Browse Items (16108 total)

Handwriting, materials, decoration, and language indicate that the scribe of Oxford New College MS 314 also copied Bodleian Library MS Dugdale 45 (Hoccleve's "Regement of Princess"). Though not first-rate, MS 314 was executed by a paid scribe.

Reproduces in color the illustrations of the CT pilgrims from the Ellesmere manuscript, and comments on CT, Chaucer and his portrait, and the production and transmission of the manuscript.

In RvT, Symkin's wife is not as "worthy as stinking ditch water" but "as worthy as ditch water is stinking."

Explains that imitations of northern pronunciations in RvT, preserved in the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts, provide evidence that the shift of "a" from /a:/ to /ɛ:/ was underway in northern England during the fourteenth century. Notes similar…

Recounts the history and events of the nineteenth-century American Philosophers' Camp. The chapter entitled "The Worthy Crew Chaucer Never Had" includes discussion of Ralph Waldo Emerson's notebook commentaries on similarities between the group of…

The antecedent of "hyre" in PF 284 must be Venus rather than Diana. This reading reveals the logic of Chaucer's placement of Callisto and Atalanta at the head of his list of famous lovers and leads "inexorably to the conclusion that one wastes one's…

Brewer comments on his professional visits to Japan, on similarities between Japanese and European medieval cultures, and on promises, honor, and irony in Chaucer's poetry, especially KnT.

An examination of thirteen passages in TC and CT indicates that "ther," sometimes an impersonal introductory form word in Middle English as in Modern English, has been given too much adverbial weight by editors.

Richly rhetorical and allusive, Chaucer's "Go, litel bok" stanza, in its undercutting of the opposition between "makyng" and "poesye," reflects his ambivalence toward the new classicizing poetics of trecento Italy.

Identifies similarities between Criseyde's address to Troilus in TC 3.1309 with "levation" prayers, i.e., popular devotional prayers aligned with the "looking at the host at the elevation of Mass."

The legend of Moses' magic, alluded to in SqT 247-51, first occurs in Peter Comestor's "Historia scholastica." Nicholas Trevet and Gower also mention this motif, but probably Chaucer's source for the allusion is Roger Bacon's "Opus maius."

Supports James Wimsatt's contention that the story of Ceyx and Alcyone in BD owes certain details to "Ovide moralise" rather than to the "Metamorphoses" by offering one piece of evidence, namely, that the narrator says that, to drive away the…

Unlike "Teseida," KnT lacks the formal invocations of the epic, perhaps as a result of Chaucer's fitting the story into the CT frame.

Links the python slain by Apollo with an alchemic symbol and argues that ManT is thematically related to CYT.

Comments on the "real and alleged obscenity of the farting scene in MilT, focusing on its, narrative technique, humor, and the use of "thonder-dent."

Since Chaucer uses the same passage in the Roman de la Rose as a source for the Prioress and the Wife of Bath, these two characters "are bonded in ironic literary sisterhood."

Offers evidence (rhymes and phonetic patterns in English and French) to indicate "Chaucer having pronounced 'iu' in French loanwords, with the stress on the first element of the diphthong." Further this "'iu' coalesced with earlier 'ew', 'iw', and,…

Explores similarities of Chaucer's description of women's hair (KnT 1.1048-50, PF 267-68, and TC 5.808-12) and Apuleius's "Metamorphoses" II.10, suggesting a similar aesthetic rather than a source relationship, and noting that all resonate with…

Explores why Samuel Johnson did not carry out his publicized intention to produce an annotated edition of Chaucer's works. If he had relied on Urry's edition, the annotated edition would have proved a sorry rival to Tyrwhitt's.

Proposes an influence of KnT 1.1995 ("dirke ymaginning") on Vaughan's "The importunate Fortune, written to Doctor 'Powel' of Cantre," and accounts for Vaughan's confusion of Mars and Saturn.

Argues that "a ful greet bryngere out of bisynesse" means "remover of worries."

In Chaucer's TC and in Boccaccio's "Filostrato," love is irresistible. Sudo considers Pandarus's role in effecting love's irresistibility and assesses the function of nautical imagery in conveying it.

The planetary conjunction in TC 3 is a description of an actual event that occurred in 1385.

Examines the important role of rhetorical figures--particularly repetition and contrast--in the meaning, the structure, and the description of characters in NPT, BD, and TC.

Words and phrases discussed include "lust," "blynde," "a fewe wordes white," "glosynge," "ambages," "amphibologie," "double," "sophyme," "swete wordes," "plesante wordes," and "peinten."