Downes, Stephanie.
Isabel Davis and Catherine Nall, eds. Chaucer and Fame: Reputation and Reception (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), pp. 127-42.
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…
Lampert, Lisa Renee.
Dissertation Abstracts International 58 (1997): 450A
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…
Jolliffe, Christine.
Dissertation Abstracts International 61: 2287A, 1999.
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…
Windeatt, Barry.
Charlotte Brewer and Barry Windeatt, eds. Traditions and Innovations in the Study of Middle English Literature: The Influence of Derek Brewer (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), pp. 262-78.
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.
Bronson, Bertrand H.
Studies in Philology 58 (1961): 583-96.
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,…
Gillespie, Vincent.
Mary Carr, K. P. Clarke, and Marco Nievergelt, eds. On Allegory: Some Medieval Aspects and Approaches (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 231-56.
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…
Cooper, Helen.
Yearbook of Langland Studies 32 (2018): 375-89.
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…
Explores how resonance with CT in '1 Henry IV, 1.2, "communicates the pre-Reformation otherness of the world" and raises questions about "cultural distance and appropriation" that circulate among the essays collected in this special issue of…
Carruthers, Mary (J.)
Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson, eds. Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 39-44.
Comments on the rhetorical ontology of the Wife of Bath. The character is a figure of power who "continues to bother" because she is not silenced in the text, compelling readers to wish to respond.
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.
Johnson, Eleanor.
In Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld, eds. Chaucer and the Subversion of Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 61-82.
Argues that HF, like Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" and Lyn Hejinian's "My Life," rejects a "hermeneutic of linear causality." Both Chaucer and the postmedieval authors develop the potential of the dream-vision form to advance a "literary…
Describes the history and reception of friars in France and England from their inception to c. 1400, with a chapter on late fourteenth-century English literary responses: "England: The Turbulent 14th Century, and the Writings of Chaucer, Langland and…
A heretofore overlooked list of internal evidence for Chaucer's authorship of Wom Unc concerns the source of the mirror image--the latter used by Chaucer in his Bo. Since Chaucer's lady is described in terms that smack of Boethius's Fortune, the…
Minnis, Alastair.
Medieval Translator/Traduire au Moyen Age 16 (2017): 357-76.
Maintains that, despite the critical tradition of Chaucer's self-effacing persona, there are significant assertions of his own poetic authority in ThP and HF, and perhaps even challenges to Dante. Explores details of diction and imagery ("popet,"…
Examines the fifteenth-century manuscript known as "On Husbondrie," compiled by Duke Humfrey of Gloucester, which contains information on farming, agriculture, and animal husbandry. Argues that the manuscript is not simply a practical guide for…
Chaucer's use of the interjection "Oo" in KnT (2533) is adduced as a stage in the history of "Ahoy" going back to the Anglo-French verb "oir" (to hear, listen).
Lewis, Sean Gordon.
Enarratio: Publications of the Medieval Association of the Midwest 23 (2022): 52-68.
Examines the "embodiment of language" in HF and argues that it displays epistemological "confidence in the ability of the textual word/body to communicate accurately to the reader's imagination in a synesthetic experience." Focuses on how Chaucer…
McLeod, Glenda.
Glenda McLeod, Virtue and Venom: Catalogs of Women from Antiquity to the Renaissance. Women and Culture Series. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), pp. 81-109.
Contrary to critical tradition, Chaucer did not necessarily abandon LGW in boredom. A reading with attention to the discrepancies between LGWP and the legends, and to their ordering and their figurative language, reveals a careful and purposeful…
Spearing, A. C.
John V. Fleming and Thomas J. Heffernan, eds. Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings, No. 2, 1986 (Knoxville, Tenn.: New Chaucer Society, 1987), pp. 169-77.
Examines the pervasiveness of love iconography and tradition in PF. Reviews various interpretations, political and social, and sees the "center" of the poem in the central line on the treacherous lapwing, a model for Chaucer's method with its many…
Kiser, Lisa J.
Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds. Mediaevalitas: Reading the Middle Ages (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), pp. 1-14.
Assesses the depiction of female-gendered Nature in Brunetto Latini's "Il Tesoretto," Alain de Lille's "De planctu naturae," Jean de Meun's "Roman de la Rose," and Chaucer's PF. A modern ecofeminst approach to these depictions helps disclose the…
In playing on Alan's "theological epic" in HF, Chaucer projects a view of readerly interpretation as a key component of literary production, thus challenging the notions that poetry springs solely from inspiration and "that textual meaning could be…
Donabeita Fernandez, Maria Louisa.
Teresa Fanego Lema, ed. Papers from the IVth International Conference of the Spanish Society for Medieval Language and Literature (Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1993), pp. 43-53.
A deconstructive-psychoanalytical reading of WBP that examines the gaps left in the Wife's discourse, exploring implications of rape, sexual economics, and prostitution.
Molencki, Rafał.
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 31 (1997): 163-77.
Traces the history of the phrase "al be it" from its late-medieval "heyday" through its reduction to a single-word conjunction to its current status as a marker of "concessivity" or contradiction. Most medieval instances are cited from Chaucer.
Pratt, Robert A.
Philological Quarterly 57 (1978): 267-68.
Jankyn's theories of the dissemination of sound and odor coincide precisely with those of medieval science as presented by Albertus Magnus in his "Liber de sensu et sensato." Chaucer draws upon these widely disseminated medieval views rather than…
