Thomas, Paul R., dir.
Provo, Utah: Chaucer Studio, 1995.
Recorded at the Ninth International Congress of the New Chaucer Society, Trinity College, Dublin, 1994. Re-edited and digitally mastered as a CD-ROM by Troy Sales and Paul Thomas in 2003.
Pearsall, Derek, ed.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
Follows the general format of the Variorum Edition with text based on Hengwrt and collations with early manuscripts and most printed editions . Surveys earlier criticism with extensive notes.
Hussey, Maurice, ed.
Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1965.
Presents NPPT and NPE in Middle English (following Robinson's 1957 edition) with end-of-text notes and glossary. The Introduction (pp. 1-44) considers the tale-teller relations of NPPT, the "digressions" (dreams, sermons, and rhetoric) of NPT, and…
Huddlestone, Elizabeth
Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Study guide to the NPPT that includes the Middle English text, with facing-page glosses and commentary that encourages careful reading. The volume includes a summary of CT and an introduction to Chaucer's language, along with discussion of various…
Manning, Stephen.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 59 (1960): 403-16.
Acknowledging NPT to be "a rhetorical tour de force," assesses implications of its status as a "fable," surveying medieval commentaries on the genre, particularly its ability to teach and/or delight, and commenting on the morality the Nun's Priest…
Thomas, Paul R.
Encyclia: Journal of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 62 (1987, for 1985): 41-49.
In his last allusion in NPT, the Nun's Priest reminds us once again of the preaching tradition with which his tale has been playing. The various narrative perspectives shift so frequently that NPT is more than just an idle tale or a tale about a fox…
Heffernan, Carol F.
Leeds Studies in English 42 (2011): 43-52.
Reconsiders questions of the number of Canterbury pilgrims, focusing on GP, 1.164 and the ecclesiastical pilgrims. Suggests that the Nun's Priest and the Clerk may be identical or, at least, kindred spirits, and considers what NPT and ClT may reveal…
NPT is a "mock-summa" that skeptically examines how authority is conveyed and parodies "didactic mechanisms." Mocking various kinds of rhetoric and discourse, the Nun's Priest also evokes a laughter of merriment that "laughs without laughing at…
Identifies a variety of tones in NPT, identifying interplay among the voice of the "rhetor," a "sermonizing" voice, and the outlook of a "sophisticated fabulist," exploring the "quality of their combination" by observing their relations with…
Cook, James W.
American Notes and Queries 7 (1968): 53-54.
Surmises that, as a satiric response to the anti-Semitism of PrT, NPT may reflect Chaucer's possible knowledge of a twelfth-century "Anglo-Jewish collection of 107 animal fables," the "Mishle Shu' alim," generally attributed to Berechiah Ben Natron…
Oliva, Marilyn.
Stephen H. Rigby, ed., with the assistance of Alastair J. Minnis. Historians on Chaucer: The "General Prologue" to the "Canterbury Tales" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 114-36.
Presents case studies and historical background of the nuns' priests in medieval society, and interprets literary tradition of Chaucer's Nun's Priest. Includes an appendix on the Diocese of Norwich Nuns' Priests.
Nohara, Yasuhiro.
English Review (Momoyama Gakuin University) 10 (1995): 41-65.
Surveys the verbal representation of numerals in Chaucer and elsewhere in Middle English and comments on the Germanic basis of composite representations (e.g., "four and twenty") and development of French-influenced forms (e.g., "twenty-four").…
Eckhardt, Caroline D.
Yearbook of English Studies 5 (1975): 1-18.
The observable final total of pilgrims is 33, a symbolically significant sum. The Pilgrim Chaucer's two tales may have been meant as a center-point signifying a shift from game to earnest. The initial statement that there were 29 may demonstrate…
Dane, Joseph A.
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 87 (1993): 65-80.
Questions long-established assumptions about the status of Cambridge Gg and examines Kane's methods for solving Gg 126-38. Argues that the G text of LGWP is "a modern and potentially misleading critical fiction"; that Gg should be regarded as a…
Lawton, David, ed., with prose texts ed. Jennifer Arch and dream poems ed. Kathryn Lynch.
New York: Norton, 2019.
A comprehensive edition of all of Chaucer's works (without Rom or Equat), with bottom-of-page notes, side-bar glosses, headnotes to the individual works and each part of CT, and a glossary. The text is based on manuscript witnesses and on E. Talbot…
Despite Tolkien's praise of Chaucer's "accurate observation" of dialects in RvT, examination of the mss of CT reveals that Chaucer's knowledge of northern dialect was in no way exceptional and that many of the northern speech characteristics of the…
Kelly, Henry Ansgar.
Gregory Kratzmann and James Simpson, eds. Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1986), pp. 92-114.
Reviews scholarship and corrects mistaken assumptions about medieval tragedy. The first vernacular writer in Europe to consider himself a tragedian, Chaucer was anticipated by several Latin writers but drew mainly from Boethius. The tragic falls in…
Reads MerT as a composite of "various comic attitudes toward lust and marriage," not as the bitter vituperation of an angry narrator, arguing that the latter, conventional view results from seeking to impose "organic unity" on four "strikingly…
Sands, Donald B.
Chaucer Review 12 (1978): 171-82.
The Wife of Bath is neither a comic figure as Donaldson and others see her, nor a tragic figure as several other critics see her. Instead she is, as Beryl Rowland suggests, a neurotic and a misfit.
Hartung, Albert E.
Mediaeval Studies 29 (1967): 1-25.
Evaluates MerT in light of its sources and analogues, including the "Miroir de Mariage," Boccaccio's "Ameto," and the "Elegies of Maximianus," the latter identified here as an analogue for the first time, with its presentation of "amorous senility…
Surveys the importance of classical and medieval rhetorical theories that underlie late medieval poetry, and discusses the "flowering of rhetorico-poetic technique in Chaucer's verse," analyzing samples of his poetry in light of Geoffrey of Vinsauf's…
McDonald, William C.
Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 60 (1986): 543-71.
ParsT's statement of the medieval idea (of Peraldus) that true virtue derives from nobility of the spirit rather than from nobility of birth is examined in relation to its treatment by the late-medieval German authors Heinrich von Langenstein and…
Schibanoff, Susan.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 10 (1988): 71-108.
The glosses to the Ellesmere and Egerton manuscripts of WBP and WBT illustrate how differently two readers may respond to a single text. Condemning not only the Wife's sexuality but her "textuality" as well, the Egerton commentator struggles to…
