An Ecoritical Approach to Chaucer. Representations of the Natural World in the English Literature of the Middle Ages
The 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 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.
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.
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…
Trojan Wars: Genre and the Politics of Authorship in Late Medieval and Early Modern England
In the Middle Ages, Troy was not ancient history. As a living myth that continued to evolve along with the English nation, Troy functioned as a site for examining England’s cultural and political questions.
Naught by Nature: Chaucer and the (Re)Invention of Female Goodness in Late Medieval Literature
The 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
Lovesickness in “Troilus”
The history of lovesickness in the Middle Ages is the record of physicians’ attempts to understand what happens to the body and the mind when passion renders a lover a patient.
Casting Light on Clandestine Marriage in Il Filostrato
Various studies in recent years have illuminated the almost pandemic nature of clandestine marriage in late-medieval Europe – the Church considered it to be a pernicious social problem,