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Chaucer Archive
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Food Representation in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
Posted on June 16, 2013 | No CommentsHe uses food and drink as the means to express people's characters, look, but also mood and situation. -
Function and Representation of Women in Fourteenth-Century English Arthuriana
Posted on June 10, 2013 | No CommentsThis thesis investigates the function and representation of female characters through Arthurian tropes in three fourteenth-century English Arthurian texts: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 'The Wife of Bath’s Tale,' and Sir Launfal. -
Feeding the Dogs: The Queer Prioress and Her Pets
Posted on May 28, 2013 | No CommentsEverybody knows what we should think about the Prioress’ love for animals. She steals from the poor by feeding her 'smale houndes' roast meat and good bread. And she’s breaking the rules just by keeping pets. -
War and Peace in the Works of Chaucer and his Contemporaries
Posted on May 1, 2013 | No CommentsBut whenever authors of work on chivalry and war during the Middle Ages have tried to determine the exact historical influence and result of chivalric ideals, they have run into difficulties. That is why there are such widely varying hypotheses concerning the 'Golden Age' of chivalry. -
“Walkynge in the mede” : Chaucerian gardens and the recasting of the Edenic fall
Posted on April 21, 2013 | No CommentsIn this thesis, I intend to illustrate how Chaucer uses his knowledge of garden traditions, both biblical and practical, to discuss the concept of the Garden of Eden and the Fall of humanity. -
Wynne whoso may, for al is for to selle: Sexual Economics and Female Authority in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue
Posted on April 18, 2013 | No CommentsChaucer’s inimitable Wife of Bath stands out as one of the most analyzed literary characters of all time, in part because of her existence outside of any defined medieval cultural classification, and in part as an archetype of a rising social tradition. -
Chaucer, Gower, and What Medieval Women Want
Posted on March 27, 2013 | No CommentsGeoffrey Chaucer and John Gower, friends and colleagues, both chose to retell the same story at roughly the same time in their story collections, The Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis. -
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. -
Contemplating the Evolution of Medieval Double-Entendre Literature
Posted on March 10, 2013 | No CommentsThe linguistic composition of the Exeter Book Riddles supports this, and in fact, the genre became a refuge for contemporary colloquial speech which was seen as coarse and lower class within the ideologies of Christianity and Germanic heroism. -
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)... -
Traditions of Courtly Love and the Canterbury Tales
Posted on February 24, 2013 | No CommentsChaucer uses both common and courtly love in the Canterbury Tales. His pilgrims represent nearly every level of the social scale and range anywhere from a knight to a miller to a parson to a pardoner. Thererfore, their status will determine what kind of tale they will tell. -
Mi Suete Leuedi, Her Mi Béne: The Power and Patronage of the Heroine in Middle English Romance
Posted on February 10, 2013 | No CommentsThe Middle English Romances are somewhat difficult to study as a group. In order to examine these works accurately, one must take into consideration other literature produced at the same tirne, as well as that which preceded it. -
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. -
The Wife of Bath: a Tragic Caricature of Women
Posted on November 21, 2012 | No CommentsThe Wife is characterized by a preoccupation with sex, which she uses to manipulate her husbands, of which she has had five, into acquiescing their land and money to her control. -
“My trouthe for to holde—allas, allas!”: Dorigen and Honor in “The Franklin’s Tale”
Posted on November 18, 2012 | No CommentsWe can see from the beginning of the Franklin’s Tale that honor as pub- lic esteem is an overriding concern for Arveragus, who qualifies his exceedingly courtly marriage vow, swearing always to remain Dorigen’s servant in love, with the condition that he retain the public appearance of lordly husband, “That wolde he have for shame of his degree”. -
‘In the Beginning’: The London Medieval Graduate Network Inaugural Conference
Posted on November 13, 2012 | No CommentsThis is a summary of the The London Medieval Graduate Network Inaugural Conference by Rachel Scott. The conference was held on November 2nd at King's College London. -
Medieval Book History Week Lecture: “Practical Latin and Formal English in the 14th-15th Centuries”
Posted on November 13, 2012 | No CommentsThis lecture is part of Medieval Book History Week. Renown Professor Jeremy Catto spoke about literacy and language in England during the later Middle Ages at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto. -
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. -
The Fox: A Medieval View, and Its Legacy in Modern Chldren’s Literature
Posted on September 27, 2012 | No CommentsIn the medieval bestiaries, which were considered to be authorities on zoological truths, the fox was described as a fraudulent and ingenious animal. -
Historical imagination in/and literary consciousness: The afterlife of the Anglo-Saxons in Middle English literature
Posted on September 25, 2012 | No CommentsThe long-held belief that the Norman Conquest represented a cultural apocalypse has been challenged by scholars who have emphasized continuity and gradual change as opposed to the agonistic model that formerly placed a crisp border between the AngloSaxon period and the arrival of the Normans. -
Draumkvedet and the Medieval English Dream Vision: A Study of Genre
Posted on September 23, 2012 | No CommentsThe Medieval English dream vision evidence influences from a variety of earlier vision literature, notably the apocalyptic vision and narrative dream. -
Monstrous transformations: loyalty and community in four medieval poems
Posted on September 23, 2012 | No CommentsI will examine two forms of transformation, the werewolf transformation and the monstrous human transformation, both of which feature shape shifters who presumably cannot be trusted