Jost, Jean E.
Peter G. Beidler, ed. Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde (Cambridge; and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 77-90.
Analyzes the fraternal and potentially sexual attraction between the Friar and the Summoner by focusing on Chaucer's conception of brotherhood and the male relationships in FrPT and SumPT.
Oliver, Paul.
Linda Cookson and Bryan Loughrey, ed. Critical Essays on The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales (Harlow: Longman, 1989), pp. 82-92.
Comments on several stylistic device of characterization in GP and the effects they produce: the Knight is earnest by obsolete, and spiritually ambiguous; the Parson, an exaggerated stereotype, cut off from people by lack of realistic details; the…
Surveys depictions of "good" and "bad" women in medieval art and literature, concentrating on how their hair characterizes them and directs viewers' attention. Includes a brief discussion of the implications of Emelye's yellow/golden hair in KnT…
Baghdikian, Sonia.
In Graham Nixon and John Honey, eds. An Historic Tongue: Studies in English Linguistics in Memory of Barbara Strang (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 41-48.
Draws examples from Bo and Elizabeth I’s translation of Boethius ("noght," "nowt," "nothing,” etc.) to show that the ambiguity of morphological negation disappears between Middle and Early Modern English while that of syntactical negation…
Reiss, Edmund.
Julian N. Wasserman and Lois Roney, eds. Sign, Sentence, Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1989), pp. 113-37.
Dante, Boccaccio, Gower, Chaucer, and the Archpriest of Hita are aware that language is deceptive: signs are ambiguous and may be misunderstood, or they are deliberately deceptive. The author may serve as trickster and may demand reader "response…
Compares the attitudes toward fame and poetic fame in HF and in Skelton's The Garlande of Laurell, arguing that Chaucer's willingness to accept the Boethian transience of fame contrasts a greater desire for certainty in Skelton.
Barrington, Candace.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Barrington studies examples of "Chaucer's appearances in American popular culture over the past two hundred years": Percy MacKaye's play, pageant, and opera; James Norman Hall's WWI memoir "Flying with Chaucer" (1930), Anne Maurey's pageant "May Day…
Schlacks, Deborah Davis.
New York: Peter Lang, 1994.
Argues from internal and external evidence that Fitzgerald's works were strongly influenced by Chaucer's dream poems. In particular, Chaucerian themes, characterizations of females, and dream structures occur in Fitzgerald's early works, especially…
Pinsky, Robert, and Maggie Dietz, eds.
New York: Norton, 2000.
Anthologizes a large number of selections from responses to Robert Pinsky's request that Americans submit an example of their favorite poetry and "comment on the poem's personal significance." The volume includes GP, lines 1-18, and brief comments by…
Fradenburg, Aranye.
Carolynn Van Dyke, ed. Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 13-31.
In some modern views, and in John of Trevisa's "On the Properties of Things," animals have feelings and communicate. Similarly, CT and PF demonstrate "the value and pleasure of minds speaking to other minds," whether human or avian. Late medieval…
Legassie, Shayne Aaron.
John M. Ganim and Shayne Aaron Legassie, eds. Cosmopolitanism and the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 181-205.
Compares cosmopolitanism in Trevet, Gower, and Chaucer's Constance legends. Establishes that Chaucer's sultan in MLT represents more of an aesthetic cosmopolitan than do his analogues in Trevet and Gower, who portray cosmopolitanism as a means of…
Collins, Arthur.
Literature in North Queensland 8.1 (1980): 7-13.
Verse dialogue in iambic pentameter couplets in which the Wife of Bath recommends to a convalescent Chaucer the idea of writing CT and offers to tend him while he writes.
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'."…
