Browse Items (15544 total)

Argues that Chaucer employs Livy's and Augustine's stories of Lucretia as a way to hold up feminine virtue, rather than repeating their negative attributes exhibited in the source material.

Argues that in the Dido account of LGW Chaucer "channels" deep-seated cultural "anxiety about Phoenicians as he asserts his place in a Roman-centered Western tradition." By "removing the story of Dido's diasporic leadership, and misidentifying her…

Investigates several motifs in the LGW account of Philomela: victimhood, "inappropriate sovereignty," muteness, orality and legal witnessing, "tapestry-as-prosthesis," rape as a property crime, and lack of legal remedy, arguing that Chaucer's tale…

Explores why LGW unsettles readers and outlines this special issue of "Chaucer Review."

Investigates how Chaucer, Gower, Langland, Usk, and Hoccleve use confessional discourse to challenge Latinity and "authorize their own literary productions." Includes discussion of the "self-abasing literary self-portrayals as penitents" found in…

Describes the medieval understanding of "faculty psychology"--the three cells or ventricles where imagination, logic, and memory reside--and argues that HF "takes the audience" through the three ventricles, while exploring the creative potential of…

Examines the ways in which the Legend of Ariadne in LGW reflects Chaucer's concerns over the cyclical and repeating tragedies of history.

Explores the role of the narrator in LGW as being culpable in his deception by telling idealized stories of women who suffer and die.

Provides an afterword to the special issue on LGW, focusing on the theme of love's loss, and presents an argument that Prince's song "When You Were Mine" provides a foil for the women of LGW.

Claims that LGW may have been viewed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a response to TC and as an allegory for how Chaucer may have interacted with patrons.

Investigates Chaucer's multiple registers of speech in order to explore social harmony and discord in LGW as it pertains to women's desires.

Connects LGW with the "Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry" and the "Menagier de Paris." Suggests that the domestic sphere of "Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry" and the "Menagier de Paris" offers a place for productive, satisfying love; however,…

Surveys "the idea literary fame" in classical and medieval traditions (Homer, Hesiod, Virgil, Statius, and Dante); analyzes Petrarch's notion more extensively; and examines HF to show that though Chaucer, "like Petrarch, was intimately familiar with…

Studies physical motion, readerly motion, and other motions related to texts in late medieval English literature, including a chapter on Chaucer's "engagement with motion as a concept in natural philosophy" in HF and PF, connecting it with the…

Studies the uses of allegory in western literature--classical, continental, and English, from Prudentius to George Herbert--with emphasis on growth and variety in the tradition, signals to allegory in the texts, and embedded uses of allegory as well…

Explores the significance of Chaucer's travels through Kent. Claims that HF resonates with the cult and Church of St. Leonard in Kent.

Includes a chapter entitled "Chaucer, House of Fame" (pp. 355-83) that describes HF and characterizes Chaucer's treatment of literary reputation as unusual in lacking the "moralistic slant" of his predecessors, opting instead for a "disillusioned…

Discredits the idea that the Eagle's disquisition on sound in HF is conventional Aristotelianism, mediated by Robert Grosseteste or Walter Burley, arguing that the details of the multiplying ripples and the combination of science and myth were…

Describes and illustrates the "visual arts as a whole" in late medieval England. The index records some twenty references to Chaucer, including a section on HF (pp. 345–48) that shows that "the two largest passages of writing about architecture at…

Presents new evidence that "shows that the author [of Equat] was not Chaucer," connecting the unique manuscript of the treatise (Cambridge, Peterhouse, MS 75.I) with the work and life of John Westwyk, a monk of Tynemouth. Includes paleographical…

Considers "the trope of the female body entowered" in selected romances and lyrics, BD, and the Paston letters.

Seeks to understand BD as an exploration of (male) grief beyond its presumed historical occasion and to relate the subject and structure of the poem by explicating the recurring references to literal and metaphorical nakedness--especially that of…

Adapts the "gift theory" of Jacques Derrida; considers the historical context of the marriage of John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster; and focuses on the scene of White's ring-giving (as reported by the Black Knight), considering the poem itself as…

Considers names in BD as part of a larger examination of nomenclature's role in defining Englishness within the context of other linguistic traditions.

Explores the "ideological work" of children in Chaucer's literature, commenting on Sophie in Mel, Virginia in PhyT, Maurice in MLT, and Lewis in Astr. Treats the latter as a metonym for vernacular readers and for the potential of technological…