Tagaya, Yuko.
Koichi Kano, ed. Through the Eyes of Chaucer: Essays in Celebration of the 20th Anniversary of Society for Chaucer Studies (Kawasaki: Asao Press, 2014), pp. 169-84.
Introduces the historical context of pilgrimage in both the West and Japan in order to interpret the opening lines of GP. Argues that "kejime" as represented in pilgrims in "Tokaidochu Hizakurige," written by Jippensha Ikku, can also be read in the…
Legassie, Shayne Aaron.
Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans, eds. Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), pp. 199-219.
Examines the "artistic and ideological purposes" of the notion of a pilgrimage road in the "imaginary of the Middle Ages," focusing on late medieval England and commenting on the attention (or lack of attention) to the road in CT and the Ellesmere…
Burjorjee, D. M.
Annuale Mediaevale 13 (1972): 14-31.
Surveys nautical imagery and pilgrimage-on-the-sea-of-life metaphors in the sources to TC, and discusses book by book Chaucer's uses of such figures in his poem, especially the sailing heart image, arguing that the varieties of imagery cohere to…
Reiss, Edmund.
Studies in Philology 67 (1970): 295-305.
Considers CT among other medieval pilgrimage narratives, distinguishing them from other journey narratives and emphasizing what makes CT unusual: "concretization, fragmentation, and emphasis on the human." Comments on pilgrimage as the "dynamic…
Baldry, Cherith.
Mike Ashley, ed. The Mammoth Book of More Historical Whodunnits (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2001), pp. 297-312.
Short story in which Chaucer, on peace mission to France, solves the mystery of a murder thereby helping Bertrand du Guesclin, who had been falsely accused.
Holloway, Julia Bolton.
J. Stephen Russell, ed. Allegoresis: The Craft of Allegory in Medieval Literature (New York and London: Garland, 1988, for 1987), pp. 109-32.
Using CT, "Piers Plowman," and Dante's "Commedia," Holloway looks at traditions of pilgrims and pilgrimages in their figural connections, the role of play and playfulness as correctives for error, and the pilgrim as "pharmakoi," "scapegoat figures of…
Holloway, Julia Bolton.
New York, Berne, and Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1987.
Drawing on medieval music, iconography, typology, and anthropology, Holloway uses "medieval theory and practice of pilgrimage" to illuminate the "Commedia," "Piers Plowman," and CT. Explains why each author made himself a pilgrim in his own book.
A frame-tale collection of stories that adapts aspects of CT, told while travelers are trapped on a stalled subway car. Written in rhymed couplets, with a General Prologue and nineteen tales without prologues.
Fray Juan's widely known fourteenth-century Spanish gloss on Aegidius Romanus' "De regimine principum" provides parallel passages for nearly all patristic components in Virginia's catalogue of virtues; it could also have suggested narrative…
Treharne, Elaine.
Myra Seaman, Eileen A. Joy, and Nicola Masciandaro, eds. Dark Chaucer: An Assortment (Brooklyn, N. Y.: Punctum Books, 2012), pp. 161-71.
Reads PhyT as a deliberate inversion of hagiography, seen particularly in its failure to end with any positive consequences of the martyrdom.
Bleeth, Kenneth.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 28 (2006): 221-24.
Argues that written texts are not the only valid sources of PhyT and acknowledges the need to consider "remembered texts, semantic fields, and pictorial images" - "intertexts" theorized by Michael Riffaterre.
Corsa, Helen Storm, ed.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987.
Following the guidelines of the general editors, Paul G. Ruggiers, Donald C. Baker, and Daniel J. Ransom, Corsa provides "collations of those manuscripts which have attracted commentary" and "readings from the principle printed editions that have…
Robertson, D. W.,Jr.
Chaucer Review 23 (1988): 129-39.
The Physician's misunderstanding of his tale adds to the comedy of CT. He concludes the tale with a warning to forsake sin, not realizing that--like Appius, who betrays the innocence of Virginia--he betrays the innocence of those who come to him "in…
Robbins, Rossell Hope.
Mieczyslaw Brahmer, Stanislaw Helsztynski, and Julian Krzyzanowski, eds. Studies in Language and Literature in Honour of Margaret Schlauch (Warsaw: PWN—Polish Scientific Publishers, 1966), pp. 335-41.
Traces in medieval medical tradition references to the fifteen authorities cited in the GP description of the Physician (CT 1.429-434), arguing that Chaucer's "list contains just those names that an educated doctor of his day would have cited."
Argues that PhyT was designed to critique the Man of Law, an extension of the ancient "feud between law and medicine." Explores this tradition in classical and medieval sources, and identifies ways that Chaucer evoked it through adjustments to Livy…
Schiff, Randy P.
Randy P. Schiff and Joseph Taylor, eds. The Politics of Ecology: Land, Life, and Law in Medieval Britain (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), pp. 82-103.
Argues that the narrator's comments on poachers and governesses in PhyT are not digressive, but part of a broader "biopolitical" concern that "clearly condemns the parental absolutism that leads to Virginius's murder of his daughter" and aptly…
Bordalejo uses traditional and electronic methods to explore the various orders of the tales in manuscripts of CT, concluding that the order was affected by accident in some cases but by scribal intervention in others.
Morse, J. Mitchell.
Modern Language Quarterly 19 (1958): 3-20.
Describes the "intellectual milieu" of the Clerk in order to characterize him as "man of essentially humanistic temper, aware of so many complexities . . . that he found it difficult to rest in dogmatic assurance of anything." Traces the "movement…
Howard, Donald R.
Larry D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel, eds. The Wisdom of Poetry (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Western Michigan University, 1982), pp. 151-75.
Explores the philosophy and modern "philosophizing" and especially Bloomfield's location of the philosophy in the actual experience of TC, as for example, in the narrator's "historical hindsight," which is compared to God's prescience.