Critics of "The Floure and the Leafe" respond less to the text than to its critical history. Detraction by W. W. Skeat and other members of the Chaucer Society is compensation for earlier praise of the work by Dryden, Pope, Keats, and others.
Murata, Yazaburo.
In Kazuo Araki, and others, eds. Studies in English Grammar and Linguistics: A Miscellany in Honour of Takanobu Otsuka (Tokyo: Kenkyushi, 1958), pp. 289-99.
Describes Chaucer's "power and limitations as a stylist," offering examples, and tabulating more extensively examples of oaths and swearing in Chaucer's works, including strong and weak oaths, wishes, and imprecations.
Kreuzer, James R.
Modern Language Notes 73.2 (1958): 81.
Shows that evidence from a twelfth-century bestiary may indicate that the comparison of Alison to a swallow in MilT 1.3257-58 ironically anticipates later events of the plot--her "departure" from John and his fall from the roof beam.
Solopova, Elizabeth.
A. J. Minnis, ed. Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions. Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall (Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y.: York Medieval Press, 2001), pp.27-40.
Compares punctuation in the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts with that of other manuscripts to argue that Chaucer's punctuation survives in the virgules of Hengwrt and Ellesmere, related to his development of the iambic pentameter line.
An anthology of supernatural fiction with selections from the classical period to the modern; includes (pp. 132-33) a modernized selection from NPT (7.3000-49) as an example of a ghost story.
McGraw, Matthew Theismann,
Dissertation Abstracts International A75.05 (2014): n.p.
Includes discussion of FranT as one among several examples of late medieval English romances that explore "noble identity and chivalric values" and use magic to place these values in starker relief than can be accomplished realistically.
Plummer, John F., ed.
Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995.
Edition of SumT, based on the Hengwrt manuscript. Collates nine additional manuscripts and the major editions from Caxton to "The Riverside Chaucer." Spelling is lightly modernized and punctuation is introduced. Notes, critical commentary, and…
Fleming, John V.
Chaucer Review 2.2 (1967): 95-107.
Traces the iconographical motif of "Maria Misericordia" as it developed from its early roots into the satire of friars found in SumP. Originally found in treatise by Caesarius of Heisterbach, the motif was adapted by Dominican and Franciscan friars…
Considers SumP to be Chaucer's experiment in and assessment of the genre of the vision of the afterlife, with "possible echoes of the Visio Tnugdali" (Vision of Tundale).
Garbáty, Thomas J.
Medical History 7 (1963): 348-58.
Adduces medieval and modern medicine to argue that the Summoner's disease described in GP 1.623-66 can best be diagnosed as "a rosacea-like secondary syphiloderm with meningeal neurosyphilitic involvement, with chronic alcoholism playing an important…
Kaske, R. E.
Modern Language Notes 74 (1959): 481-84.
Identifies biblical and patristic resonances in GP 1.634, suggesting that they help to "deepen an already ugly picture of spiritual as well as physical deformity."
Fletcher, Alan J.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 18 (1996): 91-117.
Attests two early-fifteenth-century analogues of SumP and describes several echoes of Wycliffite antifraternal sentiment in SumT: concern with letters of fraternity and trentals (i.e., commissioned masses for the dead), venal preaching, fraternal…
Argues that reading "panne" at the end of FrT as clothing rather than cooking utensil closely links the Wife and her tale with that of the Friar. Connects the Friar's criticisms of the Wife and her desires with the depiction of the faithful widow…
Forrest, Ian.
Stephen H. Rigby, ed., with the assistance of Alastair J. Minnis. Historians on Chaucer: The "General Prologue" to the "Canterbury Tales" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 421-42.
Reveals the Summonor to be an "unattractive caricature" and posits reasons for Chaucer's description and portrayal in GP and SumT. Provides historical background on medieval summoners, and claims that the Summoner is "part of a Chaucerian critique"…
Wood, Marjorie Elizabeth.
Comitatus 37 (2006): 65-85.
Anxious about the threat of Eastern hegemony and the increasing authority of merchant women, the narrator of MLT crafts characters that subtly feminize the East, "Orientalize" the feminine, and discredit women's economic participation as a threat to…
Marvin, Julia.
Robert Epstein and William Robins, eds. Sacred and Profane in Chaucer and Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honour of John V. Fleming (Buffalo, N. Y.: University of Toronto Press, 2010), pp. 113-28.
Marvin traces a pattern of concern with literary interpretation in LGWP-F and exemplifies that the pattern is also evident in "some of the legends themselves," particularly Dido's. The F prologue and the tale assert bookish authority, question it,…
Mustanoja, Tauno F.
Jerome Mandel and Bruce A. Rosenberg, eds. Medieval Literature and Folklore Studies: Essays in Honor of Francis Lee Utley (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1970), pp. 51-76.
Surveys the suggestiveness of first names in Middle English poetry, exploring connotations, denotations, name-play, and the implications of form in the uses of such names. Includes comments on names used by Chaucer, especially in CT.
WBP and WBT appear within frameworks of CT in which masculine values of truth and authority are already evaporating. In phallocentric discourse, women's talk is assumed to be untrue, and male desire is the central secret. Alison reveals throughout…
Patch, Howard R.
Jess B. Bessinger, Jr., and Robert P. Creed, eds. Franciplegius: Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honor of Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr. (New York: New York University Press, 1965), pp. 255-64.
Describes a series of recurrent concerns in Chaucer's poetry: pity (but not sentimentality), remarkable female characterizations, a complicated view of love, and the "theme of death."
Harper, Stephen.
Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Glasgow, 1997. Open access at https://theses.gla.ac.uk/3152/1/1997HarperPhD.pdf (accessed January 30, 2023).
Explores secular rather than religious implications of madness in works by Chaucer (MilT and SumT; madness and social class), John Gower (VC, Book I), Thomas Hoccleve ("major works"), and Margery Kempe ("Book of Margery Kempe").
Brinton, Laurel J.
Sylvia Adamson, and others, eds. Papers from the Fifth International Conference of Historical Linguistics, Cambridge, 6-9, April 1987. Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, 4th series. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, no. 65 (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1990), pp. 31-53.
Uses TC as a tests case to reinforce Otto Funke's argument that "gan" is a structural marker, noting its relations with sequencing adjectives.
