Boyd, Beverly.
Florilegium 9 (1990, for 1987): 147-54.
Almost all Chaucer's poetry specifically addressed to Mary includes translation, adaptation, or quotations from disparate sources brought together via "collage" technique. This layered effect has precedent in church liturgy and macaronic lyric.
Dean, James M.
Comparative Literature 41 (1989): 128-40.
Compares Chaucer's treatment of the Mars and Venus fables with Ovid's and with other medieval versions to demonstrate that Chaucer created Mars as a misguided commentator on his own story. Chaucer's audience, familiar with Jean de Meun's "Roman de…
Purdon, L. O.
Papers on Language and Literature 25 (1989): 216-19.
Chaucer's reference to "wod" in "Form Age" 17 not only suggests England's flourishing dyeing industry (lacking in the former age) but also alludes to abuses of that trade.
Allen, Valerie.
Review of English Studies, n.s., 40 (1989): 531-37.
The "first stok" of Gent 1 refers to God as the father of "gentilesse" of Gent 8, to Christ as its exemplar and model. The genealogical image operates as metaphor, pun, and paradox in the poem.
Purdon, Liam O.
Julian N. Wasserman and Lois Roney, eds. Sign, Sentence, Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1989), pp. 144-52.
Sted, which begins as a complaint, reveal the poet's "anxiety over the mutable condition of language."
The Canterbury tale not written by Chaucer operates both as fabliau and as folk tale, with the relentlessly stupid hero both laughed at by the nobility and empathized with by the bourgeoisie, for whom he represents a triumph of the simple classes…
Fisher, John H.
Chaucer Newsletter 11:1 (1989): 1, 4.
Presenting evidence set forth by Pamela Robinson, J. D. North, and D. J. Price, Fisher argues that Peterhouse MS 75.1 of "Equat" is a Chaucer holograph and suggests tantalizing biographical implications.
Review of "Legenda femeilor cinstite si alte poeme" (1986). Dan Dutescu, praised as a highly sensitive translator possessing the "quintessence" of the art of translation, has given Romania its first complete Chaucer translation--of LGW.
The absence of holographs and of other early manuscripts, along with other evidence, suggests that Chaucer left only "foul papers" or copies of his works, especially CT and TC, in a state of more or less continual revision, from which different…
Two CT manuscripts reveal simplifications of Chaucerian narrative as part of the fifteenth-century reader response valuing sententiousness and formal coherence. Huntington Library MS 140 includes ClT without its framing references, followed…
Lewis, R. E.,N. F. Blake, and A. S. G. Edwards,eds.
New York and London: Garland, 1985.
"A record of all extant Middle English prose texts composed between c. 1200 and c. 1500 in both manuscript and printed form in medieval and post-medieval versions." Lists texts and editions through 1982.
Owen, Charles A.,Jr.
Chaucer Review 23 (1988): 1-29, 95-116.
The record of surviving manuscripts shows three patterns in the production of collections of CT: the gathering in of examplars for the specific occasion; the use as exemplar of an already written manuscript of CT; and the use of a collection of…
Besserman, Lawrence [L.]
New York and London: Garland, 1988.
The main text consists of "Index I: Chaucer's Biblical Allusions--An Annotated List," arranged by Chaucer's works, and "Index II: Scriptural References," a reverse index. The apparatus includes an introduction; an essay, "Research on Chaucer and…
Binkley, Peter.
Scintilla: A Student Journal for Medievalists 2-3 (1985-1986): 66-100.
Cotton Titus A. XX, an anthology of fourteenth-century Latin poems, contains no. 19, "Proprietaties multorum animalium et aliarorum," some antimedical satires and bestiary poems. One of the latter, a poem on the sparrowhawk, may be the source of the…
Cooper, Helen.
Charles Martindale, ed. Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 71-81.
Discusses Chaucer's borrowings from Ovid in HF, BD, WBT, and ManT. Although to the fourteenth century the "Metamorphoses" was a chief among works demystified or allegorized to produce Christian doctrine, Chaucer rejects this tradition and emphasizes…
Diekstra, F. N. M.
English Studies 69 (1988): 12-26.
Chaucer is indebted to "The Romance of the Rose" for many of his techniques of irony, such as the juxtaposition of units not in themselves ironical, the exposure of hypocritical or false reasoning, the unreliable narrator, ironical digression, and…
Frese, Dolores Warwick.
Charles Foulon, et al., eds. Actes du 14e Congres International Arthurien (Rennes: Presses Universitaires, 1985), pp. 184-207.
In contrast to the prevailing critical view that Chaucer eschewed the use of Arthurian romance material, two Arthurian themes--the quest and amorous fatality--become transposed as pilgrimage and marriage in CT. The Tale of Arveragus, told by the…
