Browse Items (15542 total)

Useful in researching legal themes in medieval literature.

Examines the influence of the frame narrative tradition on CT, particularly on Chaucer's use of the "narratio brevis" genre. Also published in Bulletin of the Japanese Association of the History of the English Language n.v. (2009): 31-43.

Analyzes modern approaches to Chaucer's portrayal of women.

Discusses LGW alongside Middle English romance and an "hermeneutic tradition stretching from Jerome and Alan of Lille." Argues through these intersections for a mode of interpretation that centers on female desires, including silenced narratives of…

Argues that the use of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe in LGW reveals a queer critique of the patristic tradition of hermeneutics.

Examines Cambridge University Library, MS Ff. 1.6 (the Findern manuscript), which includes extracts from PF and part of LGW, and considers its "taste for writings relating to female desire." Argues that "expression of female same-sex desires must be…

Anthologizes theoretical essays and illustrative examples of literary satire drawn from the ancients through the moderns. Designed for classroom use, with a glossary of terms, a bibliography of suggestions for further study, and an index. Includes…

In SumT 1851-53, the Friar smoothly transforms the mother's concern for her own dead child into his own self-aggrandizement. Hints of the son's death appear throughout SumT to reinforce the Friar's failure with Thomas.

Nineteen essays on the continuities and discontinuities of medieval and Renaissance literature. For three essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Work of Dissimilitude under Alternative Title.

Twenty articles on tradition and innovation in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, three specifically on Chaucer.

Contains three essays on Chaucerian topics. For individual essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Subjects on the World's Stage under Alternative Title.

Examines how late-medieval changes in audience and breadth of subject transformed responses to exemplary literature, exploring "Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry," Caxton's translation of it, and works of Gower, Chaucer (PhyT, PardT,and TC), and…

Gower's "Confessio Amantis" presents Genius's tales as morally simple, although the incest stories stimulate readers to ask moral questions. In MLT, Chaucer represents his narrator as misreading Gower, affecting a simplistically moral stance and…

The reception of the Pardoner can be more fully understood by examining medieval preachers' and orators' uses of examples, or stories that would "excite" an audience to behave virtuously. By "laying bare" his own selfish desires, the Pardoner elicits…

Explores issues of exemplarity and applicability in examples of Middle English literature--"Book of the Knight of the Tower," Gower's "Confessio Amantis," Lydgate's "Fall of Princes," Henryson's "Testment of Cresseid," and CT and TC. Chaucerian…

Focuses on Criseyde's two oaths of fidelity in TC (3.1493-1502 and 4.1549-54) for the way that they allusively engage Ovidian narratives; counter the linear temporality of epic; affirm Criseyde's sincerity and "bold idealism"; and compel readers to…

Excavates the multi-layered ironies of WBT, focusing on the motifs of transformation and bad judgment and on the Wife of Bath's manipulations of her narrative materials, particularly the Ovidian Midas exemplum.

Medieval literary theory in general, and commentary on Ovid's "Metamorphoses," the tales-in-a-frame book most certainly important to Chaucer, suggest that CT can best be understood when grouped in four kinds: natural, magical, moral, and spiritual. …

Medieval literary commentators uniformly assigned "literary works" to the category of ethics: poetry served as a kind of "enacted ethics" for the medieval audience. The commentators define and describe this material in terms of the "forma…

Reads ParsT as "just another tale" (rather than the crescendo of CT), adducing Boethian aesthetic and moral attitudes, Aristotelian poetics, and the sequence of the last four tales as evidence that we should read the penitential message of ParsT…

Describes modes of literary analysis and understanding characteristic of the late Middle Ages, derived from the work of "classicizing writers" such as Robert Holcot, John Lathbury, Thomas Ringstead, John Ridewell, John Bromyard, Thomas Waleys, and…

Uses allegorical interpretations from Hugh of St. Cher to show how the exegetical equation of cock and preacher is consistently upended in the description and actions of Chauntecleer in NPT, offering a mock allegory where "fruit is chaff."

Assesses character names in works "from 'Beowulf' to Robert Henryson, tracing patterns in onomastic function, language philosophy, and literary form." Includes discussion of names from HF, TC, and CT.

Continuation of SAC annual annotated bibliography (since 1975); based on contributions from an international bibliographic team, independent research, and MLA Bibliography listings. 399 items, plus listing of reviews for 84 books. Includes an author…

Continuation of SAC annual annotated bibliography (since 1975); based on contributions from an international bibliographic team, independent research, and MLA Bibliography listings. 337 items, plus listing of reviews for 77 books. Includes an author…