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.
Love, Marriage, and Happiness: Changing Systems of Desire in Fourteenth-Century England
It 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.
(Un)Natural Love: Homosexuality in Late Medieval English Literature: Langland, Chaucer, Gower, and the Gawain Poet
We can examine in their works if there are any mentions of homosexuality, and, more importantly, whether these mentions bear a strong marking of late medieval English society. Do the four authors take different approaches to the subject? Do they take approaches at all, or do they omit any mention of homosexuality?
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.
That country beyond the Humber”: the English North, regionalism, and the negotiation of nation in medieval English literature
The 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
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
Producing the Middle English Corpus: Confession and Medieval Bodies
In Producing the Middle English Corpus: Confession and Medieval Bodies, I argue that confessional discourse played an important role in the creation of the Middle English canon.
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.
A Chivalrous Man is Not a Gentleman: A Look at Chivalry in the Age of Chaucer
The 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.
‘It’s a Magical World’: The Page in Comics and Medieval Manuscripts
In this essay I examine the location in the material world that calls forth that cognitive frontier: the page.
The Judgement of Urines
The Judgement of Urines Canadian Medical Association Journal, v.159:12 (1998) Abstract An earnest physician of Renaissance England counted this as one of the…