Browse Items (16035 total)

Only Chaucer places the story of the rioters' search for gold in plague time. The article examines the implications of the plague setting and the plague in literature to explain Chaucer's choice of plague setting.

Argues that the "ability of the poet to secure a just and enduring fame" is an important and unifying theme in HF, focusing on the poem's concerns with poetic authority and patronage, and suggesting that its "missing conclusion" was to entail the…

A revised, shortened version of Patterson's "Perpetual Motion: Alchemy and the Technology of the Self."

Contextualizes the bedchamber of BD, exploring its adaptations of French source material, the otherness of France, the social and psychological implications of beds and textiles, and the imagery of black and white. Emphatically English in its…

Review controversies regarding the editing of medieval texts, faults the new "Riverside Chaucer," which represents no "textual advance over Robinson 2," and judges that "what Bowers offers is the best of two worlds--fidelity to auctorial usage…

Fresco draws attention to the imitation of Chaucer's enchâssement (encasement, enshirement) in Christine's Enseignemens moraulx BnF fr. 1551.

Federico explores how "Ricardian court culture haunts the chivalric spaces inhabited and visited by" Chaucer's TC and by Gawain in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." Parallels between the "moral lapses" of Richard II and those of the two protagonists…

Defines oral performance art as an artistic genre, with written representations of it also manifesting distinctive generic qualities. Ugoretz examines these matters on the basis of contemporary oral performance and analyzes them in relation to five…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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.

Contains only TC by an excellent fifteenth-century scribe. R. K. Root considered this a gamma text.

In PF, BD, and HF, descriptions of mural paintings serve a common function: Chaucer endows the visual artifact with the status of a narrative fiction.

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…

Effective use of repetition solves the question of justice through obvious devices such as polyptoton, semantic implantation, and verbal association.

Reads PhyT as a deliberate inversion of hagiography, seen particularly in its failure to end with any positive consequences of the martyrdom.

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.

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…

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…

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."