The Virtuous Pagan in Middle English Literature
From the first through the fourteenth centuries, a succession of solutions to the problem of these virtuous pagans evolved. For the Early Church, an attractive solution was that Christ descended into Hell to convert the souls he found there.
The True Characters of Criseyde and of Diomede in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: A Restoration of the Reputations of Two Misunderstood Characters Unjustly Maligned in Literary Criticism
This is a defence of the characters of Criseyde and of Diomede based, inter alia, on a close textual analysis.
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – Politically Corrected
Most literary studies examine what an author wrote. This essay examines what Geoffrey Chaucer did not write.
A Feminist of the Medieval Times: Chaucer’s Wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer’s characters take part in a story-telling contest while going on the pilgrimage. Among them, the Wife of Bath is an outstanding woman who seems not to be a typical figure in the medieval times.
Chaucerian Ekphrasis: Power, Place and Image in the Knight’s Tale
We first glimpse Chaucer’s Knight in a portrait-like description of him that Chaucer the narrator relays in the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales.
Towards a Context for Ibn Umayl, Known to Chaucer as the Alchemist ‘Senior’
his article will present what we know of the life and times of an important alchemist, Ibn Umayl.
Madness and Gender in Late-Medieval English Literature
Madness 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.
“Be waar, Hoccleue, I rede thee”: Intertextual Subjectivity in Thomas Hoccleve’s Petitioning Poetry
The way these operate can be seen in the section of La Male Regle from which I excerpted my paper’s title. It comes about three-quarters of the way through the poem when the narrator relates a first-hand account of how he and his Privy-Seal Office colleagues handle a night of drinking.
Female Body as Geosomatic Apotrope in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Middleton
As a geographic trope transposed to literary discourse, discovery remains closely linked to the desire for possession. Postcolonial criticism has sought to deconstruct the feminized and sexualized discourses of geographic places and spaces as objects of desire, invasion, and annexation.
The Evolution Of English
A video lecture on the origin and vagaries of the English language up to the 15th century
Depiction of Women in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in Comparison Across Medieval Genres
In 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.
Queer Pedagogy (A Roundtable)
A roundtable discussion on teaching Queer Theory with Susannah Mary Chewning (Union County College) Lisa Weston (California State University–Fresno); and Michelle M. Sauer, (University of North Dakota)
Contributions of contemporary science to Chaucer’s work
The thesis shows that the Medieval Sciences made a significant contribution to Chaucer’s mind and art, and that Chaucer shared the attitude of great scholars before and after him
A Merchant’s Franklin’s Tale
Examines Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale, found in The Canterbury Tales, and a 15th century exemplum known as A Good Matter of the Merchant and His Son.
Personal Piety or Priestly Persuasion: Evidence of Pilgrimage Bequests in the Wills of the Archdeaconry of Sudbury, 1439-1474
However, 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.
Love, Labor, Liturgy: Languages of Service in Late Medieval England
Working with three major Middle English texts – William Langland’s Piers Plowman, Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde – my thesis argues that the languages of service available to these writers provided them with a rich set of metaphorical tools for expressing the relation between metaphysics and social practice.
VAGANTES: “That is a Long Preamble of a Tale”: Mobile Narratives in Fragment III of the Canterbury Tales
This 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
This 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.”
“Kan he speke wel of love?”: Luf talk and Chivalry
In my view, Criseyde’s inquiry about Troilus’s verbal skill in “luf talk” highlights more a problematic issue of Criseyde’s concern about a man’s “loves craft” than that of his class in society. As Chaucer’s narrator remarks in the proem of Book II (22-42), every human activity in love is governed by language conventions, expressive shortcuts that a community agrees to understand and honor…
Chaucer’s female characters in the Canterbury Tales
How are the female narrators and characters represented? Does their status correspond to women‟s historical situation in the fourteenth century?
Convents, Courts and Colleges: The Prioress and the Second Nun
Pilgrimage, 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
Isolda 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.
Fairytale Characteristics in Medieval Romances
It is the contention of this thesis that the link between fairytale and romance which I previously mentioned as disparaging to romance is in fact a strength of romance.
Chaucer’s Inferno: Dantean Burlesques in The Canterbury Tales
Like 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.