The people's and Griselda's agreements with Walter, the agent of testing, are analogous to the Old and New Testament covenants, respectively. The lower-order civil bond, governed by the letter of the law, is weak; the higher-order marriage bond,…
Pappano, Margaret Ann.
Dissertation Abstracts International 59 (1999): 2490A.
Explores the sociocultural influence of sacerdotal celibacy on literature. Capable of performing the Mass, the "special body" of the priest became a literary icon, aligned with the Latin language in opposition to Lollardy. Lay writing emerged against…
Adamina assesses the trickster qualities of the fox and of the Nun's Priest, including various kinds of linguistic slipperiness, doubleness, and flattery.
It is impossible to determine an exact modern value of the 100 francs in ShT, but internal, economic, and comparative literary evidence indicates that {dollar}5,000 is "a specific lower limit to the value of that amount in 1990's U.S. dollars." …
The woman that infatuates the narrator is a barista who she calls "Chaucer girl," so named because she is first seen holding a copy of "The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer."
Dane, Joseph A.
Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, n.s., 7 (1993) : 18-27.
Collates versions of the epitaph on Chaucer's tomb to challenge assumptions underlying the Chaucer-Variorum choice of the Hengwrt manuscript as a base text. While Hengwrt may be close to Chaucer's original, the "movement" from Skeat to Hengwrt in…
Lucas, Angela M., and Peter J. Lucas.
English Studies 72 (1991): 501-12.
In seeking "blisse" and "prosperitee," Arveragus and Dorigen opt for a limited, worldly purpose for their marriage. The difficulties that arise stem primarily from Arveragus's and Dorigen's words to each other and from the nature of their…
Pickering, O. S.
Archiv fur das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 226 (1989).
Since the late 1970s, manuscript study has become a major part of Middle English scholarship, but such study has not affected edditorial practice. The "Riverside Chaucer," for example, "is scarcely revolutionary in its method and biases."
Surveys Middle English references to Spanish people, places, and things, concluding that, among Middle English authors, Chaucer "reflects the greatest and the most diverse knowledge" of Spain. He was familiar with Spanish geography, "hispano-Arabic…
Series of essays focusing on medieval vernacular literature and "the presence of a text to its own age and the presence of that age within it." Special emphasis on Chaucer in Chapter 6, which examines CT, ABC, and LGW, to "restore the presence of the…
Drakakis, John.
Andrew James Johnston, Russell West-Pavlov, and Elisabeth Kempf, eds. Love, History and Emotion in Chaucer and Shakespeare: "Troilus and Criseyde" and "Troilus and Cressida" (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), pp. 109-24.
Contrasts the presentations of interiority in TC and in Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida" as a basis for analyzing Shakespeare's vacating his play of chivalric principles.
Chaucer studies are often considered neutral and unpoliticized, whether they are subjective, personalized readings, or objective and "professionalized." The construction of the Middle Ages as unalterably "Other," combined with the lack of a…
A textbook anthology of British and American poetry, arranged topically, with a glossary of poetic terms, a section entitled "About the Poets," and a first-line index. In a chapter labeled "Human Condition" includes a modern English translation of…
Separate chapters are devoted to Lollard society, education, biblical scholarship, and the ideology of the movement as it relates to theology, ecclesiology, and politics. Chapter 9,"The Context of Vernacular Wycliffism," examines the question of…
Wojtyś, Anna.
Richard Dance and Laura Wright, eds. The Use and Development of Middle English (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 179-96.
Analyzes the occurrences of the preverbal y- prefix in seven manuscripts of CT, attending to grammatical, syntactic, and metrical considerations. Concludes that, although the construction is used to form passive constructions clearly, the data also…
Gutierrez Arranz, Jose M.
Margarita Gimenez Bon and Vickie Olsen, eds. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference of the Spanish Society for Medieval Language and Literature (Vitoria-Gasteiz: Dpto. Filologæa Inglesa, 1997), 140-45.
Examines "epistolary discourse" in ClP, PrP, NPP, SqT, and PardP in terms of style, using Isidore of Seville's recommendations about decorum.
Beck, Richard K., ed.
Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1964.
Edits the GP portrait of the Wife of Bath, WBP (with excisions and interspersed summaries), WBT, and a portion of FrP, with bottom-of-page textual notes, and end-of-text explanatory notes and glossary. The Introduction addresses the base-text…
Fletcher, Alan J.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989): 15-35.
PardT is not organized according to modern sermon form; rather, it follows a homiletic genre exemplified by the sermons in John Mirk's "Festial," in "Jacob's Well," and in "Speculum sacerdotale," among others. Often "themeless," with an "associative…
Hannis, Grant.
In Sue Joseph and Richard Keeble, eds. Profile Pieces: Journalism and the "Human Interest" Bias (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 17-29.
Opens a volume of essays on the journalistic practice of "painting a picture [of a person] in words," including discussion of the depiction of a "cross-section of Chaucer's contemporary English society" in CT--in GP and elsewhere--with particular…
Boyd, Beverly.
Res Publica Litterarum: Studies in the Classical Tradition 17 (1994): 147-52.
Considers Emelye's prayer in KnT in light of both Boccaccio's "Teseida" and the fertility symbolism in Chaucer's tale, concluding that the prayer should be understood in terms of Diana's various mythological powers, while the answer should be…
Ruud, Jay, and Stacey M. Jones.
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 11.2 (2009): n.p. [Electronic publication]
Uses public relations theory ("concepts of relationship management") to examine the competitiveness of the Pardoner in PardPT and the combination of competiveness in WBP with the valuing of "communal relationship" in WBT.
Jager, Katharine Woodason.
DAI A68.11 (2008): n.p.
Jager contends that medieval English poetry occupied a "hybrid" oral/written cultural space and that the poems "posit an artisanal, poetic masculinity." She uses Th, along with "Piers Plowman," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," and other works,…
Tuttle, Elaine.
Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, eds. Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Athens and London : University of Georgia Press, 1988), pp. 230-49.
In ClT, Griselda paradoxically is able to achieve power only by submissiveness to Walter. As in LGW, Chaucer is equivocal about the power of women.
