Pearsall, Derek.
Geoffrey Lester, ed. Chaucer in Perspective: Middle English Essays in Honour of Norman Blake (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), pp. 178-93.
Examines the editorial implications of one metrically unambiguous feature of Chaucer's grammar. Chaucer's final -e has syllabic value when it occurs as the ending of monosyllabic adjectives with unelided weak inflexion followed by nouns with stress…
Wax, Judith.
New Republic 169.10 (September 17, 1973): 24-25.
Sendup of the Watergate political scandal in pseudo-Chaucerian rhymed couplets, based on GP descriptions. Includes comic foonotes. Reprinted in "Time" 102.13 (1972): 20, with a brief introduction.
Lampert-Weissig, Lisa.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 43 (2021): 111-49; 3 b& w illus.
Reads PrT and the thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman "Hugo de
Lincolnia" as "conspiracy theory narratives," showing "how they use language and imagery to generate aesthetic emotions, especially fear and disgust," and revealing connections "both to…
Mitchell, Ken, Thomas Chase, and Michael Trussler, eds.
Regina, Saskatchewan: University of Regina, 1999.
An anthology of forty works of short fiction designed for "first-year university students," with an Introduction that discusses the genre, and an appendix of related literary terms. Each narrative is accompanied by a brief assessment and a…
Addresses how "manipulations of time" affect the narrative structure of KnT, and "recreate instabilities inherent to fourteenth-century chivalric ideas." Views Theseus, Palamon, and Arcite as the "walking dead," since they only "exist in literature…
Kirkpatrick, Robin.
Chaucer and the Italian Trecento (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 201-29.
Focuses on qualities that distinguish CT from the "Decameron:" the self-deprecating Chaucer persona, Chaucer's concern with human individuality, his willingness to admit the limitations of language and art, and his use of irony.
Grindley, Carl.
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 18.2 (2011): 79-91.
Offers a series of undergraduate classroom exercises to teach differences in kinds of edited texts and to introduce concepts crucial to editorial practice, using samples from Middle English literature: MerT IV.2069–76 most extensively.
Behrman, Mary.
Studies in the Novel 42 (2010): 453-70.
Identifies and assesses allusions to medieval literature in Ian McEwan's novel "Atonement" (2001), emphasizing Chaucer's works (TC and ClT) and Arthurian literature.
Barr, Jane.
Julia Bolton Holloway, Constance S. Wright, and Joan Bechtold, eds. Equally in God's Image: Women in the Middle Ages (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), pp. 122-28.
The Wife of Bath tells us that she acquired forbidden learning through forbidden sex with university students, breaking the barriers of both literacy and celibacy, as reflected in her challenge to Pauline epistles and Jerome's Vulgate.
Stanbury, Sarah.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 13 (1991): 141-58.
Feminist film theory and psychoanalytic theory clarify how acts of looking and the arrangements of personal space establish power relations in TC. Explores how power is gained and lost in Troilus's initial gaze at Criseyde, her view of him from her…
The Narrator's recollection of the Pilgrim's talk and the intonations of his own voice leave their sounds in all subsequent English poetry. These sounds are the result of the brilliant combination of conventional features.
Klinch, Anne L., ed.
Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019.
Anthologizes 131 poems "that illustrate the range and variety" of Middle English lyrics. Includes none by Chaucer, but refers to his works recurrently to clarify themes and techniques, both in the Introduction and in discussions of individual lyrics…
Masciandaro, Nicola.
Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
Masciandaro investigates the vocabulary of work (travail, labour, swink, werk, craft) and its cultural significance in late medieval England, exploring depictions of the history of work in Middle English literature (including Gower, a treatise on…
Cheney, Patrick.
Curtis Perry and John Watkins, eds. Shakespeare and the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 103-25.
Cheney examines how Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and Turtle" echoes PF, particularly as "a poem about the politics of authorship." As a "great poet of self-crowning," Spenser responds to Chaucer's self-effacing pursuit of fame. Shakespeare sets these…
Knight, Stephen.
James Bothwell, P. J. P. Goldberg, and W. M. Ormrod, eds. The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England (Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y.: York Medieval Press, 2000), pp. 101-22.
Knight considers Chaucer's Plowman (among other figures) in an effort to construct a "structure of feeling" pertinent to late-medieval English labor. As in the mystery plays and in Piers Plowman, the depiction of labor in CT is first idealized, then…
An examination of "wit" and its near synonyms provides a control for the study of terms of cognition. Bo discards native words such as "understanding" and "knowing," in favor of Romance words such as "intelligence" and "science." These latter terms…
Partridge, Stephen.
English Manuscript Studies, 1100-1700 03 (1992): 29-37.
Compares the vocabulary and style of Equat, Astr, and other contemporary scientific treatises, concluding that variations between Equat and Astr cast doubt on Chaucer's authorship of the former.
Koster, Josephine A.
T. L. Burton and John F. Plummer, eds. "Seyd in Forme and Reverence": Essays on Chaucer and Chaucerians in Memory of Emerson Brown, Jr. (Provo, Utah: Chaucer Studio Press, 2005), pp. 35-45.
Reads WBP as an example of genre-bending: a parody of female saints' lives. Surveys Chaucer's uses of the conventions of female hagiography in CT and argues that Alison of Bath "acts in precisely the opposite way to an orthodox saint." The essay…
Hilmo, Maidie.
Susanna Fein and David Raybin, eds. Chaucer: Visual Approaches (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), pp. 218-43.
Studies the interplay between textual content and "mise-en-page" in the Ellesmere MS of CT, especially its use of gold, border ornament, decorated letters, and glosses. Such elements shape an integrated experience of the text, duly "sanitized and…
Of the sixteen extant manuscripts of TC, the organization of the Morgan, Corpus Christi, and St. John's shows the greatest concern for both readers and listeners of the fifteenth century.
Machan, Tim.
Herbert Schendl and Laura Wright, eds. Code-Switching in Early English (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), pp. 303-34.
Describes various ways that scribes used "visual pragmatics" (i.e., "bibliographic codes like rubrication, illumination, underscoring and so forth") to indicate code-switching in late medieval English literary manuscripts. Includes a comment on the…
