Lee, Brian S.
Yearbook of English Studies 22 (1992): 190-200.
FranT is a rhetorical . . . completion" of SqT, which should itself be read with "rhetorical and lyrical" rather than narrative models in mind. The literate mode of Dorigen's complaint and Aurelius's two speeches to her contrasts with the oral mode…
Eberle, Patricia J.
Robert Taylor, James F. Burke, Patricia J. Eberle, Ian Lancashire, and Brian S. Merrilees, eds. The Centre and Its Compass: Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Professor John Leyerle (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1993), pp. 111-49.
Growing out of the Parliament of 1386 and subsequent confrontations between Richard II and his subjects, arguments over the nature of royal and representative authority shape the portrayal in MLT of pagan savagery, Northumbrian custom, Providential…
Emerson, Katherine T.
Notes and Queries 202 (1957): 277-78.
Argues that Aleyn's "easy conquest" of Malyne in RvT can be attributed to their prior familiarity and to her promiscuity, the latter evident in the "ease" with which she uses the term "lemman."
Offers a psychotherapeutic approach to literature, including discussion of Chaucer's "Marriage Group" (pp. 91-120). Praises WBP for its feminine acceptance of the realities of love and the simultaneous pursuit of the desire to transcend them. The…
Levy, Bernard S.
Studies in Short Fiction 4.2 (1967): 112-18.
Describes the "ironic reversal" of the roles of the husband and the monk in ShT, exploring the equation of sex and commerce in the Tale, and the wife's use of them both. The Tale presents commercialization of sex and a sexualization of commerce.
Dane, Joseph A.
Joseph A. Dane. Mythodologies: Methods in Medieval Studies, Chaucer, and Book History ([Santa Barbara, Calif.]: Punctum, 2018), pp. 243-56.
Questions whether Richard Pynson's edition(s) of Chaucer's works (1526) is "one or three items," examining the bibliographical evidence and traditions available to answer the question, exploring the limitations and assumptions underlying this…
Bessent, Benjamin R.
Studia Neophilologica 41 (1969): 99-111.
Considers Chaucer's "references to time" in TC in light of parallel passages in Boccaccio's "Filostrato," considering variants in TC manuscripts and arguing that Chaucer's concern with time in the poem results from his "desire to portray Criseyde as…
Identifies and assesses various motifs in medieval literary and visual renderings of the barnyard chase of the fox, including those found in NPT. Argues that in several instances Chaucer's story may have influenced later depictions or mediated…
Wilcockson, Colin.
Joanna Burzynska and Danuta Stanulewicz, eds. PASE Papers in Literature and Culture: Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Conference of the Polish Association for the Study of English. Gdansk, 26-28 April 2000 (Gdansk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdánskiego, 2003), pp. 431-36.
The puppy in BD is not only a guide, but also a complex symbol of psychological and literary connectivity.
Chaucer's ties to Lincoln and the reference to Hugh of Lincoln in PrT make it unlikely that Chaucer was satirizing anti-Semitism in the Tale. The punishment of drawing and hanging in PrT refers to historical cruelty and reflects an attitude prevalent…
Heyworth, P. L.
P. L. Heyworth, ed. Medieval Studies for J. A. W. Bennett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 140-57.
The punctuation of medieval texts, including Chaucer's, imperfectly shows relationships between parts of the sentence. Standardized punctuation adopted in early Chaucer reprints often confuses meaning.
Earnshaw, Steven.
Manchester and New York : Manchester University Press, 2000.
Explores drinking establishments (inns, taverns, alehouses, pubs) in English literature for how they have helped to constitute what is thought to be particularly English, starting with CT and Langland's "Piers Plowman" and ending with Martin Amis's…
Donaldson, E. Talbot.
In Speaking of Chaucer (London: Athlone, 1970), pp. 102-18. Published originally in Ilva Cellini and Giorgio Melchiori, eds. Lectures and Papers Read at the Sixth Conference of the International Association of University Professors of English Held at Venice, August 1965 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1966).
Describes illusions of objectivity in recension, the genetic method of textual editing, cleverly though earnestly articulating that subjectivity--or "common sense"--is needed in the process of editing. Challenges the principle of grouping manuscript…
Recent studies have attributed psychological realism to CT characters. This "old critical ghost" unfortunately diverts the "critic from his (or her) proper task, the analysis of the functioning of verbal constructs constituting the text, to…
The psychological condition of ClT must be understood in terms of fourteenth-century, not twentieth-century, psychology. The relationship between Griselda and Walter can be compared to a man-to-God, child-to-parent, or colonial-to-colonizer…
Schricker, Gale C.
Philological Quarterly 72 (1993): 15-31.
The epilogue reveals that the narrator of TC undergoes (in Freudian terms) a neurotic crisis. Ultimately, however, he demonstrates the psychic health of his ego by integrating conflicting forces of the id (functions of the received tale), the…
Fowler, Elizabeth.
Cristina Maria Cervone and D. Vance Smith, eds. Readings in Medieval Textuality: Essays in Honour of A. C. Spearing (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), pp. 15-30.
Considers the hermeneutic value of Spearing's concept of "experientiality" in KnT. Defines "roaming" as "an investigation of the relation between bodily experience and language."
Uses examples from CT, TC, and the anonymous Middle English Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf, read in a context created by Bakhtin's theory of "speech genres," to demonstrate the power of proverbs to transform the situations in which they are…
Rose, Christine M.
Harvard Library Bulletin, n.s., 3:4 (1992-93): 38-55.
The existence of a fifteenth-century Middle English translation of Trevet's "Chronicle" indicates that one may have been available to Chaucer and Gower in the fourteenth century.
Georgianna, Linda.
C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, eds. Chaucer's Religious Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 55-69.
Focusing on such critics as Thomas Lounsbury, E. Talbot Donaldson, D. W. Robertson, John Fleming, and Derek Pearsall, Georgianna suggests that twentieth-century scholars, like their sixteenth-century predecessor John Foxe, have constructed a…
Depres, Denise L.
Sheila Delany, ed. Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 145-64.
Unlike the isolated narrative of Jews in CT (PrT), various narratives in the Vernon manuscript investigate the Jew in markedly different ways, going beyond demonization of Jews to debate their essential nature.
Crampton, Georgia Ronan.
Dissertation Abstracts International 28.06 (1967): 2205A.
Traces the topos of the sufferer as protagonist in classical, Christian, and late Latin sources and explores it "as an element" in KnT, TC, and Edmund Spenser's "Faerie Queene," arguing that Chaucer tends to emphasize "the value of acceptant…
Abelson-Hoek, Michelle Christine.
Dissertation Abstracts International 60: 4418A, 1999.
Studies the medieval whore figure as rebel, outlaw, and heretic through historical and sociological analysis of the Norman Latin poem "Jezebel." Chaucer and Langland consider the whore evil but also emblematic of this world's carnal pleasures.…
