Mel and Th function together to create a game that shows and explores how author and audience together manipulate and receive language in the creation of a text.
Boitani, Piero.
Piero Boitani. The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1989), pp. 20-55.
The Monk's "de casibus" tragedy poses a problem for the modern reader with an idea of tragedy that involves fallibility, sin, and error. Chaucer himself holds a more complex idea of tragedy than does the Monk. Chaucer's version differs from Dante's…
MkT is very likely a virtually unrevised early poem, the first to be written after Chaucer's return from Italy in 1372 and his first collection of stories. As such, it deserves a separate existence, as Chaucer's early poem 'De casibus vivorum…
Jager, Eric.
Modern Language Quarterly 49 (1990, for 1988): 3-18.
In his tale, the Monk selectively edits the legend of Croesus from Jean de Meun's "Roman de la Rose" to "lessen the dreamer's responsibility for his fate" and thus to "fit Croesus into his gallery of tragic figures."
The statement that the fox "thurghout the hegges brast" into the barnyard, which does not accord with the earlier description of the yard as surrounded by a fence and a dry ditch, is perhaps best accounted for as a narrational paraphrase of the name…
Judging Chaucer's works, especially NPT, by modern critical and cultural-literary standards deprives us of the "ideas and customs" of Chaucer's age, which are necessary for proper appreciation.
Saito, Isamu.
Kinshiro Oshitari et al., eds. Philologia Anglica (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1988), pp. 346-55.
The Nun's Priest's pronouncement, "Taketh fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille," has been interpreted exegetically. Scriptural exegesis, however, is invalid for explicating NPT, which is Menippean--dialogic and polyphonic.
The central question for NPT is not whether it is allegorical or ironic but how it uses allegory and irony to refigure its own past. This tale was composed for a court audience at the beginning of a new vernacular tradition. What kind of authority…
Suhamy, Henri.
Mythes, Croyances et Religions dans le Monde Anglo-Saxon 6 (1988): 119-23.
Examines whether NPT manifests a superficial or an intrinsic religiosity and treats NPT--a tale appropriate to the teller--as a religious allegory with Chauntecler as Man or Adam, Pertelote as Eve, and the fox as Devil.
Hitchcox, Kathryn Langford.
Dissertation Abstracts International 49 (1989): 3033A.
Most scholarly treatments of Chaucer and alchemy deal with whether Chaucer believed in alchemy or whether he condemned it, but Chaucer's primary concern with alchemy was to use it as "symbolic language," especially in SNT and CYT. This salvific…
In CYT, Chaucer's comic use of technical terms related to alchemy or to alchemists (e.g., "craft," "disciplyne," "emprise," "experience," "labour," "loore," "maistrie," "multiplicatioun," "philosophie," "science," "travaille," "wirkyng,"…
PardT, ParsT, and Ret all treat the moral complexities of language. Applying a text from Timothy, quoted by both the Pardoner and the Parson, reveals that the Pardoner's discourse is barrren; the Parson's fruitful. Ret is the fruit of ParsT.
ParsT makes use of a tradition of penitential mediation (cf. ParsP 55 and 69) on the virtues and vices. In the plan of CT, ParsT abandons the emotive fiction and fables of the earlier tales for the solid ground of meditation, transforming an earthly…
Wurtele, Douglas J.
Mediaevalia 11 (1989, for 1985): 151-68.
Those similarities to Lollard doctrine--protest against blasphemy, unwillingness to "curse for tithes," and distaste for storytelling--that have been used to argue that Chaucer's Parson was a Lollard or Wycliffite were not peculiar to the Lollards;…
Traditions of simultaneous affirmation and negation found in pseudo-Dionysian mystical theology account for Ret's treatment of the reader and its relation to CT.
The unadorned, unironic ParsT is what Chaucer wanted for the ending to CT. The Ricardian pattern of sickness, pilgrimage, and penitence shows why Thomas Gascoigne's narrative of Chaucer's deathbed retraction of his writings is a likely story, or not…
The shift from the first person of Anelida's complaint to the third person of the narrator's commentary is not an artistic flaw. Attributing the commentary to the Chaucerian narrator is consistent with that character's pose as inexperienced and…
Machan, Tim William.
Chaucer Review 24 (1989): 150-62.
That the Bo scribes altered their text in a number of substantive ways suggests that the "Consolatione" was not a fixed text but a living tradition. This tradition became even more diverse whenever the "Consolatione" was translated. The implication…
Hewitt, Kathleen.
Papers on Language and Literature 25 (1989): 19-35.
BD "questions the very nature of the relation between text and interpretation." Each of the four divisions of the poem examines a different relation of source and text.
Hoagwood, Terence Allan.
Studia Monastica 11:2 (1988): 57-68.
BD contains analogies within analogies and poems within poems. The poem's subject is the mental movement from figure to embedded figure. The redemption offered in the poem is "the salvation that is opened within the mind as it recedes into…
Kooper, Erik Simon.
Dissertation Abstracts International 49 (1989): 2651A.
The Aristotelian view that the marital relationship can involve friendship (found not in Augustine but in Aelred of Rievaulx and Thomas Aquinas) influenced Jean de Meun, translator of Aelred. De Meun's treatment of the matter in "Roman de la Rose"…
Kruger, Steven F.
Dissertation Abstracts International 49 (1989): 2651A.
Kruger investigates the ambivalent nature of dreams in light of various classical and medieval dream theories, as well as actual accounts of dreams. The "middle vision," neither divine nor satanic, figures in Langland, Nicole Oresme, and Chaucer (BD…
