Considers Chaucer's extensive and subtle use of "the full vocabulary of 'chance' and 'mischance'." Shows how his use of privatives and negative prefixes with these words "inflect[s] his larger concerns with Fortune (usually personified as an agent)…
In view of Chaucer's resistance to the "finality of closure," allusions to CkT in Fragment 9 suggest that CkT "may be complete for Chaucer, although not completed by the Cook." Perhaps the Tale's "unfinished business" is an interruption by one of the…
Binkley, Peter.
Scintilla: A Student Journal for Medievalists 2-3 (1985-1986): 66-100.
Cotton Titus A. XX, an anthology of fourteenth-century Latin poems, contains no. 19, "Proprietaties multorum animalium et aliarorum," some antimedical satires and bestiary poems. One of the latter, a poem on the sparrowhawk, may be the source of the…
Mertens-Fonck, Paule.
Catherine Bel, Pascale Dumont, and Frank Willaert, eds. Contez me tout: Mélanges de langue et de littérature médiévales offerts à Herman Braet (Paris: Dudley, 2006), pp. 281-96.
The structure of the Clerk-Knight debates, based on the rivalry between a clerk and a knight, underlies most Tales in CT and can be used to reveal unsuspected meanings.
Surveys the roots of analogical thinking and late-medieval critiques of its methods and assumptions, exploring the background to understanding "Chaucer's curious neglect of the allegorical mode." As with nominalists, Chaucer is consistently concerned…
Rajendran, Shyama.
Literature Compass 16, nos. 9-10 (2019): n.p.
Challenges the uses and meanings of "vernacular" and "vernacularity" in literary and linguistic studies on the grounds that the terms are historically and intrinsically racist, colonialist, and/or supremacist. Using the "paradigm of metrolingualism,"…
Pattenaude, Annika J.
Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Michigan, 2022.
Dissertation Abstracts International A84.03(E).
"[A]nalyzes scenes of 'undisciplined reading' in late medieval texts: that is, scenes in which characters read without formal training and with the 'wrong' emotions." Includes discussion of NPPT as a "bungled interpretation of Marie de France's…
Considers the frontispiece to TC found in Corpus Christi College MS 61 (which depicts Chaucer addressing a court audience, particularly the court of Richard II). The frontispiece shows that literature was delivered orally (by "prelection") and…
Chaucer's audience would not have come to BD with our preconceptions (that the Man is John of Gaunt and that his song is personal). Rather, they would have experienced the gradual revelations as they are unfolded and would have concerned themselves…
Study guide that describes Chaucer's life and historical context, and surveys the characters, plots, themes, and literary devices of CT. Designed for young adult readers; includes suggestions for essays and excerpts from critical studies.
Defines medieval romance as a narrative (usually poetic) that follows a hero's encounters with "love, ladies, and adventures, culminating in a happy ending." Whetter explores these features in Middle English romances, particularly Malory's "Morte…
Brewer, Derek.
Nikolaus Ritt and Herbert Schendl, eds. Rethinking Middle English: Linguistic and Literary Approaches (New York and Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 1-16.
Some scholars harbor a Golden-Age notion of chivalry not unlike that expressed in ParsT. Others, operating within a post-Freudian context, presume that the chivalric emphasis on ceremony must conceal inward anxiety or repression: hence, the…
Foster, Edward E.
Lewiston : N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999.
Chaucer's fictions are opaque and self-conscious. Neither ordinary ironist nor allegorist, Chaucer is a nominalist "philosophical poet" for whom "divine truth is stable; human knowledge is provisional; and fiction is the means by which nominalist…
Owen, Charles A.,Jr.
Chaucer Newsletter 2.2 (1980): 7-10.
Provides a broad outline for an undergraduate course in Chaucer and a complete syllabus for a graduate course, the latter based on the author's conception of the development of CT.
Identifies a "number of medieval commonplaces" in KnT that support the notion that "greater idealism" is what distinguishes Palamon from Arcite, i.e., a "loftier" view, more a matter of theodicy than determinism.
Gaylord, Alan.
Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters 46 (1961): 571-95.
Describes how "the part Pandarus attempts to play" in TC "is intended by Chaucer, though not by Pandarus, as a parody of the philosophical counsel offered to Boethius" in the Consolation of Philosophy. Focuses on the comedy of the "first scene"…
Galloway, Andrew.
Studies in Bibliography 52: 59-87, 1999.
Reviews the theories and practices that underlie several works: George Russell and George Kane's edition of the C text of Piers Plowman (1997), Kane and Janet Cowen's edition of LGW (1995), Ralph Hanna's Pursuing History (1996), and A. V. C.…
Denery, Dallas D. II, Kantik Ghosh, and Nicolette Zeeman, eds.
Turnhout: Brepols, 2014.
Interdisciplinary collection examines "disciplinary and methodological forms" of medieval Scholasticism and questions of knowledge in the Middle Ages. For two essays that pertain to Chaucer, search for Uncertain Knowledge under Alternative Title.
An, Sonjae (Brother Anthony).
Jacek Fisiak and Hye-Kyung Kang, eds. Recent Trends in Medieval English Language and Literature in Honour of Young-Bae Park (Seoul, South Korea: Thaehaksa, 2005), vol. 1, pp. 283-308.
The compassion for human failure and potential failure in Chaucer's GP reflects Christian awareness of sin and grace. Like later poets Christopher Hill, Seamus Heaney, and Ko Un (Korea), Chaucer is a "prophet-poet" whose recognition of human…
Jufresa Muñoz, Montserrat.
Anuari de filologia: Antiqva et mediaevalia 9, no. 2 (2019): 121-31.
Analyzes the depiction of old age in MerT from a philosophical perspective, with particular emphasis on Epicureanism as it was understood during the Middle Ages. In Catalan.
Giaccherini, Enrico.
Revista di Letterature Moderne e Comparate 27 (1974): 165-76.
Assesses the terms used for varieties of dreams summarized in HF 1-12, comparing them with their source in Macrobius's "Commentary on the Dream of Scipio," with Latin usage, and with Chaucer's uses of the terms elsewhere in his works.
