Browse Items (15542 total)

Explains the important place in the tradition of Chaucer portraiture of John Speed's engraving made for Thomas Speght's 1598 edition of Chaucer's "Workes". Comments on relations with the manuscript portrait of Chaucer that accompanies Thomas…

Considers why Gower's verse-epistle “In Praise of Peace” was included in William Thynne's 1532 edition of Chaucer’s works and explores possible motives and collaborations in the process of editing the poem and the volume.

Outlines the “origins of early modern traditions of ‘lives of the poets’ and biographical reading” of their works. Includes analysis of Thomas Speght’s “Life of Geoffrey Chaucer” in his 1598 edition of Chaucer’s Workes, commenting on revisions made…

Describes the launch of a new electronic journal related to the study of Chaucer, "New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy & Profession," and summarizes the contents of the inaugural issue.

Maintains that "medieval thought was continually pushed toward true contradictions . . . despite [the] impossibility imposed by classical logic," citing Aristotle, Abelard, Jean Buridan, Aquinas, and modern thinkers such as Hegel and Graham Priest…

Presents an understanding of the rules of law, chivalry, and inheritance in "The Tale of Gamelyn." Demonstrates how these rules account for its apparent narrative (and, by extension, aesthetic) inconsistencies by showing how a knowledge of…

Identifies connections among "war, narrative, and literary technique" in TC to show "how Chaucer constructs . . . siege as a dynamic space in which to imagine the forces that shape and determine human behaviour." Chaucer "reconfigures the idea of a…

Examines desire and intimacy in TC and "reinterprets the depiction of pleasure" in the poem, "particularly the bed scene in Book III, through an allegorical reading of medieval and modern concepts of desire."

Argues that the "ongoing negotiations between experience and authority, flesh and spirit, nature and the divine, are fluid, bidirectional, and mutually dependent" in PF. The poem depicts a cacophonous set of voices and demonstrates that the…

Studies Ovid's "Tristia" and LGW and argues that "Ovid's literary autobiography" revealed in the "Tristia" is "assimilated and elaborated" by Chaucer in LGWP. This connection not only allows Chaucer "to convey . . . a sense of his own Ricardian,…

Argues that Gavin Douglas's construction of Honour and Venus in the "Palyce of Honour," though misogynistic, constitutes a complex allegorical response to Chaucer's model of literary renovation in the HF.

Clarifies "two distinct modes of ekphrasis, the literal and the literary," exploring how and where they are deployed in HF (storm at sea and wall paintings of Dido and Aeneas) and in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (castle description and Gawain's…

Discusses previous scholarship on line 1315 of BD, and suggests that emending the line to “Gan [hym] homwarde for to ryde" brings it into conformance with the rest of this "briskly tetrametric poem."

Presents evidence from a "description of a manuscript of Chaucer’s 'Treatise on the Astrolabe' that appeared in a sale catalogue in 1843." This description, because it doesn’t correspond to any known, available copies, suggests another manuscript of…

Challenges scribal and editorial choices to use "swyve" at ManT, 256, where the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts (and two others) have some form of "et cetera," arguing that the latter is "likely an example of authorial play." Gauges the meanings,…

Argues that "through the Nun's Priest's portion of Fragment VII Chaucer navigates much of the theories of characterization found in the late medieval rhetorical treatises known as the 'artes poetriae,' or the arts of poetry," and offers "a critique…

Positions Mel and ManT as "vivid examples of Chaucer's polyphonic authority that highlight the rich network of gendered speech constituting his mature voice." Argues that Chaucer's ventriloquized women in Mel and ManT translate continental sources…

Offers evidence for the source for the opening of the ShT, connecting it with Gilbertus Minorita's "Dictinctiones" and its quotation of then-contemporary vernacular poetry.

Traces the figure of the "sursanure" in FranT, demonstrating that this superficially healed wound is an apt metaphor for Chaucer/s soft or "sunken" sources.

Focuses on marvels in medieval literature, and argues that medieval readers appreciated indeterminacy of the marvelous. Some attention to FranT.

Traces the struggles of Dorigen in FranT as a kind of conduct literature for wives, as Dorigen's pain in Arveragus's absence is linked to "two contemporary French conduct texts--'Le Livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry' (1371) and 'Le Mesnagier de…

Traces Chaucer's uses of purses and other cavities in PardPT as sites of queer reproduction. Throughout, "locates the ‘purs’ as a gendered, sexualized, and economized site of social exchange."

Reassesses the role and value of the falcon and the mechanical horse in SqT. Demonstrates through these depictions that SqT creates "interspecies and intrasexual relationships of care outside of the gendered human norms of chivalric romance."

Draws on debates about slow cinema to suggest how ClT evokes a "slow eco-aesthetics" with an ethical impact. Based on the notion that medieval pilgrimage texts evoke a slow aesthetic, the strategies of slowness and patience in the tale of Patient…

Uses "lessons from trauma studies concerning silence, as well as new materialist and ecocritical approaches," to explore the resistance of Griselda's patient silence. "[T]hrough a preponderant use of negative words"--a "poetics of negation"--Griselda…