Moorman, Charles.
South Atlantic Quarterly 64 (1965): 87-99. Reprinted in A Knyght There Was: The Evolution of the Knight in Literature (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967), pp. 76-95.
Contrasts the conventionalized courtly characterization of the knight in BD with the relatively individualized courtly characterization of Troilus in TC, and goes on to assess the Knight and Theseus of KnT as a new kind of figure found only "at the…
Lepley, Douglas Lee
Dissertation Abstracts International 38 (1978): 1539A.
Neither tedious nor ignorant, MkT teaches a "sound Boethian lesson" and can be seen as "artistically refined" in its evocation of tragic pathos. The Knight, the Host, and the critics err in castigating the Monk and his Tale.
Asay, Timoithy M.
Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Oregon, 2014. Freely accessible at https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/18728; accessed November 22, 2022.
Argues that frame narratives make "language both a represented object and a representing agent" and "thus perfectly mimetic." Following both Dante and Boccaccio in using the device, Chaucer unsettles "easy assignations of identity" for his…
Proposes that historical thinking can be productively conceived of as recombinative fantasy rather than as empirical recollection. Uses several medieval examples of imaginative fantasy as exemplary models: Chaucer's House of Rumour in HF, Dante's…
Jones, Lowanne E.
Rupert T. Pickens, ed. Studies in Honor of Hans-Erich Keller: Medieval French and Occitan Literature and Romance Linguistics (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1993), pp. 419-26.
Jones explores the use of the leek as a phallic symbol in works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Boccaccio, and Rabelais.
Fumo, Jamie C.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 35 (2013): 85-136.
Various associations of sight and death indicate that KnT is a "nightmare vision of vision itself" which, in comparison with Boccaccio's "Teseida," flattens the character of Emelye, intensifies her agency, and indicts chivalry. In KnT the motifs of…
Wagenknecht, Edward.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968.
Offers a "psychography" of Chaucer, using biographical records, contemporaneous events, and Chaucer's works to describe his appearance, habits, personality, opinions, and attitudes. Focuses on the personae in Chaucer's literary works; on his…
Argues that "to see Chaucer the pilgrim as anyone other than a marvelously alert, ironic, facetious master of every situation is to misread" CT. Particularly in his views of churchmen and uses of superlatives, the narrator is best understood as "a…
The public evidence of Edward III's religious devotion reveals his rather conventional piety, "imbued with a strong and confident nationalism" and dedicated largely to commendation of his dynasty.
Weisl, Angela Jane.
New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Weisl explores residual traces in contemporary American popular culture of medieval narrative structures and patterns - e.g., pilgrimage, veneration of relics, conversion, heroic accomplishment, romance, fabliau - identifying such patterns in sports…
Despite their diverse emphases, critical responses to the Monk's portrait in GP evince the same "close reading instinct" that generated E. Talbot Donaldson's "Chaucer the Pilgrim" essay and that has persisted "in an almost universal unwillingness . .…
Tracks the popularity of a passage about shoes from Rom in the nineteenth-century popular press, demonstrating how the passage forges a connection between Victorian and medieval England by using Chaucer as a supporter of Victorian interests and…
West, Philip.
Essays in Arts and Sciences 8 (1979): 7-16.
The Wife of Bath is, in B. J. Whiting's phrase, "an oxymoron in the flesh," and modern structuralist criticism helps us to see the mythic implications of her parodies of Paul's dicta concerning marriage, apostolic experience, and beatific vision.
Jost, Jean E.
Cindy L. Vitto and Marcia Smith Marzec, eds. New Perspectives on Criseyde (Fairview, N.C.: Pegasus Press, 2004), pp. 207-30
Jost applies performance theory to key points in the narrative at which Criseyde seems to manipulate her words and her behavior self-consciously to achieve a desired effect.
Fulton, Helen.
Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 106 (2006): 25-42.
Assesses the late-medieval and early modern popularity of the "story of Griselda" as an exploration of the "paradox of her non-noble status and her fitness to hold the moral high ground" and a reflection of anxiety "about marriages based on unequal…
Crane, Susan.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
Crane investigates a wide range of cultural rituals, demonstrating how identity was performed in late medieval England and how such performances make meaning and establish identity. She explores the Chaucer coat of arms as self-representation rooted…
Paxson, James J., Lawrence M. Clopper, and Sylvia Tomasch, eds.
Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998.
Eleven essays by various authors on medieval theatricality as a cultural process, including discussion of dramatic images and ludic energy in Chaucer and the social and ideological "performativities" of the mystery and morality plays. For six essays…
Examines PrT and the Prioress's sketch in GP as reflexes of gender performance and the historical conditions that shaped such performances. The anti-Semitism of her tale results from her suppression of her "bodiliness," represented in a fetishizing…
Lehmberg, Stanford E., Samantha Meigs, and Thomas William Heyck.
Chicago: Lyceum, 2008.
Credits Chaucer "[m]ore than any other single person . . . with establishing the position of Middle English," describing him as a "major figure in politics as well as literature," and declaring that CT "achieved instant popularity" and that it is the…
Fleming, John V.
R. F. Yeager and Charlotte C. Morse, eds. Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V. A. Kolve (Asheville, N.C.: Pegasus Press, 2001), pp.301-24.
Explores the "iconographic vocabulary" of Pentecost and its affiliations in Wolfram von Eschenbach's "Parzival," Dante's "Inferno," Lus de Cames's "Lusiads," and Chaucer's SumT. Chaucer's version combines details from verbal and pictorial traditions…
Neither Gascoigne's comments on Chaucer's deathbed repentence nor the retraction at the end of ParsT should be read too strongly. Rather Ret should be connected to the ParsT more clearly and seen in relationship to remarks on repentence in ParsT…
Item not seen. The WorldCat record states that this is a "Shortened edition of The Horizon book of the Middle Ages, published in 1968 by American Heritage, New York," with a section on Chaucer.
Opens with a section (pp. 1-6) on Chaucer's life and his role as a songwriter (one who "introduced the rondel into England from France"), and reprints, with glosses and comments, the words from Ralph Vaughan Williams's printed musical score of MercB…
