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.
Modern Philology 54 (1956): 1-6.
Clarifies the implications of the Prioress keeping dogs as pets and feeding them meat (GP 1.146ff.), explaining that such behavior bends or breaks at least four "Benedictine strictures"--ones that restrict pet owning (especially dogs) and eating…
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…
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.
