Boitani, Piero.
Joerg O. Fichte, ed. Chaucer's Frame Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 83-128.
Examines Marian prayers and images in Dante, de Guilleville, Petrarch, and Chaucer, who use prayers to the Virgin at crucial moments in their works. A comparative study illuminates religious ideals and narrative strategies in CT (PrT, SNT), TC, and…
Brand, Ralph.
Historical Research: The Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 60 (1987): 147-65.
The Inns of Court did not serve as places of legal instruction before the fifteenth century. Evidence from legal manuscripts suggests that such instruction was handled not only through attendance at court but also by means of lectures, annotated…
Breckenridge, Jay.
Pennsylvania English 15:1 (1990): 37-48.
Breckenridge discusses his stage dramatization of Geoffrey Chaucer and the problems regarding Chaucer's life and personality engendered by life records and critical appraisal of Chaucer the man and Chaucer the persona.
Brundage, James A.
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
An exhaustive study of sexual practices and attitudes (both "official" and "popular") and the attempted regulation of sex and marriage under canon law. Chapter 10 deals with the period from 1348 to the Reformation.
Dinshaw, Carolyn.
Madison : University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
In chapters on Adam, TC, LGW, MLT, WBT, ClT, and PardT, Dinshaw argues that Chaucer's writing constructs and engages a sexual poetics. She contends that "whoever exerts control of signification, of language and the literary act, is associated with…
Duby, Georges, ed.
Cambridge and London: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1988.
English version of of Phillipe Aries and Georges Duby, gen. eds. De l'Europe feodale a la Renaissance, vol. 2 of Histoire de la vie privee. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1985, translated by Arthur Goldhammer.
Edwards, Robert R.
Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 1989.
Argues that Chaucer's dream visions are concerned with both "mimetic representation" (the narrator's story of his dream) and aesthetic systems. Chapter 1, "The Practice of Theory," discusses Chaucer's study of Latin, Italian, and French writers to…
Erler, Mary, and Maryanne Kowaleski, eds.
Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1988.
A collection of essays by various hands. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Women and Power in the Middle Ages under Alternative Title.
Erzgräber, Willi.
Gerd Wolfgang Weber, ed. Idee, Gestalt, Geschichte: Festschrift Klaus von See. Studien zur Europaischen Kulturtradition (Odense, Denmark: Odense University Press, 1988.), pp. 117-35.
Discusses Chaucer's use of the concepts "kynde" and "nature." Although Chaucer uses the two interchangeably at times, "kynde" represents absolute moral standards, indicating power and reason. The "lex naturalis" of antiquity also includes these…
Fisher, Sheila, and Janet E. Halley, eds.
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989.
Twelve essays by various hands that stand "at the intersection of Anglo-American empirical historicism and French theories of textuality." Historical women were real in ways that are absent from writings. Essays are grouped under three headings:…
Frank, Robert Worth,Jr.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989): 5-14.
Argues that Chaucerians should assess more explicitly the consequences of critical readings: for instance, interpreting Alison of Bath as a murderer or Criseyde as having an incestuous affair with Pandarus.
The rare pre-Chaucerian fabliaux in English display affinities with exempla, drama, and inverted romance. Critics have long pondered why no fabliau tradition in English exists; they hypothesize scribal prudery or loss of many texts. Considering the…
Gallacher, Patrick J., and Helen Damico, eds.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.
Essays began as papers read at the sixty-first annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, April 1986. For three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search under Alternative Title.
Given-Wilson, Chris.
London and New York: Routledge, 1987.
Studies the chief preoccupations of the noble and knightly families of the fourteenth century; politics (both local and national), the lands, and the family structure.
Presents the 68 Sanctorale sermons, based on British Library Additional 40672 in collation with 25 other manuscripts, with modern punctuation and capitalization, as the second of four volumes on the 294 English Wycliffite sermons.
Haas, Renate.
Uwe Boker, Manfred Markus, and Ranier Schowerling, eds. The Living Middle Ages: Studies in Mediaeval English Literature and its Tradition. A Festschrift for Karl Heinz Goller. (Stuttgart: Belser, 1989), pp. 319-32.
Considers Furnivall's use of Chaucer and Langland in his teaching at the Working Men's College and analyzes some of his early editions and the political effect of his "pet book" among the EETS English Gilds volumes. Furnivall's endeavors and…
Hasenfratz, Robert Joseph.
Dissertation Abstracts International 50 (1989): 439A-440A.
Examines the emotional exploitation of the grotesque and sensational in the light of various modern critical views. Analyzes writings from Old English homilies to Margery Kempe, including Chaucer's ClT and PhyT.
In the allusions to infernal sufferers in medieval poems, the lover and the miser are often linked: both have lost their rational capacity, and the sins of both proceed from cupidity. Hence, such reference in BD and TC show that the Black Knight…
Kelly, Henry Ansgar.
Leeds Studies in English 20 (1989): 191-206.
Chaucer discovered tragedy as a narrative genre not from Boccaccio but from Boethius and from the glossator of his own copy of "De consolatione," who may have been Ralph Strode. Chaucer's concept of tragedy included the fall of the innocent as well…
