Chaucer's compound words and showing that he favored combinations of two Old English nouns rather than combining a noun with another word form or Old…
Minnis, A. J.
A. J. Minnis, ed. Chaucer's "Boece" and the Medieval Tradition of Boethius (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), pp. 83-166.
Surveys scholarly discussion of Chaucer's sources for his extrapolatory glosses in Bo, arguing that he was indebted to "some version of the Remigian glosses," to Jean de Meun's "livres de confort," and to a complete version of Nicholas Trevet's…
Frequently used in ParsT, colloquial anaphora enhances the homiletic style in such repetitious expressions as "Now Comth...," "Look forther...," "Certes...," and "Soothly,...."
Chaucer's punning in ShT is complex, some puns depending upon the eye ("tale," "tallynge") and others upon the ear alone. The Shipman imports into English a foreign form (the fabliau) and foreign (especially French) financial words "that hadden…
Watts, William H.
Hugo Keiper, Richard J. Utz, and Cristoph Bode, eds. Nominalism and Literary Discourse: New Perspectives (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997), pp. 145-55,
Discusses the problematic nature of relating late-medieval nominalism to Chaucer's literary texts. Chaucer's representation of philosophizing clerks suggests that he took a dim view of such figures of contemporary life, whom he tended to portray as…
Severs, J. Burke.
Beryl Rowland, ed. Chaucer and Middle English Studies in honour of Rossell Hope Robbins (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974), pp. 140-52.
Surveys Chaucer's seven clerks (Nicholas and Absolon of MilT, John and Aleyn of RvT, the clerk of FranT, Jankyn of WBP, and the Clerk), describing the extent to which the characterizations accord with or echo what is known of "fourteenth-century…
Goodwin, Amy W.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 28 (2006): 231-35.
Goodwin explores the practical problems of source study - terminology and the constraints of publication - in relation to ClT. Comments on Boccaccio's and Philippe de Mézières' Griselda stories as "sources of invention" for Chaucer's version.
Bodden, M. C.
Mark D. Meyerson, Daniel Thiery, and Oren Falk, eds. 'A Great Effusion of Blood'? Interpreting Medieval Violence (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2004), pp. 216-40.
Bodden reads ClT as Chaucer's deconstruction of the violence of hagiography. Plot and purported allegory clash in the Tale, and Walter is concerned not with Griselda's obedience but with her outward show. Virtue without will is no virtue at all. The…
Mitchell, J. Allan.
Studies in Philology 102.1 (2005): 1-26
Mitchell examines the polyvalent meanings of ClT and reflects on the processes of moral deliberation and the polarities that possible meanings represent. The Tale invites us to think hard about the nature of moral thinking.
