Allen, Valerie, ed.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
A school-text Middle English edition of MilPT and the GP description of the Miller, with notes, a running narrative summary, and facing-page glosses. Accompanied by commentary on several topics (Chaucer's language, town versus gown in Oxford,…
Winny, James, ed.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.
A textbook edition of MilPT in Middle English, with introduction and end-of-text notes and glossary. The Introduction (pp. 1-25) discusses the place of the Tale in the CT, its rhetoric and diction, sources and analogues, various themes,…
Boenig, Robert.
English Language Notes 21 (1983): 1-6.
The medieval bagpipe was featured in Nativity scenes, depictions of angels, and royal occasions. The Miller's bagpipe was a soft, pleasant, courtly, even celestial instrument--in subtly ironic contrast to his character.
Deliberately drawn links between Alisoun of MilT and the Wife of Bath enable Chaucer to carry forward the moral and spiritual implications of the scriptural allusions in MilT, using them to inform and reinforce the audience's response to WBP.
Porter, Gerald
Risto Hiltunen, Marita Gustafsson, Keith Battarbee, and Liisa Dahl, eds. English Far and Wide: A Festschrift for Inna Koskenniemi (Turku: Turun Yliopisto, 1993), pp. 59-74.
The figure of the miller has a dual tradition as it develops from oral to literary presentation: that of a carnivalesque artisan and that of a social-climbing tradesperson. Porter traces literary depictions of millers from the fourteenth to the…
Rigby, Stephen H.
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. 368-85.
Offers a history of late-medieval English milling and the social and economic effects of the Black Death in an analysis of Chaucer's Miller. Claims that MilT is both a "comical fabliau" and "an Augustinian moral performance."
Traces the legacy of the mill as a metaphor for creativity, child-bearing, and sexual activity, drawing examples from WBP (3.384-90), HF (1798-99), and RvT (1.4313-14), among other sources.
Historical detective fiction set in the frame of CT, in which a doctor, modeled on Chaucer's Physician, tells a story to the rest of the pilgrims about sorcery, exorcism, and deaths involved with the mysterious figure of the Midnight Man.
Surveys the historical, literary, and rhetorical development of the Middle English verse love epistle, tracing its precursors in Latin and Continental traditions, the roles of TC and Gower's Cinkante Balades, and the flowering of the genre in the…
When Absolon "froteth" his lips upon realizing the real target of his kiss in MilT, he acts in accordance with his training as a barber-surgeon. More than a synonym for "to rub," the verb "froten" connotes a range of medical and surgical approaches…
Describes, tabulates, and analyzes the "word-order patterns in the Subject-Verb cluster in twelve texts of Late East Midland prose and poetry, 1369-1400," including BD, KnT, TC (Book 5), GP, PardT, NPT, ParsT, Mel, and Astr, as well as texts by…
Greentree, Rosemary.
Rochester, N.Y.; and Cambridge : D. S. Brewer, 2001.
Descriptive, annotated bibliography of editions and criticism of Middle English lyrics and short poems, focusing on 1900-1995 but including several editions and studies outside this range. Excludes works dedicated exclusively to Chaucer and other…
Salisbury, Eve.
Dissertation Abstracts International 56 (1996): 3950A.
Despite the apparent variablility of the genre in English, six Breton lays demonstrate distinctive characteristics, influenced by the turbulent fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England that produced them. Though they deal with difficult issues of…
Petricone, Sister Ancilla Marie.
DAI 34.03 (1973): 1251A.
Examines the progressions of events in various French and English Breton Lays; includes commentary on repetition as a narrative technique that leads to closure in FranT.
Vial, Claire.
Leo Carruthers, Raeleen Chai-Elsholz, and Tatjana Silec, eds. Palimpsests and the Literary Imagination of Medieval England (New York: Plagrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 175-91.
Awareness of generic ancestry offers evidence of the palimpsestuous nature of the "true" Middle English Breton lays. Reference is made to Chaucer's FranT among other so-called Breton lays.
Keiser, George R.
Thomas J. Heffernan, ed. The Popular Literature of Medieval England (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), pp. 167-93.
Through the "Planctas Mariae," Keiser illuminates the pathetic mode that governs MLT, PrT, ClT, and PhyT. Griselda, Custance, and Virginia resemble the Virgin in the "Planctas." The anti-Semitism of PrT is common in the "Planctas," and the tale of…
Winstead, Karen.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Examines life-writing in the European Middle Ages, with commentary on late antique prototypes and focus on England, ranging widely in languages and forms: Latin and vernacular, history and fiction, poetry and prose, biography and autobiography,…
Bildhauer, Bettina, and Chris Jones, eds.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Collection of essays that address medieval and medievalism themes and how they continue to impact contemporary perspectives. The introduction includes a history of medievalism from the fourteenth to the twenty-first centuries, and remarks how…
Alamichel, Marie-Francoiseand Derek Brewer,eds.
Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 1997.
Eleven essays study the influence and impact of the Middle Ages on Western life and culture from the sixteenth century to the present. The essays cover a wide range of topics--literature, stylistics, lexicography, art, the cinema, philosophy,…
Bolton, W. F., ed.
London: Barrie & Jenkins; Sphere, 1970.
Comprises eight chapters by various authors surveying English literature from the Old English period through Middle English prose. The chapter pertaining to Chaucer includes four sections: 1) a brief account of Chaucer's life (pp. 159-62), by W. F.…
Ariza-Barile, Raúl.
Literature Compass 15.6 (2018): n.p.
Contemplates the concept of "of a 'medieval Mexico' as a historically significant paradigm" in light of the nation's colonial past. Considers various translations of CT into Spanish and comments on Chaucer studies in Mexico, including the lack of…
Uses the Halle-Keyser theory of meter to discover a "pattern of heavy stresses in the initial syllables" of twenty-one of the twenty-three stanzas of ABC that "illuminate the poem aurally."
Pearsall, Derek.
Ad Putter and Judith A. Jefferson, eds. The Transmission of Medieval Romance: Metres, Manuscripts and Early Prints (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 33-49.
Describes Middle English metrical predecessors to "The Tale of Gamelyn" and assesses its regularities and place in the tradition of alliterative long-line verse. Also comments on its status as an example of Chaucerian apocrypha.
