Browse Items (15544 total)

After examining weather patterns during the Middle Ages, suggests that the late fourteenth century experienced lower than normal temperatures and increased precipitation that would have affected harvests. Since inclement weather plays a role in BD,…

WBP, belonging to the genre of the French sermon joyeux, "a parodic homily by a woman that uses biblical exegesis to endorse worldly pleasure," had a "topical resonance" for Lollards, who, "championing female literacy and lay biblical exegesis,…

Greenwood studies types of friendship, plus the positive and negative values attached to friendship, in FranT, MerT, and Mel.

In TC, "Chaucer explores the cultural function of counsel as a key mode of power distribution in chivalric society," examining Pandarus's advice, Criseyde's impersonations of him, and parallels between personal counsel and the Trojan Parliament.

The calming of an "urban rabble" in Aeneid 1.148-56 was a topos in reports and rumors that surrounded the uprising of 1381 and in reports of similar conflicts at Lynn and London in 1377. Baswell explores the "anxieties, hopes, and tensions" of the…

Knapp argues that a historicized, aesthetic appreciation of Chaucer is possible, despite recent tendencies to focus on ideological issues only. The aesthetic theories of Kant and Gadamer help to explain the roles of subjectivity, universality, and…

Although we know of no sustained aesthetic treatise dating from the Middle Ages, medieval people were lovers of beauty who conceived of worldly beauty as a reflection of divine perfection. Ginsberg comments on Chaucer's leave-taking of his poem in…

Depictions of marriage in a range of late Middle English texts engage concerns with lay and ecclesiastical authority and promote interests of "the lay middle strata." The book opens with a reading of how FranT expresses in its "discourse of…

Investigates the lexicons of emotion and "codes of masculinity" in a range of late medieval English literary texts, including RvT.

Argues that modern theoretical discourse, in particular affective criticism--reader-response theory and "rezeptions-asthetik" (which "emphasizes the historicity and alterity of literary works from the past")--derives from and is applicable to…

Investigates the relationship between medieval studies and medievalism and how "the history of the medieval" provides contemporary readers with "a model of how to relate to the past." Argues that medieval writers offer models for understanding how…

By "acknowledging and exploiting the affections of [its] female characters," RvT "fashions a masculine collective." By excluding Symkyn from this collective, the Tale demonstrates that "cherl" identity after the uprising of 1381 was ethically and…

Discusses "the power of affect on minds and bodies" and the "psychology of love and loss" in Chaucer's works. Explores relationship between women's literary culture and roles of women in BD, KnT, TC, and LGW.

Reading is a "two-way" process: "texts affect us while we affect texts." Chaucer typically "plays" with his readers, leading them to expect one meaning but giving them another. Any interpretation is influenced both by Chaucer's techniques and by…

Its fierce anti-Semitism notwithstanding, "Titus and Vespasian" is an important document of cultural uses of the "fall-of-Jerusalem narrative" and of attitudes toward Jews and Judaism in late medieval England. Thus, it deserves scholarly attention…

Summarizes the four papers included in this volume, with emphasis on how well they cohere.

Comments on Chaucer as a translator (especially his adaptations of Dante in HF and MkT) and on the reception of his works over time as a legacy of translating and adapting him. Cooper details Chaucer's influence and adaptations of his works in the…

Discusses Eustace Deschamps's balade in praise of Chaucer, the Duxworth manuscript of Chaucer that belonged to Jean Angouleme, and two sixteenth-century French references to Chaucer that evince French awareness of Chaucer as a poet: an anecdote about…

In patriarchal tradition, the Christian is defined as male and spiritual; the female, as Other, Hebrew, and carnal. Lampert traces tensions in the parallel between women and Jews from Bernard de Clairvaux to Shakespeare's Shylock, including medieval…

With the linguistic turn from mimetic to generative properties of language, the traditional understanding of many aspects of literary and intellectual history has been denied. Jolliffe questions this extreme position in the light of writers such as…

Davis discusses Alexander Pope's "The Temple of Fame," a translation of HF.

Explores the history and iconography of Venus and focuses on the theme of Venus in KnT, PF, and TC. Also maintains that "medieval Venus" stories greatly impacted Derek Brewer's writing and scholarly interests.

Argues that MerT "was composed before and independent of" MerP, initially addressed orally by Chaucer to a "courtly audience." Such listeners were familiar with the "humorous antifeministic tradition" into which the "senex amans" convention,…

Surveys distinctions between the restrictive "allegory of theologians" and the expansive "allegory of the poets," arguing that Chaucer's poetry is a radical form of the latter. Chaucer's works decenter the author and thereby pose "new kinds of…

Comments on the studies included in a cluster of essays entitled "Chaucer’s Langland" (YLS 32 (2018) and, acknowledging the difficulties of establishing direct influence between Langland and Chaucer, describes a variety of dissimilarities between…