Browse Items (15542 total)

Compares Chaucer's heroine in MLT with her predecessor in Trevet, arguing that Custance's passivity, her prayers, and her divinely-aided escape from the "renegade knight" combine with other religious features of the tale to make it "a romantic homily…

Acknowledges the association of "lucre of vileyne" (PrT 7.491) with "turpe lucrum" (filthy lucre) found in the Vulgate 1 Timothy 3.8 and quoted in the Ellemere gloss, but specifies that the phrase, a "technical legal term" of canon law, was a matter…

Comments on the names of selected characters, including the names of Chaucer's CT pilgrims and some of the characters in the tales. Compared with Spenser's and Shakespeare's names, "Chaucer's fictional names are rather limited in kind and number,"…

For five essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Essays on English Language and Literature in Honour of Michio Kawai under Alternative Title.

Reads TC as a "jubilant celebration of earthly love" which "testifies to the accessibility of Christian salvation by means of human love" (xi). Earthly love and divine love are balanced in the poem, with Troilus regarding Criseyde as the "Blessed…

Explores how the figure of a drunken man, originating in Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy" and "De topicis differentiis," and used by Chaucer in Arcite's complaint in KnT, I.1260–67, "blurs the line between universal and particular" and thereby…

Yu examines the changing roles of literary rhetoric and dialectic, poesy and logic, from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. Chaucer is cited as a writer whose use of irony reflects changes in the understanding of logic.

A novel in poetry that opens with direct reference to CT, and proceeds as a series of tales by various kinds of people: historical tales, migrants' tales, artists' tales, etc. The volume includes a Preface by John Kinsella in which he reports that…

An entry on a "boke of schrift" found in a commonplace book compiled by Cheshire gentleman Humphrey Newton (1466-1536) contains the section against swearers and flatterers from ParsT (600-21, 626-27). Humphrey perhaps chose this passage for its…

Offers "senex style" as the a label for an particular network of themes of aging, related rhetorical commonplaces, and narrative poses in a range of late-medieval and early modern works, focusing on those where an "I-persona that extols the wisdom,…

Chaucer's approaches to hagiography vary from ironic distancing in LGW to pious orthodoxy in SNT, preventing audience identification. Also treats Criseyde, Alisoun, and Dorigen. Griselda, a special case, is historicized and then dehistoricized.

Reexamines Halle and Keyser's three principles of the iambic line as applied to Chaucer's verse, arguing that the verse is better explained by a prototypical hierarchy of stresses than by a pattern of alternating weak and strong stresses. Kiparsky's…

Argues that Chaucer's decasyllabic lines are based on metrically significant, statistically normative feet, with clear and significant caesuras. Chaucer's and Shakespeare's iambic lines deviate from prototypical lines in similar ways. See Thomas…

The proverb "to be as glad of something as 'fowel of day'," or variant, is used in KnT, CYT, TC, and ShT. The character associated with the fowl is deceived by appearances or by another character. In ShT Don John represents the fowler interpreted…

Uses Chaucer, Spenser, Homer, Virgil, and Bunyan as test specimens in the presentation of allegory as a vision of superimposed frames of reference.

Shows that color expressions in TC are elaborately calculated to represent the characteristics of Troilus and Criseyde and that the color terms vary in almost every book.

Examines Chaucer's various uses of color expressions: metaphorical, contrastive, mixed, etc. Yoshimura argues that there is a gradual transmutation from simplicity to complexity in Chaucer's use of such expressions.

Investigates religious and medical medieval discourses in the Middle Ages. For an essay that pertains to Chaucer search for Medicine, Religion and Gender in Medieval Culture under Alternative Title.

Studies the generic variety, rhetorical features, and persuasive power of four works of medieval English literature, including ParsT, tabulating the relative incidences of rhetorical questions, appeals to authority or logic, poetic devices,…

Yoshikawa studies Middle English verbs with both reflexive and impersonal uses in ten typical situations, considering Chaucer's uses of "menen" and "remembren" as examples where semantic value and the nature of the participants affect usage.

Godfrey echoes PardT.

Although Griselda is "translated" in three different ways in ClT (language, place,and social class), her labor is constant throughout. Her labors (domestic, wifely, and public) define her essential selfhood and grant her a kind of power that Walter…

Surveys representative examples of northern English dialect ("Alliterative Morte Arthure," RvT), Scottish Chaucerians (Henryson, Dunbar), and non-Chaucerian Scottish works (Barbour's "Bruce," "The Wallace") to identify common and distinctive…

Considers the "politics of translation" in ClT, arguing that the tale is primarily concerned with how Walter "draws out the willing submission of his subjects," manifest in the "analogical relation between Walter and Griselda as the translator and…

Analyzes SNT, MLT, and ClT to find forms of women's authority and determine how women's authority is constructed. Argues that women in these tales possess "charismatic, positional, and spiritual" authority as a result of their confrontations with…