Clark, S. L.,and Julian N. Wasserman.
Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association 4.3 (1978): 11-17.
Secular exempla evoke Fortune's rise and fall; religious ones, divine intervention for good. They fit Constance's romance architectonically and thematically.
Patterson, Lee.
Peter G. Beidler, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer: "The Wife of Bath." (Boston and New York: Bedford-St. Martin's, 1996), pp. 133-54.
A new-historicist reading that focuses on the conditions of marriage depicted in WBPT to show how the Wife uses the late-medieval marital system for her own private, emotional advantage. She capitalizes on the social and economic opportunities of…
Collette, Carolyn P.
Chaucer Review 42 (2008): 223- 43.
Considered in the light of key themes of Victorian medievalism and of her own early identification with Chaucer's Emily, Davison's actions--especially those leading to her untimely death--stand as expressions of her ethical commitment, rather than as…
Chaucer's comments on language show him to be particularly sensitive to all aspects of English, which had become fully accepted as a literary language. Along with other Middle English writers like the "Gawain"-poet and Langland, he manipulates…
Chiappelli, Carolyn.
Proceedings of the International Patristic, Mediaeval, & Renaissance Conference 4 (1979): 1107-14.
The motif of "fals apparences" is a unifying factor of HF. The eagle as sophist or false philosopher, in seizing the narrator as prey, is reminiscent of Satan as fowler, or Dante's Gerione, emblem of fraud.
McMillan, Ann.
Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 1.1 (1982): 27-42.
Argues that "The Flower and the Leaf" and "The Assembly of Ladies" are both concerned with female chastity as a means to effective power, the first asserting this theme and the second expressing frustration with such assertions. Also surveys…
Gastle, Brian W.
Dissertation Abstracts International 59 (1999): 3446A.
Describes the social and economic status of the "femme sole" in late medieval England, and discusses the role of the figure in select Paston letters, the Book of Margery Kempe, and CT, particularly the Guildsmen, the WBPT, MerT, ShT, and the…
Argues that the name "Strother" in RvT is not a place name but a surname, and suggests a connection between the tale's fictional clerks, John and Aleyn, and two junior members of the prominent Strother family of Northumberland.
Analogous to orientalism, the "philologism" of RvT is rooted in "North-South binaries" that partake of and help to constitute southern condescension to northerners in England, even before the rise of a Standard Written Dialect. Informed by the…
The main characters in TC are oppressed in various senses. How to enhance and ennoble them despite their unfortunate situation is one of Chaucer's undertakings. He cannot, however, free himself from the given conditions of the Trojan cycle. Hence…
Newman, Barbara.
Stephen A. Barney, ed. Chaucer's Troilus: Essays in Criticism (Hamden, Conn.: Shoestring Press, 1980), pp. 257-75.
The dichotomy between "trouthe" (fidelity) and truth (actuality) marks TC from the outset. "Trouthe" in love is linked to "routhe" and "kyndenesse," and on every level is compromised by the characters' feigning.
Wilson, Katharina M.
Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 4 (1985): 17-32.
Examination of the Wife of Bath's hypothesis that if women wrote stories literature would be misandric; yet men are the ones who promote the one-sided ideal of feminine excellence. Hrotsvita of Gandersheim and Christine de Pizan show women who are…
Looks at writers, including Hoccleve and Lydgate, as responding to and shaping a post-Chaucerian literary era, examining both the "end" of Chaucer's era and the "end" or purpose of their own work.
Utz, Richard J.
Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 21 (1996): 29-32.
In TC, Chaucer adapts Boethian thought to expose the dangers of the radical determinism of John Wyclif. Such determinism fails to remedy Troilus's loss of Criseyde, posing dangers to society as well as to the individual.
Arrathoon, Leigh A.
Leigh A. Arrathoon, ed. Chaucer and the Craft of Fiction (Rochester, Mich.: Solaris Press, 1986), pp. 385-409.
MerT is an ethical narrative in which the aenigmalogue (puzzling narrative surface) is blended with the apologue (Augustinian "oversense"), thus revealing the Merchant as a Manichean and January as a parody of Jovinian. The apologue is signaled by…
Focuses on how the idiomatic phrase "for goddes love" is used in TC as "an expression of power" and how the phrase "appeals to a divine system of mercy and justice" when used by Troilus, Criseyde, and Pandarus.
Argues that the phrase "for gode" in MilT (I.3526) is not, as is often assumed, a misspelling meaning "by God," but rather an intentional use of a phrase appearing in unsophisticated texts of the period. The phrase has similarly been misunderstood in…
Parsons, Ben.
Modern Language Review 103 (2008): 940-51.
Not just a continuation of CT, the "Tale of Beryn" engages Chaucer's work critically. Assigned, in the anonymous Interlude, to the Merchant on the return journey, "Beryn" challenges the Clerk's notion of male adolescence as a stage of pre-identity…
Scheitzeneder, Franziska.
PhiN: Philologie im Netz 36 (2006): 44-59.
Reads the opposition between the Clerk and the Wife of Bath in light of Derrida's opposition between the structuralist desire to decipher signs and the poststructuralist impulse to play with the "instability of signs." The Wife is an "anachronistic…
ManT and the depiction of the Manciple reflect Chaucer's effort to undermine bourgeois threats to court culture, his critique of practical "wit," and, simultaneously, his affirmation of the destructive power of adultery.
Investigates traditions of medieval antifeminism to show the ambivalences present in the Wife, whom Chaucer presents as both a satire on womanhood and a threat to orthodox male authority.
