Browse Items (15544 total)

Introduces the social practices in Chaucer's age; designed for classroom use. Arranged by the cycle of the day, with commentary on food, clothing, shelter, marriage, childhood, days of the week, festivals, and more, with hypertext links (some broken)…

Posits a "Children's Cluster" of tales in CT (including all of fragments 6 and 7) wherein a "child has a central place" in each tale. Then argues that Virginia's voice and the tensions and "digressions" in PhyT encourage an ethical interpretation of…

Describes the concern with the "embodiment" of peasants in medieval estates theory, explores physicality in the GP description of the Miller, and examines rebelliousness and animal imagery in MilPT, aligning them with "peasant poetics" and the…

Explores how and to what extent the WBP "presents both the challenges to women's agency posed by medieval marriage and, conversely, the ways existing practices of medieval marriage could be manipulated to empower women." Designed for pedagogical use,…

Explores the tension between "solaas" and "sentence" in three features of NPT (its representations of humans and non-humans, its reference to the Uprising of 1381, and its gender politics), investigating the importance of the rhetoric of the Tale in…

Investigates the extent to which ParsT as a manual of confession can be seen to encourage the process of "individualization" theorized by Michel Foucault and to subvert the "immense control that the Church had over medieval lives" and aligning with…

Argues that ClP "confronts the social politics of translation and accessibility" after which the "re-vernacularization" in ClT "progresses . . . toward class and gender accessibility," "addresses the politics of tyranny and class," and engages issues…

Explores "mortal embodiment" in KnT, particularly in the descriptions of Arcite's lovesickness, injuries, and death, contrasting their physicality with the metaphysical perspective of Theseus's final speech. Designed for pedagogical use, includes…

Describes the events and social impact of major historical events in fourteenth-century England: war with France, Black Death, the Uprising of 1381, Wycliffite reform, and their interrelations. Designed for classroom use.

Interprets the Reeve's conflict with the Miller and the sexual politics and violence of RvT in light of late-medieval agrarian economy and Marxist ideas of the inequities of economic exchange. Designed for pedagogical use, includes several questions…

Considers Ret in light of the medieval humility topos, penitential practice, and Lollard reform, raising questions about Chaucer's intentions in his works and the extent of our ability to perceive them. Designed for pedagogical use, includes several…

Explores the "conflict and friction" of GP as a stand-alone tale, also reading it forward to the following tales and backward from them. Designed for pedagogical use, includes several questions for discussion.

Interprets CYPT as "Chaucerian critique of the male desire to use technological and scientific innovation to generate alone, excluding women from creation and thus overthrowing the normative pairing of sex contraries upon which medieval religious,…

Explores the "powerlessness of the voiceless" in ManPT, focusing on Phebus's wife, who has no voice in the Tale, in contrast with the speaking crow whose voice is taken from him and the ventriloquized mother of the Manciple. Designed for pedagogical…

Introduces the field of "critical animal studies" and assesses the degree to which characters and animals in FrT can be considered to have agency. Designed for pedagogical use, includes several questions for discussion and suggestions for further…

Explores the relations between emotion and identity in PrPT, observing that the presence of Jews "amps up its emotional charge," particularly how it "provokes--and coopts--a huge range of emotions in the service of Christian piety." Considers the…

Thinks about Thopas "in the context of medieval maps," and considers the Tale's pointers and misdirections in plot and genre, assessing them in light of the traditional Chaucer-Pilgrim / Chaucer-Poet distinction. Designed for pedagogical use,…

Describes the generic features of the fabliau, and explores how and what extent the MerT fulfills and overturns these features in its plot, diction, biblical allusion, and courtly conventions, also commenting on interpolations in two manuscripts.…

Treats geography, lineal descent, and "religious and political difference" as racial markers in MLT and its analogues, suggesting that skin color "lurks in the shadows." Designed for pedagogical use, includes several exercises and questions for…

Cautions that what we say about the Pardoner's body "might say something about ourselves"; summarizes critical discussion of the Pardoner's sex, sexuality, and rhetoric; and comments on the Old Man, Death (compared to Terry Pratchett's Mort), the…

Defines and describes the social and rhetorical emphases that characterize the persona and poetic "common voice" of late-medieval English "public poetry," exemplified here most extensively in analyses of Langland's "Piers Plowman" and Gower's…

Assesses the inclusion in the mid-1500s of "The Plowman's Tale" in Chaucer's "Workes" and its effects in reading reception and influence on beast fable throughout the sixteenth century.

Connects "The Prologue and Tale of Beryn" (PTB) with the London Company of Mercers that met at St. Thomas Acon, suggesting that PTB was composed on the occasion of their feast in 1428 or 1430, exploring connections of the poem with John Carpenter,…

Investigates the role of Chaucerian apocrypha and adaptations in defining "Chaucerian," a concept "that was as much a product of Chaucer's later editors, adapters, and imitators as it was a product of his contemporaries and predecessors." Considers…

Examines the textual witnesses for issues of authorship and attribution, as well as the various forms in which Sted survives.