Robertson, D. W.,Jr.
Studies in Philology 84 (1987): 418-39.
Given historical events in the age of King Richard II, details of the Knight's portrait in GP would have been irrelevant before 1393 or after 1396. Chaucer may have inserted the Knight's description into GP, altered other details in GP, planned…
Following the example set in V. A. Kolve's Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, Brown develops the mimetic and iconographic relations of the prison in KnT and the castle in Roman de la Rose.
Kruger, Steven F.
Frank Grady, ed. The Cambridge Companion to "The Canterbury Tales" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 167-90.
Discusses the Prioress’s antisemitism in PrT within the context of late medieval religious feeling, in order to "understand it from within so as more effectively to analyze it." Traces "the condensation of a complex set of antisemitic ideas, wrapped…
Lynch, James J.
Modern Language Notes 72.4 (1957): 242-49.
Reviews arguments that identify and explicate "Seinte Loy" in the GP description of the Prioress (GP 1.120) as a reference to St. Eligius, and suggests an alternative possibility: St. Eulalia. Explores resonances of the reference--thematic and…
Introductory study guide to PrPT, WBPT, and the accompanying GP descriptions, focusing on the ambiguity of the Prioress and the "moral incoherence" of the Wife of Bath. Includes questions for discussion but no text of the poetry.
Burton, T. L., dir.
Provo, Utah: Chaucer Studio, 1990.
Recorded at Campion College, University of Regina (side one), and at the Seventh International Congress of the New Chaucer Society, University of Kent (side two). Re-edited and digitally mastered as a CD-ROM by Troy Sales and Paul Thomas in 2004.
Boyd, Beverly, ed.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987.
Relying on Hengwrt as the basic text, Boyd--in the manner of all editors in this variorum series--surveys both manuscripts and printed editions, emending in light of both. The introduction provides critical and textual commentaries, the former…
Astell, Ann W.
Susan Yager and Elise E. Morse-Gagné, eds. Interpretation and Performance: Essays for Alan Gaylord (Provo, UT: Chaucer Studio Press, 2013), pp. 3-11.
The quotation of Psalm 8 in PrP would have reminded Chaucer's audience of two Gospel narratives of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, one referring to singing children, the other to speaking stones. The power of this combined allusion links the clergeoun…
Looking beyond the OED's definition of "span"--a length of roughly nine inches--to a range of medieval senses of the word suggests that the width of the Prioress's forehead "offers no meaningful foothold for objecting to her."
Simons, Rita Dandridge.
College Language Association Journal 12 (1968): 77-83.
Identifies details in the GP description of the Prioress that are inconsistent with the Benedictine Rule and indicate satirically that she is courtly, a "worldly woman dressed in a Prioress's habit."
Describes the associations of coral with apotropaic power in medieval lapidaries, and suggests that the Prioress's rosary of coral in GP (1.158) ambiguously may signal religious intent as well as courtly luxury.
Examines the Prioress's claim that she is unequal to the task of praising Mary as an example of the inexpressibility topos, used recurrently in the Middle Ages to express the ineffable. Comments on several instances of the topos used by theologians…
Spence, Timothy L.
Scott D. Troyan, ed. Medieval Rhetoric: A Casebook (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 63-90.
The Prioress's prayer to Mary shares characteristics with the "genre of prayer known as 'pura oratio'." Spence identifies features of this genre in rhetorical tradition, shows where they are evident in PrP, and suggests that they extend into PrT,…
Steadman, John M.
English Studies 44 (1963): 350-53.
Observes that as the patron saint of prisoners St. Leonard was associated iconographically with chains and fetters, and contends that this deepens the irony and ambiguity of the motto on the brooch of the Prioress in GP 1.162, where "vincit" carries…
Condren, Edward I.
Chaucer Review 23 (1989): 192-218.
Despite the crossed purposes of the Prioress's secular and religious impulses, each impulse paradoxically reaches fruition in PrT. In creating the young boy as an innocent so like herself and then describing his martyrdom with the particular…
Pizzorno, Patrizia Grimaldi.
Patrizia Grimaldi Pizzorno. Metaphor at Play: Chaucer's Poetics of Exemplarity (Alessandria: Edizioni dell'Orso, 1997), pp. 53-78.
PrT develops the concerns with food, gluttony, and filth that are established in the GP description of the Prioress, where she is characterized as childish, greedy, and sinful. The tale of Thopas parodies PrT and restores moral balance.
The Prioress is neither aristocratic, as Bowden, Manly, and Robinson argue, nor classless as Sister Madeleva posits, but a proto-Cockney and, thus, a typically round, contradictory Chaucerian character. With East London associations and dialect (her…
Lewis, Katherine J.
Stephen H. Rigby, ed., with the assistance of Alastair J. Minnis. Historians on Chaucer: The "General Prologue" to the "Canterbury Tales" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 94-113.
Places the Prioress and the Second Nun in the context of late medieval female monasticism, contrasting the roles of female agency and the "representations of female holiness" of the Prioress and the Second Nun.
Frank, Mary Hardy Long.
DAI 31.06 (1970): 2874-75A.
Argues that the "emblematic Mary legend of the medieval 'puys'" is analogous to PrT, that the description of the Prioress in GP is "as Marian" as it is courtly, and that Chaucer had access to information about the "puys."
Ridley, Florence H.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965.
Surveys critical approaches to PrT, distinguishing between "hard critics" of the Tale who read it as an indictment of the teller's anti-Semitism, and "historical" approaches that consider it in light of late-medieval attitudes and practices. Argues…
