Watt, Diane
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
Reads John Gower's Confessio Amantis as a work that "encourages its audience to take risks in interpretation, to experiment with meaning, and to offer individualistic readings." The work pursues a "negative critique of ethical poetry" and enables…
Exemplified by those of Carolyn Dinshaw and Elaine Tuttle Hansen, feminist critiques of E. Talbot Donaldson's scholarship are curiously similar to D. W. Robertson's critiques of that scholarship. These critiques find fault in its subjectivity and…
Ingham, Patricia Clare.
Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico, eds. The Post-Historical Middle Ages ((New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 13-35.
Ingham considers evidence from the exhumation of Petrarch's skull and from Chaucer studies to demonstrate the role of "amorous dispossessions" in historicist pursuits. Lacan's comments on courtly love theorize such dispossessions and complicate…
Dalrymple, Roger.
Phillipa Hardman, ed. The Matter of Identity in Medieval Romance (Woodbridge, Suffolk; and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 2002), pp. 149-62.
Although based on Ovid's tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, "Amoryus and Cleopes" (1449) was clearly influenced by TC in diction and style. Metham's amelioration of tragedy simplifies Chaucer's complex and ambiguous combination of de casibus tragedy and…
TC reflects heterodox or heretical outlooks and religious division in its depiction of love as religion, its prescribing a morality based on love, its metaphors of preaching, its celebration of love's power, and its notion of false felicity.
McKinley, Kathryn.
Brian Gastle and Erick Kelemen, eds. Later Middle English Literature, Materiality, and Culture: Essays in Honor of James M. Dean (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2018.), pp. 107-21.
Describes (with illustrations) the "material remainders of late medieval English practices of pilgrimage," discussing them "in the context of Chaucer's and Langland's portraits of pilgrim attire," and commenting on relations between extant badges and…
Coleman, Joyce.
Joyce Coleman. Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 148-78.
Internal evidence in Chaucer's works indicates that he expected his works to be read aloud--both by himself and to an immediate, first audience and by prelectors to later audiences. Chaucer's references to the reception of his work, his references…
David, Alfred.
Mary J. Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk, eds. Acts of Interpretation (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1982), pp. 147-57.
Although the format (alphabetical) of ABC limits it somewhat, it follows the style of fourteenth-century religious courtly lyrics with a heightened sense of emotionalism. The struggle of the Virgin with the devil in ABC can be equated with the…
Von Kreisler, Nicholai.
Chaucer Review 6.1 (1971): 30-37.
Traces the allusion to a "panyer ful of herbes" in MerT (4.1568) to an oral version of the apocryphal "Life of Aesop," commenting on the implications of this source for the tale.
Horowitz assesses the aesthetic value of BD by focusing on three "transcapes" (through visions): that of the narrator as a literary medium; that of the work's interwoven sources and time spans; and that of the gendered landscape, which is both…
Evans, Ruth.
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans, eds. The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280-1520 (University Park : Pennsylvania State University Press; Exeter: University of Exeter Press 1999), pp. 331-52, pp. 371-78.
Assesses the functions of prologues in Middle English literature, commenting on nuances of "prohemye," "prefacyon," ”preamble," etc., and exploring how prefatory works "disorganiz[e] the categories of center and periphery, 'theoria' and 'praxis'."…
Rabin, Andrew.
Notes and Queries 266 (2021): 164-65.
Claims that Chaucer may have been aware of a fourteenth-century alchemical work prescribing an "elixir" of "a grain of wheat soaked in wine" that prolongs life long enough for someone whose death is imminent to "speak, make their will, and confess."…
Fragments VIII and IX are connected by opposed images of sight and blindness, idleness and work. Themes of alchemical transformation and restraints on freedom (food, mates, language) also link the fragments.
Nakao, Yoshiyuki.
Hisao Tsuru, ed. Fiction and Truth: Essays on Fourteenth-Century English Literature (Tokyo: Kirihara Shoten, 2000), pp. 133-44.
Assessing the punctuation in editions by Baugh, Donaldson, Fisher, Howard, Pollard, Robinson, Root, Skeat, and Windeatt, Nakao suggests that editorial punctuation of TC obscures another voice of Crisyede.
Richardson, Janette.
Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 198 (1962): 388-90.
Traces the scribal and editorial history of capitalizing (or not) "S/summoner" in FrT 3.1327, advocating the lower case "s" for the way it maintains the ambiguity of reference to the protagonist of FrT and the Friar's pilgrim-opponent.
Kirby, Thomas A.
Beryl Rowland, ed. Chaucer and Middle English Studies in honour of Rossell Hope Robbins (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974), pp. 381-83.
Summarizes the plot of a modern analogue to RvT, David Madden's story called "Night Shift," published in "Playboy" magazine in 1971.
Christine de Pizan uses the Griselda tale to illustrate the virtues of patience and constancy in her "Livre de la Cite des Dames," derived from a French prose version of Philippe de Mezieres, perhaps also consulting the anonymous French prose…
Green, Richard Firth.
English Language Notes 28:4 (1991): 9-12.
Discusses similarities between Chaucer's WBT and the French farce "Les deux maris et leurs deux femmes" and suggests that the loathly lady's riddle at the end of WBT "might be drawing on a less recherche tradition than that of Latin rhetoric."
De Nerville, Catherine Jenelle Maness.
DAI 35.03 (1974): 1619A.
Discusses critical approaches to Chaucer's poetry using M. H. Abrams' categories of literary theory (mimetic, objective, pragmatic, and expressive) and commenting on the criticism of D. W. Robertson Jr., Robert M. Jordan, Robert O. Payne, and Charles…
Andersen, Jens Kr.
Orbis Litterarum 27 (1972): 179-201.
Investigates how the frame of the Canterbury pilgrimage is reflected in individual tales, gauging their degrees of authenticity, the quarrels among the pilgrims, the relations between social rank and taste, the interdependence of solace and sentence,…
Silar, Theodore I.
Chaucer Review 32 (1998): 284-309.
The repetition of "fin" (the settlement of a fictitious suit) at the ending of TC has many legal overtones. It evokes "landholding," "harmonization of contrary positions," and "legal fiction," as in a legal suit for which there is, as in TC, a…
Analyzes the "organization and assumptions" of four medieval rhetorical handbooks, focusing on their "methods of amplification," and assesses the influence of rhetorical tradition on the characterizations in TC, in comparison with those of Boccaccio…
