Browse Items (16089 total)

Chaucer's characters' beards, medievally understood, are iconographic and physiognomic, and neatly fit the personalities of their wearers.

Clerk John's oath by "seint Cutberd" (line 4127) is to the appropriate saint Cuthbert, but Chaucer puns on "cut-beard," suggesting sexual deceit.

Assesses Chaucer's "vulgarisms" for the ways that they "reveal" his "expert insight into the uninhibited lives of the folk." Comments on Chaucer's depictions of incest, claims that Chaucer's uses 119 "bawdy terms," and focuses on his robust…

An alphabetical glossary of obscene, sexual, and scatological references, puns, and allusions in Chaucer's works. Individual entries define and analyze the terms and phrases, providing bibliographical citations to previous critical discussions; the…

Disagreeing throughout with Joerg Fichte and Edmund Reiss, Stemmler uses literature contemporary with Chaucer to show that Ros is a "seriously meant love-lyric." It is not a parody.

Traces the development of the "sermo humilis" tradition in literature and the visual arts as a context for Chaucer's uses of "pathetic style" in the Ugolino episode of MkT, PrT, PhyT, and MLT, arguing that these accounts reflect the evolution of…

Tabulates the percentage of romance words in the works of Chaucer against the overall length of these works, suggesting that, in terms of its romance vocabulary, Equat "is to be regarded as a work by Chaucer." Establishes a logarithmic formula for…

The problem of ascertaining Chaucer's audience(s) is complex, running from the fictional one of GP to the real audiences of the poet's day to the audiences of the present.

Symposium by thirteen Chaucerians.

Chaucer's frequent references to nagging wives and henpecked husbands have less to do with his personal views than with his awareness of audience; women as well as men could share the misogynistic joke because in Pauline theory the shrew was "some…

Chaucer obviosly expects his audience to be familiar with his person, his previous writings, and his reputation as an author. He also expects his audience to reflect about the moral function of poetry. He draws his audience into his poetry by using…

Special individuals of the lesser gentry--knights, squires, and women of equivalent rank closely connected with the court, in such professional positions as the Chancery, secretaryships, and legal work--found their complicated life-experiences…

Brewer surveys the presence (and absence) of music in Chaucer's work, suggesting that Chaucer knew its celestial, theoretical underpinnings and enjoyed its zesty, earthy pleasures.

Exemplifies the varieties and density of assonance in Chaucer's poetry, commenting on assonance in French, Italian, and English predecessors, and on Chaucer's uses of assonance in combination with other devices of sound and emphasis.

Chaucer is the rule for vernacular poets rather than the exception. His appropriation of monastic patterns of thought and ascetic ideas and imagery were a tradition already becoming a classic in his time. In CT, the Summoner's portrait, the…

In the Middle Ages the term "art" meant the liberal arts or almost any serious endeavor (other than the visual arts), also involving Gregory the Great's dictum that "the art of arts is the rule of souls." Chaucer was less influenced by the visual…

Surveys prior criticism of ManT and observes recurrent irony in the tale, particularly in Chaucer's assigning unnecessary expansions and repetitions to the verbose narrator.

Argues that Chaucer uses portions of Pope Innocent's "De Miseria" in MLPT to "further characterize" the Man of Law, deepening the "concern with wealth" found in the GP description of the Sergeant. Furthermore, the portions from "De Miseria" unify the…

Identifies "traces of the primitive folk tale" that underlie the Cupid and Psyche myth and WBT, and maintains Chaucer's familiarity with some version of the myth. Compares and contrasts aspects of the Tale with its English analogues, and argues that…

A comparison of the manuscripts of TC with those of Boccaccio's "Filostrato" indicates that Chaucer's narrative divisions correspond to the summary rubrics in the earlier work, even if he did not retain Boccaccio's internal subdivisions.

Considers Chaucer's use of Arthurian legend, from his use in TC of the traditional French conception of Lancelot for Troilus to his examination of the subtext the legend provides for the fabric of fourteenth-century English society. In particular,…

WBT is an ironic Arthurian romance, particularly when viewed alongside Marie de France's "Lanval" and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," which parallel it in several ways.

Demonstrates Chaucer's "skills as a miniaturist," discussing antecedents in rhetorical tradition to the phrase "places delitables" (i.e., "locus amoenus") in FranT (5.899) and the interdependence of "moral and physical gifts" in the description of…

Gauges how subject, author, and reader "interact with varying degrees of subtlety in the GP descriptions of the pilgrims: the "snapshot" (Yeoman), idealization (Parson), caricature (Summoner), balance between ideal and caricature (Wife of Bath), and…

Chaucer's art of characterization is an act of poetic creation rather than the mere use of rhetorical convention. By employing rhetorical devices which vivify emotion and intensify dramatic action, or which infuse suggestion of movement, Chaucer…