Argues that Chaucer uses rhyme words in the ballade form (Ros, Ven, For, Purse, Sted, Gent, Wom Nob, Buk, Scog, Truth, Wom Unc) for stylistic effects, not because of linguistic limitation. As a translator, Chaucer employs several methods of…
Hinnie, Lucy R.
Chaucer Review 55, no. 4 (2020): 484-99.
Traces how "Chaucer is invoked and"utilized in the 1568 Bannatyne Manuscript,” suggesting that the manuscript participates in the "querelle des femmes" and "interrogates the idea that Chaucer becomes a ‘straw man’ for the writers included in the…
Drout, Michael D. C.
Prince Frederick, Md.: Recorded Books, 2005.
Designed as a college-level academic course, with a series of fourteen lectures by Drout on Chaucer's life, language, and works. Lectures 1-2 pertain to biography, language, and style; lectures 3-4 to the dream visions and translations; 5-6 to TC;…
Lynch, Kathryn L.
Peter Brown, ed. Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 99-124
Examines Renaissance views of Chaucer and argues that Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream" was influenced by LGW. Discusses Chaucer's and Shakespeare's complex treatment of dreams and the treatment of Theseus in KnT, HF, and LGW.
Schieberle, Misty.
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 20.2 (2013): 19-40.
Describes a pedagogy for teaching NPT that guides student discussions "beyond basic descriptive understandings . . . into critical arguments," using genre and background material, performative readings, gender concerns, the politics of revolt, and…
Introduces Chaucer’s life and works, with a brief selected bibliography. Includes plot summaries and/or descriptions of BD, Rom, HF, PF, TC, LGW, each of the CT, and several lyrics.
In Chaucer's RvT and Malory's "Morte D'Arthur," illegitimacy is not a negative notion. The Reeve is unorthodox in his negative view of the illegitimacy of Symkyn's wife and of the sexual liberation of Symkyn's daughter. Chaucer however, discloses a…
Renoir, Alain.
Orbis Litterarum 36 (1981): 116-40.
TC's first three images (peacock, stairs, Bayard) assume an affective function and create a context for reader response. Passages from the "Iliad," the "Aeneid," and "Chanson des quatre fils Amyon" explain the strong affective element of the allusion…
Cohen, Jeremy.
Ithaca, N.Y. and London: Cornell University Press, 1989.
Surveys the historical understanding and application of Gen. 1.28, tracing its "career" in Scripture, its interpretations in Hebrew and Christian traditions, and its roles in such literature as Bernard Silvestris's "Cosmographia," Alain de Lille's…
Parsons, Ben.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015): 163–94.
Identifies relations between domestic and pedagogical violence in WBP, establishing that its vocabulary is "redolent of the classroom" and arguing that Jankyn's treatment of Alison grants her agency, albeit unintentionally. Describes the motivations…
Horobin, Simon.
Carol M. Meale and Derek Pearsall, eds. Makers and Users of Medieval Books: Essays in Honour of A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), pp. 214-23.
Beaupré Bell (1704-45), member of a noble Norfolk family, was known as a careful, if not exhaustive, annotator of Chaucer manuscripts (Cambridge,Trinity College, MSS R.3.19 and R.3.15). Now it is clear that two printed editions of Chaucer in the…
Nolan, Maura.
Paul Strohm, ed. Middle English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 207-21.
Nolan argues that the description of Alison in MilT is Chaucer's means to "stage an investigation or exploration of the relationship of beauty to individual perspectives . . . and the idea of a universal aesthetic." The passage also confronts the…
Fradenburg, L. O. Aranye.
Exemplaria 22 (2010): 65-83.
Fradenburg begins with a brief psychoanalytic view of the aesthetic of enjoyment as the communication of affect. The article explores the image of Alceste/daisy in terms of psychological and philosophical intersubjectivity. The individual stories,…
Rice, Nancy Hall.
Dissertation Abstracts International 36 (1975): 875A.
The mistaken belief that sin was connected with death and sexuality led to the need to find a scapegoat. The result was virulence against women, Jews, or other denigrated casts. The virulence of the dominant group against the Jews in PrT can be…
McLeod, Glenda Kaye.
Dissertation Abstracts International 49 (1988): 501A
The tradition of listing good women, dissociating them from their backgrounds, reveals varying attitudes toward woman's nature and rhetorical shifts from florilegia to debates; LGW is treated.
Heng, Geraldine.
Geraldine Heng. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 181-237.
Heng assesses MLT as an account of a "feminized crusade" that involves "sexual martyrdom" on the part of Custance and reveals the power of her "reproductive sexuality." The fusion of hagiography and romance in MLT is also evident in ClT, but while…
Archibald, Diana C.
Studies in Medievalism 7 (1996): 169-80.
William Morris's attempt to produce the ideal book "fails to match form with content." The harmonious presentation of his Kelmscott "Chaucer" disguises the diversity of tales and conceals unresolved problems of text and structure.
Comments on CT as a “text born in trauma,” observing “numerous wounds” in KnT and MkT and linking them with James Comey's 2017 testimony before the US Senate Intelligence Committee.
Mitchell, J. Allan
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Studies the ontogeny (rather than ontology) of medieval western humanness, focusing on gestation, birth, childhood, and the social and cultural coming-into-being of the child. Links various aspects of "posthumanist, ecological, and materialist…
Cohen, Jeffrey, and Bonnie Wheeler, eds.
New York and London: Garland, 1997.
Eighteen essays by various authors and an introduction on topics ranging from Old English penitentials to Sir David Lindsey. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Becoming Male in the Middle Ages under Alternative Title.
Burger, Glenn D.
Glenn D. Burger and Holly A.Crocker, eds. Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 90-117.
Compares the Wife's presentation of her conduct in WBPT to the conduct book" Le ménagier de Paris," and shows how the Wife's record of her activities and the presentation of negative emotions function as essentially a reversal of the "Ménagier." By…
Gilbert, Jane.
Nicola F. McDonald and W. M. Ormrod, eds. Rites of Passage: Cultures of Transition in the Fourteenth Century (York: York Medieval Press, 2005), pp. 109-31
Gilbert's anthropological reading of BD and LGW emphasizes how in BD Blanche is represented as having successfully left the land of the living for the land of the dead. In LGW, the female protagonists resist this rite of passage and, in doing so,…
