Browse Items (16318 total)

Considers Chaucer's uses of Theban material drawn from the tradition of Statius and Boccaccio, exploring how he adapted his sources and how, in turn, his works were adapted by others. Surveys the "exemplary power" of Thebes in Chaucer's works, and…

Surveys translations and studies of medieval English literature produced in the People's Republic of China, commenting on the important role of Professor Li Fu-ning and describing translations, theses and dissertations, and critical books and essays.…

Uses a "political theology of the refugee as neighbor" to explore contiguities between "Refugee Tales" (2016) and CT. Explicates nuances of "tendre/"tender" in the works and examines the absent presence of Theban refugees in KnT. The Knight "edits…

Seeks to answer the "demande d'amour" of FranT (1622), first eliminating Dorigen and the magician from consideration of who is most "fre," and then arguing that Aurelius and Arveragus have effectively equal claim to be named--a complicated balance…

Compares and contrasts John of MilT with January of MerT as "ridiculous figures" and "gulls of courtly love," the first "senex amans" naïve, the second lascivious. Both men violate "an existing societal order" and the ideals of "sexual propriety and…

Assesses John Lydgate as "the premier learned war poet of the later English Middle Ages," exploring his "Troy Book" and "Seige of Thebes" for the ways they depict the violence of war. Includes recurrent attention to Lydgate's sources, Chaucer's TC,…

Explicates the scene of Pandarus's interruption of Criseyde's reading group (TC,
II.85ff.), attending to its intertextualities, the implications of its setting in a paved "secular parlor," the nature of the female aristocratic readers, and…

Suggests that "wood" indicates lechery in FrT 3.1327, echoed punningly by "harlotrye" in the next line.

Argues that "as a better joke," "worly" is preferable to "worthy" in Tho (7.917). The latter appears to be "scribal normalization" of Chaucer's mocking of a "well-worn native" word.

Argues that Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" alludes to KnT (particularly the figures of Emelye and Arcite) in ways that "perforate the boundaries" of the chronology of Shakespeare's borrowings the from the tale in "Dream" and in "The Two…

Sketches "the mode of literacy" that "occupies a borderland just beyond the precincts of surviving evidence," exploring "the role of dictation" rather than "a sequence of errors in copying that stands between" versions of such texts as TC and "Piers…

Traces Chaucer's uses of purses and other cavities in PardPT as sites of queer reproduction. Throughout, "locates the 'purs' as a gendered, sexualized, and economized site of social exchange."

Includes discussion of the version of ParsT in Longleat, MS 29, a compilation of devotional works where Chaucer's name is "cut from the tale and the work presented in an unambiguously religious context."

Locates the origins of Pandarus's "proverbial expletive" about "haselwodes" (TC 3.890) in the tradition of magical divination by sticks (rhabdomancy), commenting on the "appositeness" of assigning the proverb to the "hard-headed, skeptical Pandarus."

Examines conflicts between secular and religious notions of masculinity in the Monk's description in GP and in MkPT, showing that they depict the Monk's "inability to abide by the expected behaviours of his vocation" and expose him to ridicule by the…

Explores "economic terms and metaphor" in Middle English literature "to determine what such treatment indicates about the shifting social relations of marriage in late medieval England." Discusses how, in WBP, the Wife "appropriate[s] economic…

Discusses the connection between physicality and personality in St. Christopher's hagiography in the "South English Legendary" and, in expanding this connection, uses Chaucer's descriptions of the Miller and the Wife of Bath in GP as additional…

The occasions, imagery, and verbal play of the lyrical interludes in TC clarify Criseyde's role as a Christian archetype, one who leads Troilus from self-absorption to transcendence but who nevertheless remains ambiguous in her own silence and her…

Fradenburg contemplates similarities between Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams" and medieval dream theory (especially Chaucer's in PF, BD, and NPT) as a way to explore the continuities of history and human psychology.

Addresses the male gaze "at other men's bodies," focusing on visual art and on "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." Includes comments on Chaucer's "lingering over the details of Nicholas's ass" in MilT.

Explores "inversions of the material and the immaterial" in the description of the temple of Mars in KnT, describing how the narrator of the description is both "subjectless and immaterial," and investigating "how we think about what we imagine we…

Considers literary completeness, its relations to philosophies of perfection, and "the ways in which incompleteness is a special characteristic of Middle English literature," particularly in manuscript studies. Surveys kinds of incompleteness in CT,…

Weinstock constructs a pseudo-sonnet from Chaucerian couplets and submits it to translation, analysis, and commentary. First publishesd in Peter L. Oesterrich and Thomas O. Sloane, eds. Rhetorica Movet: Studies in Historical and Modern Rhetoric in…

Troilus cannot read the "text" of Criseyde's face because he is too self-absorbed. Thinking only of what she can do for him, he neglects her "context," fails to acknowledge her vulnerability, and thinks of her as an "image in stasis." Although…

As an often-married single woman, the Wife of Bath confronts and eludes the "binarisms that contained married women": married/not married, male/female, experience/authority, etc. In the fantasy of WBT, she succeeds partially in creating a "world of…