Explores the meanings and implications of the phrase "spiced conscience" in Middle English and later English language history, arguing that in both the GP description of the Parson (1.526) and the Wife of Bath's admonition to her husband (WBP 3.435)…
Shawver, Gary Wayne.
Dissertation Abstracts International 60: 3655A, 1999.
Computer-assisted analysis of "storie" and "tale" in context indicates that Chaucer uses them differently. "Storie" typically appears in relation to the historical, courtly, and clerical, associated with public memory and authority. "Tale" refers to…
Sullivan, Helen.
Natalie Grimes Lawrence and Jack A. Reynolds, eds. A Chaucerian Puzzle and Other Medieval Essays (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1961), pp. 1-46.
Challenges the theory that ShT was originally intended to be narrated by the Wife of Bath, and suggests a major emendation: moving lines 7.5-19 (which include first-person feminine pronouns) later in the tale and having them spoken by the merchant's…
Cooper, Helen.
Penguin Classics Essays. <http://us.penguinclassics.com/static/cs/us/10/essays/chaucer.html>. 10 July 2002.
Month-by-month (April to March) commentary on the significance of dates and months in Chaucer's life and works, with occasional quotations. Initial version posted April 2001. An addendum includes the transcript of a "Question and Answer Session" with…
Coghill, Nevill, trans.
London: Faber and Faber, 1972.
A selection of excerpts from Chaucer's verse with facing-page translations, arranged topically in several categories: "Golden World"; Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory; Dreams; Portraiture; Students; Science; and Matrimony. The excerpts (many with passages…
Forni, Kathleen.
Literature / Film Quarterly 30: 256-63, 2002
Not a realization of CT, Pasolini's I racconti di Canterbury is a subversive parody, providing a critical model different from many contemporary approaches.
Kawasaki, Masatoshi.
Hisao Tsuru, ed. Fiction and Truth: Essays on Fourteenth-Century English Literature (Tokyo: Kirihara Shoten, 2000), pp. 35-46.
Explores the relationship between orality and literacy and between authority and experience in the context of medieval folk culture, dealing with BD and HF.
Dillon, Bert.
Laura C. Lambdin and Robert T. Lambdin, eds. Chaucer's Pilgrims: An Historical Guide to the Pilgrims in the "Canterbury Tales" (Westport, Conn.; and London: Greenwood, 1996), pp. 108-15.
Reads the Clerk's sketch in GP as an idealized depiction of academic life in fourteenth-century Oxford, summarizing typical activities and outlooks.
Collette, Carolyn P.
Chaucer Review 10 (1976): 337-49.
In SNT, Chaucer works within the theological tradition of Plato, Augustine, and Prudentius to instruct Christians in their proper attitude toward this world: a "thing" perceived by the physical senses, especially sight, is an apparent reality that…
White, Jack Hammons.
Dissertation Abstracts International 39 (1978): 2926A.
After William Caxton's 1485 edition of CT, Richard Pynson's is the earliest (c. 1492). Pynson's printing practice and his role within the historical scope of English printing provide backgrounds for analysis between the two texts of major variants…
Waller, Martha S.
College English 47 (1985): 873-74.
Woman was made from Adam's rib (rather than his head or foot) so that she would be a fellow to man. This idea is found in Chaucer's ParsT and earlier in Aquinas's "Summa Theologica," pt. 1, chap. 92.
Holahan, Michael
Richardson, David A., ed. Spenser and the Middle Ages: Proceedings from a Special Session at the Eleventh Conference on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan 2-5 May 1976 (Cleveland: Cleveland State University, 1976), pp. 230-36.
Reads Spenser's address to Chaucer in "The Faerie Queene," Book 4, as a declaration of independence as well as an acknowledgement of influence and dependency, arguing that Spenser "locates himself beyond the Middle Ages by invoking medievalisms"…
Bowden, Muriel.
New York: Macmillan; London: Collier-Macmillan, 1967.
Reprints the original version of 1948, with a very brief second preface (half page) and appended additional material and bibliography (pp. 317-28). Throughout the reprinted text, the additional material is signaled by means of daggers included in the…
A community of tradespeople-artisans in small shops on Paternoster Row near Saint Paul's Cathedral was engaged in book production during Chaucer's last decade and the early fifteenth century. The editor, text writer, and artists of Ellesmere may be…
Argues that in "The Ancestor's Tale: Richard Dawkins "uses Chaucer's poetics to address interpretative problems with evolution," particularly the "anthropocentric" notion that "humanity is the 'result' of evolution." Dawkins's uses of the frame…
DeMaria, Robert, Jr., Heesok Chang, and Samantha Zacher, eds.
Chichester: Wiley, 2014.
lxix, 458 pp.
Includes twenty-six essays by individual authors that survey a range of issues in understanding the concept of "British literature" in the medieval period, considering history, politics, modes of production, literary forms, reception, religion,…
Twenty-nine essays on the literary, social, political, and geographical contexts within which Chaucer produced his work, as well as his response to contemporary ideologies. Each essay includes a survey of existing scholarship in a given area,…
Readings in social and cultural history for classroom purposes, arranged in eight sections: politics and ideology, social structures, daily life, religious life and prayer, knighthood and war, reading and education, sciences and medicine, and…
Intended as a "do-it-yourself course" for first-time readers of CT, the Companion is organized in a series of separate chapters devoted to GP and to most tales, although the Links, CkT and SqT, Thop, Mel, MkT, and ParsT are consigned to appendices.
Thirty-eight essays by various authors, arranged in seven subheadings: "Overviews"; "The Production and Reception of Texts"; "Language and Literature"; "Encounters with Other Cultures"; "Special Themes"; "Genres"; "and Readings." Each essay includes…
Thirty-four essays by various authors, with an introduction and an epilogue by the editor, all on topics pertaining to English poetry from its origins through the fifteenth century. Each essay includes suggestions for further reading, and the volume…
Bawcutt, Priscilla, and Janet Hadley Williams, eds.
Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y. : D. S. Brewer, 2006.
Thirteen essays by various authors and an introduction by the editors. Topics include studies of individual poets and poems (Henryson, Dunbar, Douglas, Lyndsay, Richard Holland's "Buke of Howlat," Gilbert Hay's "Buik of King Alexander the…
Salih, Sarah, ed.
Rochester, N.Y.; and Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 2006.
Seven essays by various authors and an introduction by the editor. The book discusses late medieval English saints from a number of perspectives (readership, shrines and festivals, gender, historiography), with recurrent references to Chaucer,…
