Browse Items (16319 total)

Shows that the "blered" eye image in CYT (7.730) and "Piers Plowman" indicates covetousness, associated with "unkynde" or unnatural separation from community and knowledge.

Palaeographical differences between the hands of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts of CT and of Additional 35287 are more compelling than are the similarities. Horobin suggests that Pinkhurst "was not Chaucer's personal copyist" and focuses on…

Pynson's 1492 edition of CT illustrates the editor's role in decline of verse forms.

Tolmie notes "an anti-Augustinian semiotic moment" (111) in MilT.

The Wife of Bath and Langland draw on similar "schoolroom texts" such as Matthew of Vendôme's "Tobias."

Against the sociopolitical background of the fourteenth century, Kirk examines the Plowman as worker and religious symbol in "Piers Plowman" and Chaucer's GP.

MerT is a direct response to passus 9 of the B version of Piers Plowman, presenting an "unkyndely similitude" of marriage in contrast to the ideal expressed in Langland's poem.

GP was inspired by the A text of Piers Plowman, echoing its concern with estates satire, its concern with social and moral cohesion, and many of its details.

The ironic treatment of the lovers in Book III may be clarified by examining representations of "charitas" and "cupiditas." Chaucer juxtaposes them throughout the poem and with special effect in the proem and aubades of Book III. His use and…

The famous "Troilus" Frontispiece has created an image of Chaucer's audience as the royal court with Richard and Ann. But such identification in an unrealistic picture, clearly a presentation-picture variant, is impossible. Chaucer's actual audience…

Although Chaucer's use of "termes" ranges from simple pun or word play to the emergence of an elaborate figurative pattern, his basic technique makes certain words gain power from use, context, and collocation and perhaps forms the basis of the…

Aside from questions of direct borrowings, "Romeo and Juliet" has much in common with TC. Resemblances include handling of characters, attitudes toward love and death, the use of comedy within the tragedy, imagery, and the overall shape of the…

The wording of MerT has many echoes, some heretofore unidentified, of medieval marriage services. Suggestions of the Christian ideal are thus juxtaposed to the characters' perverse misunderstandings of marriage throughout the tale, providing an…

Explores ways that "Jacques Lacan's radical account of sexual difference" as "the articulation of an impasse of language" can open ways to see beyond "normative views of sexual difference and femininity" in reading WBPT.

Connects the "[f]inancial discourse" of WBP with those of "The Book of Margery Kempe" and of "Paston women's papers," showing that fictional and historical women share a mutual mercantile "understanding of life" that unites their "spiritual, marital,…

Uses Giorgio Agamben's discussion of "homo sacer" to argue that the "bare life" of imprisonment for Emelye, Palamon, and Arcite in KnT serves Theseus's sovereignty. Justifying exceptions to previous rulings, Theseus maintains his power through…

Focuses on Troilus's love letters in TC, and on Absolon’'sin MilT and Damyan's in MerT, reading them in light of courtly conventions and placing them "in dialogue with the impact of love missives as recorded in manuscripts that circulated in the…

Addresses shouting in Chaucer's narratives, focusing on "the hue and cry," which, "strikingly frequent," engages "with questions about the reliability of narratives, and also with problems of rape and sexual consent, misogynistic narratives and…

Argues that the "tidal influences" in FranT encourage "feminist interpretation" of Dorigen's promise, "identification of an environmentalist sensibility" in the tale, and attention to human subjection "to natural cycles and forces." Furthermore,…

Argues that "contemporary critical translation theories shed light on" Chaucer's "translational environment" and identifies "a cluster of five translational actions"--"communication, transformation, transportation, hermeneutics, and liminality"--that…

Explores how Alexander Pope's posing of his "Women ben ful of Ragerie" as a Chaucerian work reflects eighteenth-century concerns about literary history and authenticity and "provides us with new ways of understanding how Chaucer was read,…

Argues that the widow Ranter of Aphra Behn's "The Widow Ranter; or, The History of Bacon in Virginia" is "a 'reincarnation' of Chaucer's Wife of Bath in the New [W]orld." Behn's play "translates the wife . . . to colonial Virginia to negotiate both…

The observable final total of pilgrims is 33, a symbolically significant sum. The Pilgrim Chaucer's two tales may have been meant as a center-point signifying a shift from game to earnest. The initial statement that there were 29 may demonstrate…

In MLT, Chaucer uses the case of Custance's Latin being understood by Northumbrians - an instance of xenoglossia, more characteristic of the saint's life genre - to focus on translation in various genres and to make Custance, "subtly active," an "apt…

Argues that the scriptural glosses found in Thomas Godfray's 1535 publication of "The Ploughman's Tale" are similar to Langland's techniques in "Piers Plowman," as are the "poem's anticlericism and alliteration"; when Godfray republished the tale in…