Stephens, Rebecca.
Laura C. Lambdin and Robert T. Lambdin, eds. Chaucer's Pilgrims: An Historical Guide to the Pilgrims in the "Canterbury Tales" (Westport, Conn.; and London: Greenwood, 1996), pp. 47-54.
Summarizes the conventions of medieval monastic life and comments on the hagiography of SNT. In all except the fact that she speaks, Chaucer's Second Nun embodies the ideal of the medieval nun.
Blake, N. F.
Notes and Queries 222 (1977): 400-01.
The lines (1.4087 and 4187) in RvT suggest the reading of "god" without the inflectional ending. Tolkien objects on grounds of meter, but we do not know enough about Chaucer's meter to emend on these grounds alone.
Burrow recommends repunctuating TC 2.255 as "Nece, alwey lo to the laste," suggesting that it means "look to the last," a phrase that might have been inspired by Chaucer's experiences as a "diplomat and negotiator."
Grady, Frank, and Andrew Galloway, eds.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013.
Essays focus on the medieval idea of the "literary," with particular emphasis on the poetry of Chaucer, Langland, and Gower. For five essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Answerable Style under Alternative Title.
Smith, Sheri.
Dissertation Abstracts International C75.01 (2016): n.p.
Examines answers to prayer in BD, HF, KnT, FranT, "hagiographic tales" (SNT, PrT, MLT, and ClT), and TC, arguing that Chaucer engages significant "theological and philosophical issues."
Surveys "precursors of modern novels" in English tradition between 1400 and 1600, with a "glance" at even earlier stories which "reveal a kinship with the future narrative form," discussing, among others, TC, and treating it (pp. 28-40) as an…
Minnis, Alastair.
REALB: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature (Tubingen) 12 (1996): 203-21
Assesses differing opinions of female preaching and teaching in medieval orthodoxy and in the Lollard movement, arguing that Chaucer's depiction of the Wife of Bath and the loathly lady in WBT confronts these opinions. Just as PardT confronts…
Hultin, Neil C.
Annuale Mediaevale 9 (1968): 58-75.
Considers the courtly conventions that are used in Mars, and argues that they are deployed ironically and comically to "show the moral deficiencies" of the courtly "system" and lead the reader to judge it accordingly. Considers the allusive…
Narinsky, Anna.
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 14.2 (2016): 187-216.
Treats "the operations and qualities of fictional minds" in ClT, "as well as the narrative means through which they are conveyed," examining Griselda, Walter, and the "group consciousness" of the Saluzzan people in light of "modern cognitive…
Kruger, Steven F.
Suzanne Conklin Akbari and James Simpson, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 147-65.
Questions “to what extent might late medieval Christian intellectual and historical engagements with Judaism be productive for readings of Chaucerian texts not only when Jews are directly represented but also in the absence of such explicit…
Estelle Epinoux and Nathalie Martinière, eds. Rewriting in the 20th-21st Centuries: Aesthetic Choice or Political Act? (Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2015), pp. 105-18.
Argues that in her experimental novel "Ryder," Djuna Barnes wrote "under the influence of Chaucer by employing a similar style," that her "use of glosses" in Chapter 10 "demonstrates an intertextuality" with CT, and that in Chapter 22 she "rewrites a…
Chaucer criticizes not anti-Semitism but rather the Prioress herself. The Prioress does not believe in New Testament attitudes on accepting Jews. Despite being a nun, she is unyielding in her belief that Jews are evil.
Simpson, James.
Troianalexandrina: Anuario sobre literatura medieval de materia clásica 19 (2019): 293-312.
Traces elegiac, tragic, and pseudo-historical traditions in late medieval English narratives of Troy, arguing that they are all "anti-Virgilian, and therefore anti-imperialist" and "also somber, monitory, skeptical and intimately sensitive to the…
Emmerson, Richard Kenneth.
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981.
Presents apocalyptical, exegetical, iconographic, and literary traditions of the Antichrist. Warns against conflation of Antichrist and devil in the canon of CYT (p. 147).
In SumT, anticlerical polemic serves the religious argument of Chaucer's conservative faith. The caricature of the Friar is purposeful and schematic: the tale mocks his carnality and literalness and calls into question the administration of penance…
Georgianna, Linda.
Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen, eds. The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), pp. 148-73.
Examines the complexity of anticlericalism. Clerical figures are prominent in the works of both Boccaccio and Chaucer, but CT redirects the potential disruption of anticlerical complaint away from dissent and toward self-evaluation. Georgianna gives…
Weissman, Hope Phyllis.
George D. Economou, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer: A Collection of Original Articles (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976), pp. 93-110.
The depiction of women in CT stems from the medieval presentation of four main female archetypes. Chaucer employs and experiments with these types, occasionally seeming sympathetic to women. Nonetheless, the women in the tales perpetuate the…
Brady, Lindy.
Notes and Queries 257 (2012): 163-66.
"Arthur and Gorlagon" and WBPT share numerous misogynist topoi as well as the plot element of a mission to understand women. The Latin romance is thus "a more significant analogue for the combined Prologue and Tale . . . than has been recognized."
Borthwick, Sister Mary Charlotte.
Modern Language Quarterly 22 (1961): 227-35.
Reads Antigone's song (TC 2.827-75) as a "reply to Criseyde's objections to love" which precedes it in the narrative. Much of the song derives from Guillaume de Machaut's "Paradis d'Amour," but its sequence and several ideas mirror Criseyde's earlier…
