Browse Items (16038 total)

Ponders the complications and implications of discussing rape in modern classroom considerations of WBT, and recommends using the BBC television version of the tale to help raise and confront its inherent questions and values.

Identifies contradictions and complications in legal and ethical understandings of rape, and describes how issues of consent and culpability can be used productively in classroom discussion of RvT to help students understand their own values as well…

Maintains that attention to speech and silence is crucial to literary analysis and to understanding medieval notions of gender difference, exemplifying how the speech/silence binary can be explored in complex ways to help analyze rape as a plot…

Includes thirteen essays by various authors and an introduction by the editor, all focusing on teaching medieval narratives that involve rape, attempted rape, or false accusation while attending to twenty-first-century awareness of rape, sexual…

Explores how philosophers, theologians, poets, and other thinkers in late medieval England altered ancient ideas of geographical space. Analyzes medieval science, theology, literature, and maps, and the "relationship between high science and high…

Considers tragedy from the perspective of analytical philosophy, arguing "that tragic literature seeks to offer moral and linguistic redress (compensation) for suffering'; it "involves the balancing of a protagonist's suffering with guilt (and vice…

Explores the concept of "cooperative" or "conjoint" agency in Chaucer's works to examine ideas "about the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity." Examines the notion of passivity in the works of Chaucer and Bernard of Clairvaux, as well as…

Examines connection between "language and cultural identity" and claims that Chaucer mocks "Alexander's 'storie' as 'commune' "in MkT. Analyzes how Latin, French, and English Alexander narratives were read, and rewritten, in medieval literature…

Questions the assumptions underlying critical commentary on the Wife of Bath's deafness, exploring potential parallels between authority and experience, literacy and orality, and hearing and deafness. Indicts the "audism" of much of the commentary,…

A group of "deaf/Deaf/hard of hearing scholars with wide-ranging expertise in literary studies, rhetoric, disability studies, and Deaf Studies" express "deep reservations" about Robinson's essay.

Draws on modern media studies to clarify practices of "participatory reading" in late medieval England, exploring how vernacular authors, texts, and manuscripts elicit and/or limit the agency of their readers who engage with texts in making meaning,…

Explores "links between gender ideology and money in the late Middle Ages," arguing that Chaucer's "depiction of his purse as a faithless female lover" in Purse reflects the "cultural imaginary around money before the emergence of
political…

Considers relations between PardPT and the Museum of London’s carved wooden panel that depicts details of the tale. Calculates the "absurdity of the hoard" in the tale, and explores possible responses of the "London economic elite" to the differing…

Examines relations between theology and economics in FrPT and SumPT (with glances at WBP and PardPT), focusing on the polysemous implications of debt, and suggesting that these tales are “key source texts” for modern “economic theology”…

Coins the phrase "liminal transactionalism" to characterize the late medieval combination of gift-exchange and commercial economies, arguing that a similar combination extends forward to Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations," challenging traditional…

Ten essays by various authors and an introduction by the editors. "Introduction: 'Greet prees at Market'-- Money Matters in Medieval English Literature" comments on recent critical interest in the social and political aspects of late medieval…

Reviews Chaucer’s experience with law and legal proceedings, and argues that in his poetry he "questions the fourteenth-century English legal system" and critiques its tendencies to favor the powerful. Focuses on "virtuous women undone or ignored…

Contemplates the concept of "of a 'medieval Mexico' as a historically significant paradigm" in light of the nation's colonial past. Considers various translations of CT into Spanish and comments on Chaucer studies in Mexico, including the lack of…

Summarizes aspects of cognition theory and posits that the "knowledge accumulated by past generations is encapsulated in language" and that, like a "palimpsest," imagery retains "vestiges" of the worldviews of the past. Discusses examples of…

Describes factors involved in English language spatio-temporal systems, i.e., the uses of pronouns, demonstratives, adverbs, verb tenses, and modals that indicate proximity and distance between speakers in space and time. Draws evidence from Astr and…

Describes similarities between medieval and modern uses of obscenity to establish homosocial identity and assert power, using evidence from CT manuscripts to clarify the "sexually explicit status" of the late medieval verb "swyven."

Explores Chaucer’s uses of "fama," perhaps reflecting his ambiguous relationship with the concept. At times, he seems to switch from desire of acknowledgment to a more bitter view.

Exemplifies the "Scandinavian influence" on Middle English, offering morphological, syntactical, and lexical samples of this influence on CT.

Contemplates the pains of language change and language death, distinguishing between change and the perception of it; exploring Latinity, vernacularity, and their continuities; and expanding upon the "dream of language" theorized by Giorgio Agamben.…

Comprises ten essays by various authors, with summaries by the editors in an introduction, a bibliography, and subject index. For six essays pertaining to Chaucer, search for Later Middle English Literature, Materiality, and Culture under Alternative…