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Canterbury Tales Archive
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‘Fromm thennes faste he gan avyse/This litel spot of erthe’: GIS and the General Prologue
Posted on May 2, 2013 | No CommentsThis paper was given at the Canada Chaucer Seminar on April 27, 2013. -
Chaucer’s Arthuriana
Posted on March 18, 2013 | No CommentsThe majority of medieval scholars, including Roger Sherman Loomis, argue that the popularity of the Arthurian legend in England was therefore on the wane in the latter half of the fourteenth century; as a result, the major writers of the period, such as John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer, refrained from penning anything beyond the occasional reference to King Arthur and his court. -
Fashion of Middle England and its Image in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
Posted on February 24, 2013 | No CommentsFashion of Middle England and its Image in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Petra Štěpánková Bachelor Thesis, Masaryk University – Brno, Faculty of Education, Department of English Language and Literature, Brno (2012)... -
Lay Writers and the Politics of Theology in Medieval England From the Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries
Posted on January 3, 2013 | No CommentsMy intention is not to continue the discourse on such practices but to analyze narrative content in relation to the politics of theology that had an impact on lay writers and their artistic creativity concerning the search for selfhood from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. -
An Ecoritical Approach to Chaucer. Representations of the Natural World in the English Literature of the Middle Ages
Posted on December 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe choice to write and present a study of nature in medieval English literature from an ecological perspective has been originated by a personal interest in the urgency of the deep environmental crisis we are faced with and by the drive to expand the eco- oriented study of representations of nature in literature to chronological and spatial areas well beyond those originally typical of ecological criticism. -
Medieval Feminine Humanism and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Presentation of the Anti-Cecilia
Posted on November 22, 2012 | No CommentsPerhaps the tale has been dismissed because, compared to the other tales, it appears to be simple and straightforward. Lynn Staley Johnson points out that “most Chaucerians hold that this legend could not have been written before about 1373” and further that “it is generally accepted that Chaucer decided to include the legend in the Canterbury book relatively late in the Canterbury period” . -
Chaucer’s costume rhetoric in his portrait of the Prioress
Posted on October 10, 2012 | No CommentsNo critic has ever discussed costume signs in order to reveal to what extent the Prioress does or does not conform in her costume to the fourteenth century norm, with consideration given, simultaneously, to the historical records, literature and visual arts of the period that form and inform the signs from the many traditions Chaucer in corporates in his portrait of the Prioress. -
Two University of Chicago Humanists and a Landmark Edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
Posted on October 8, 2012 | No CommentsPartly thanks to their experience as code-breakers in World War I, theirs was the first edition to take account of all 83 medieval witnesses to parts or the whole of the Tales. -
Mandeville’s Intolerance: The Contest for Souls and Sacred Sites in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville
Posted on October 3, 2012 | No CommentsWhile Chaucer‟s knight has traveled to and fought in Spain, North Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia Minor, Sir John claims to have visited the entire known world from Constantinople and the Holy Land to the farthest reaches of Asia. -
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – Politically Corrected
Posted on September 3, 2012 | No CommentsMost literary studies examine what an author wrote. This essay examines what Geoffrey Chaucer did not write. -
Madness and Gender in Late-Medieval English Literature
Posted on July 24, 2012 | No CommentsMadness has been long misrepresented in medieval studies. Assertions that conceptions of mental illness were unknown to medieval people, or that all madmen were assumed to be possessed by the devil, were at one time common in accounts of medieval society. -
Depiction of Women in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in Comparison Across Medieval Genres
Posted on July 11, 2012 | No CommentsIn my thesis I focus on the analysis of presentation of women in various medieval genres and their comparison in Geoffrey Chaucer's masterpiece The Canterbury Tales, where women appear as both narrators as well as subjects of the narrative. -
Personal Piety or Priestly Persuasion: Evidence of Pilgrimage Bequests in the Wills of the Archdeaconry of Sudbury, 1439-1474
Posted on April 23, 2012 | No CommentsHowever, when we consider the number of individuals, particularly from the lower orders, who actually undertook a pilgrimage at some point in their lives, we find that we actually know remarkably little about them. -
VAGANTES: “That is a Long Preamble of a Tale”: Mobile Narratives in Fragment III of the Canterbury Tales
Posted on April 6, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper focused on the 12 lines from fragment 3 of the Canterbury Tales of The Wife of Bath. -
Reading about Lancelot in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde
Posted on April 5, 2012 | No CommentsThis book is the central one of Troilus and Criseyde’s five books, with the sexual union of Troilus with Criseyde forming the climax and turning-point of the entire plot-structure, condensed at the start of the work by Chaucer in the words “fro woe to wele and after out of joie.” -
Chaucer’s female characters in the Canterbury Tales
Posted on March 26, 2012 | No CommentsThis essay will also demonstrate that in order to be considered a good wife a woman needed to be humble and obedient and to accept her fate as being subject to male authority figure without resistance. -
Convents, Courts and Colleges: The Prioress and the Second Nun
Posted on March 22, 2012 | No CommentsPilgrimage, after Whitby, and before Vatican II, was a secular activity, a performance of piety by the laity, not by the clergy; although there were a few exceptions.7 Chaucer's Monk, Friar, Prioress, Nun, Priest, Summoner, Pardoner and Parson ought not to be here. Their presence is outrageous comedy. Inns were forbidden to the cloistered clergy who, if they had to travel, were enjoined to stay in other monastic establishments along their route. -
Englishwomen as Pilgrims to Jerusalem: Isolda Parewastell, 1365
Posted on March 22, 2012 | No CommentsIsolda Parewastell from Somerset, who was in Jerusalem in 1365, fitted into this fourteenth-century pattern. Despite the risks involved, women pilgrims were inspired by an instinct for travel and change, as well as by a sense of religious obligation and the hope of spiritual reward. -
Chaucer’s Inferno: Dantean Burlesques in The Canterbury Tales
Posted on February 27, 2012 | No CommentsLike Dante, Chaucer composed in the vernacular rather than in Latin, organized his work by means of the frame story of a guided pilgrimage, and included himself as a character in the journey that he describes. Yet Chaucer gives each of these elements a carnivalesque turn, so that the serious matter of Dante’s Commedia becomes, in The Canterbury Tales, the stuff of comedy. -
Love, Marriage, and Happiness: Changing Systems of Desire in Fourteenth-Century England
Posted on February 14, 2012 | No CommentsIt is my intention not only to explore the discourse of love and desire in the fourteenth century, but also to examine how the ideas have been altered from those present in the Anglo-Norman and Latin material that was written or widely read in twelfth-century England and what pressures and influences may have brought about these changes. -
That country beyond the Humber”: the English North, regionalism, and the negotiation of nation in medieval English literature
Posted on December 28, 2011 | No CommentsThe English North is “Not London” but is “before Scotland,” a strangely liminal space between the familiar South and those undesirables north of the River Tweed. -
Naught by Nature: Chaucer and the (Re)Invention of Female Goodness in Late Medieval Literature
Posted on December 21, 2011 | No CommentsThe women in Chaucer’s stories are not content to live life in the margins, and these characters are neither as good as they should be according to medieval standards of proper female behavior, nor are they as bad as these same standards would have one believe -
Robin Hood and the Crusades: When and Why Did the Longbowman of the People Mount Up Like a Lord?
Posted on November 28, 2011 | No CommentsThis paper will discuss issues like these in light of the long-lasting Robin Hood tradition. But the most interesting question is simply where this idea of Robin on horseback came from, and where and why the crusades became involved. -
A Chivalrous Man is Not a Gentleman: A Look at Chivalry in the Age of Chaucer
Posted on November 27, 2011 | No CommentsThe concept of knighthood began as a military strategy used to supply men to fight kings’ wars, but it gradually developed into the glamorized ideal of chivalry and became associated with virtuous behavior expected during times of both war and peace. -
The Judgement of Urines
Posted on October 16, 2011 | No CommentsThe Judgement of Urines Canadian Medical Association Journal, v.159:12 (1998) Abstract An earnest physician of Renaissance England counted this as one of the minor benefits of urine. His other jottings...