Hornsby, Joseph Allen.
Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1988.
Explores Chaucer's legal background, his connection with English canon law of agreements, the secular law of agreements, and medieval English criminal law and procedure.
Separate chapters are devoted to Lollard society, education, biblical scholarship, and the ideology of the movement as it relates to theology, ecclesiology, and politics. Chapter 9,"The Context of Vernacular Wycliffism," examines the question of…
Thirteen previously published articles study "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," medieval English Literature, the development of Arthurian literature, and Middle English romances. Contains a Japanese translation of the first two branches of…
Kaske, R. E.,with Arthur Groos and Michael W. Twomey.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988.
Bibliography including the following divisions: biblical exegesis, liturgy, hymns, sermons, visual arts, mythography,commentaries on major authors, and miscellaneous.
Kennedy, Edward Donald,Ronald Waldron, and Joseph S. Wittig,eds.
Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Wolfeboro, N.H. : D. S. Brewer, 1988.
Contains twenty-one articles and notes on Old and Middle English literature and language (including seven on "Piers Plowman," three on Chaucer), reflecting Kane's interests: source study related to literary analysis, textual criticism, paleography,…
Koff, Leonard Michael.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1988.
Koff argues that "Chaucerian irony does not lead to Chaucer's own meaning. Instead, Chaucer's deflecting self-characterizations and the characterization of the storyteller who 'cannot tell stories' enable Chaucer to relinquish omniscience, thereby…
Kohl, Stephan.
Willi Erzgraber and Sabine Volk, eds. Mundlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im englischen Mittelalter. Script Oralia, vol. 5 (Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1988), pp. 133-46.
Kohl examines conscious "orality" and appeals to the reader by narrators in the poetry of Ricardian authors: Gower, the "Gawain" poet, and others, including Chaucer (CT, TC, PF, LGW, and HF). With the introduction of unreliable narrators, the…
Despite repressive laws and the misogyny of clerical writers, it appears that wives, widows, religious women, mystics, townswomen, and peasant women had more control, respect, and influence than has been thought. Labarge presents the whole social…
Lynch, Kathryn L.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988.
Examines the "marriage of matter and form in high medieval philosophy and poetics," the "grammar of dream and vision," and vision and dreams in Alain de Lille's "De planctu naturae, Jean de Meun, Dante, and Gower. Lynch presents a model that may be…
Maes-Jelinek, H., Pierre Michel, and Paulette Michel-Michot, eds.
Liege: University of Liege, English Department, 1987.
Collects twenty-six essays by various hands. For three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Multiple Worlds, Multiple Words under Alternative Title.
Minnis, A. J.,and A. B. Scott,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
Treats "the tradition of systematic commentary on authors both sacred and profane, Latin and vernacular, 'ancient' and 'modern,' from around 1100 until around 1375." Selections are descriptive, evaluative, and critical.
Presents a theory of irony, examines various ironic interpretations of "De amore," including those by Alfred Karnein, Betsy Bowden, and D. W. Robertson, Jr., and concludes that the numerous inconsistencies in the work either were unintentional on…
North, J. D.
Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1988.
North reveals a cryptic extension to Chaucerian criticism: a celestial allegory. Part 1 is a guide to late-medieval understanding of the planets and their influences on humans, physiologically and morally, including chapters on the spheres, the…
Favorable descriptions of persons in heroic writings generally emphasize gross size, erect posture, and directness in approach, whereas courtly texts, such as Chaucer's, represent largeness as unattractive or unrefined. The latter clearly value…
Roberts, Ruth Marshall.
Publications of the Mississippi Philological Association (1988): 137-42.
Chaucer's ability to draw female characters--in particular, Criseyde and the Wife of Bath--sets him apart from contemporaries in a male-dominated society. The subjectively described Criseyde, with her "slydynge" heart, and the objectively described…
Looking at BD, HF, and PF, Robinson examines Chaucer's relations to his masters and his dilemma in connecting books and imagination with actual life, in creating puzzles for the demands he felt "of the poetry of the poem." Chaucer's dreamscapes are…
Russell, J. Stephen, ed.
New York and London: Garland, 1988 (for 1987).
Dedicated to the memory of Judson Boyce Allen, this collection of ten articles by various hands examines medieval allegory in terms of modern critical theory. For three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Allegoresis under Alternative Title.
Schibanoff, Susan.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 10 (1988): 71-108.
The glosses to the Ellesmere and Egerton manuscripts of WBP and WBT illustrate how differently two readers may respond to a single text. Condemning not only the Wife's sexuality but her "textuality" as well, the Egerton commentator struggles to…
