Chaucer's Poetry Research Articles

Geoffrey Chaucer in Context. The Oxford Handbook of ChaucerThe Oxford Handbook of Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer in Context. The Oxford Handbook of ChaucerThe Oxford Handbook of Chaucer

The Reception of Chaucer's Shorter Poems, 1400–1450: Female Audiences, English Manuscripts, French Contexts by Kara A. Doyle

Reviewed by: The Reception of Chaucer's Shorter Poems, 1400–1450: Female Audiences, English Manuscripts, French Contexts by Kara A. Doyle Sarah Wilma Watson Kara A. Doyle. The Reception of Chaucer's Shorter Poems, 1400–1450: Female Audiences, English Manuscripts, French Contexts. Chaucer Studies. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2021. Pp. 306. $99.00 cloth; $24.99 e-book. Kara A. Doyle's new book uncovers an exciting early chapter in the reception of Chaucer's poetry. Exploring six manuscript compilations dating to [End Page 397] between 1410 and 1450, Doyle demonstrates how early compilers placed Chaucer in a French literary context that encouraged readers to focus on Chaucer's female-voiced critique of fin'amors. Creators of fifteenth-century compilations developed Chaucer's reputation as "womanis frend" by positioning his poetry alongside French and English texts that highlight female perspective, agency, and voice. Through codicological interpretation and comparative literary analysis, Doyle reconstructs the intertextual reading experience of medieval audiences, showing how compilers and readers encountered Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate through the lens of French lyric sequences and dits and debats amoureux. This French literary context foregrounded for medieval readers a concept that Doyle terms "the female hermeneutic dilemma"—"when confronted with fin'amor gallantry, should women believe men's protestations of love and fidelity or treat them with skepticism?" (3). Tracing the development of this idea in Chaucer's poetry and in the works of his French and English contemporaries and successors, Doyle explores how medieval authors, compilers, and readers responded to bids for female agency and challenges to courtly and chivalric masculinity. Before turning to the six manuscript compilations that structure her book, Doyle devotes Chapter 1 to exploring the "female hermeneutic dilemma" featured in all six collections. Influenced by Ovid's Heroides; the Ovide moralisé; the dits amoureux of Guillaume de Machaut; and the French lyric sequences of Eustache Deschamps, Christine de Pizan, and John Gower, Chaucer developed a female-voiced critique of fin'amors that is portrayed especially prominently in Anelida and Arcite. Analyzing this poem, Doyle identifies five tropes that constitute the female hermeneutic dilemma: "female ventriloquism, exposing male fickleness, skepticism about male fin'amor rhetoric, demonstrating female fidelity, and warning the female audience" (21). Doyle argues that this critique of fin'amors runs through much of Chaucer's work prior to the Canterbury Tales and receives especially extended and sincere treatment in Anelida and Arcite, a text popular among Chaucer's early readers. With the female hermeneutic dilemma in mind, in Chapter 2, Doyle turns to Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.4.27 (c. 1410–25), the earliest known attempt to compile a complete works of Chaucer. Doyle observes that the compiler opens the collection with "French-inflected materials" to create a "French lyric backdrop" (13) for Chaucer's works, and closes the collection with John Lydgate's Temple of Glass, a text that offers "an unusually thoughtful retrospective on the female-voiced tropes [End Page 398] in Chaucer's work" (14). The compiler of Gg.4.27 thus "encourages readers to see Chaucer through the lens of late fourteenth-century French literature and sets audiences up to think of Chaucer as 'womanis frend'" (52). Next, in Chapter 3, Doyle analyzes Durham Cathedral Library, MS Cosin V.ii.13, an anthology dating to between 1425 and 1450 that includes Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Thomas Hoccleve's Letter of Cupid (an adaptation of Christine de Pizan's Epistre au dieu d'amours). Doyle argues that by pairing these texts, "the compiler gives Chaucer's masterpiece a French framework and helps construct a Chaucer who teaches women to be wary readers of [fin'amors] rhetoric" (76). In Chapter 4, Doyle returns to Chaucer's Anelida and Arcite, considering how this text is positioned within two anthologies created by John Shirley: British Library, Additional MS 16165 and Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.3.20. In both manuscripts, Shirley situates Anelida and Arcite in a context that reinforces female skepticism of fin'amors rhetoric, placing Chaucer's poem alongside lyric poems that question the morality of courtly life and show the wide range of male intentions that women must interpret. Through prologues, headers, and marginal...

Continental England: Form, Translation, and Chaucer in the Hundred Years' War by Elizaveta Strakhov

Reviewed by: Continental England: Form, Translation, and Chaucer in the Hundred Years' War by Elizaveta Strakhov Rory G. Critten Elizaveta Strakhov. Continental England: Form, Translation, and Chaucer in the Hundred Years' War. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022. Pp. ix, 252. $99.95 cloth; $49.95 e-book. Elizaveta Strakhov's ambitious new study is a welcome addition to the burgeoning scholarship on England's continental connections that follows upon Ardis Butterfield's Familiar Enemy (2009). One of the achievements of that book was to raise into suspension a set of arguments that previous writers had chosen between—for example, that French was either for the French (continental French) or the English (Anglo-Norman). In contrast, Continental England sets out to prove a thesis. Strakhov argues that while the Hundred Years War threatened to tear apart the northwest corner of Europe, a group of poets was intent on repairing the damage wrought by fostering a shared repertory of poetic forms, the formes fixes lyrics. This focus on form, as opposed to language, allows Strakhov to trace a series of relationships running between England and the Continent long after the adoption of English by Chaucer and the poets writing in his wake. The [End Page 429] resulting arguments are extensive in their geographical as well as their chronological scope, taking in texts written in France, England, and Italy. Strakhov treads this ground with confidence in a book that impresses as much by the optimism of its outlook as by its philological acumen and the originality of its readings. Strakhov develops her argument over five chapters. Chapter 1 sets the scene by highlighting the community-forming function of lyric exchange as well as the interest in the minute codification of the formes fixes that is expressed in manuscript anthologies and poetic treatises. Chapter 2 affords special attention to debates regarding the uses of the classical past in a broader discussion of the integrity of the francophone cultural arena. In a set of poems that will be familiar to Butterfield's readers, Strakhov shows that Philippe de Vitry warns against a breakdown in communications as the result of diversions from standard mythography, whereas Jean de le Mote presents creative engagement with this inheritance as the condition of its survival. Strakhov's focus on classical reception in a book about form is licensed by the attention devoted to mythological elements in the repertories of formes fixes lyrics discussed in Chapter 1. The book's remaining chapters focus on writing within England. Chapter 3 addresses the propensity of Chaucer's poetry to repair connections between England and the Continent by continuing continental traditions in English. Strakhov argues that this is the hope underpinning both Deschamps's famous ballade to Chaucer and the F-Prologue to The Legend of Good Women. Chapter 4 contrasts the strategies of lyric compilation deployed by Gower and Hoccleve. Whereas Gower's retellings of popular myth in his Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz constitutes a lesson on the slippery relations between French and Latin and text and gloss, in his holograph paratexts, Hoccleve aligns his mastery of French forms with Henry V's progressive mastery of France. Finally, Chapter 5 considers the French atmosphere of Chaucer's reception in the fifteenth century. Special attention is afforded to Shirley's deliberate presentation of the poet via paratexts as a French translator; Lydgate's French debts also come in for consideration as Strakhov demonstrates the role of French as the intermediary language giving the monk of Bury access to Italian humanist thought. Much more is going on in Continental England than these summaries can capture. The arguments that subtend the book's thesis are wideranging and introduce readers to connections between multiple texts and [End Page 430] languages. Vitry critiques de le Mote in terms that Petrarch uses to critique Vitry (in Chapter 2) and Deschamps praises Chaucer in terms that Deschamps also uses for Machaut, while Chaucer praises Petrarch in the terms that Deschamps had used to praise the English poet (in Chapter 3). There are also skillful renditions of overlooked backgrounds to later medieval English literature that subsequent researchers will find suggestive...

The Norton Chaucer ed. by David Lawton

Reviewed by: The Norton Chaucer ed. by David Lawton David Raybin David Lawton, ed. The Norton Chaucer. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019. Pp. xii, 1196. $62.50 cloth; $35.00 e-book. Chaucer scholars and students alike may be grateful to David Lawton for his composition of a much-needed and reasonably priced classroom-friendly edition of Chaucer's complete works. The sturdy, hardback Norton Chaucer provides reliable texts and helpful introductory material, and it is admirably user-friendly for both students and a general audience. Pages are easy on the eyes, presenting Chaucer's poetry and prose in single columns and a large and crisp font. Marginal glosses are placed at the side of each page, with explanatory notes at the bottom. Lawton's lightly modernized texts are easily legible, and the presentation is comfortable enough for sitting back in a chair and reading. As best as I can tell, the only other edition of the complete works currently in print is Oxford University Press's 2008 paperback reissue of the 1987 Riverside Chaucer, available in Britain but not for sale in the United States or Canada. Thus, for North Americans who wish to read all of Chaucer, the book is a necessity. British readers may also prefer Norton, as the Riverside paperback's minuscule print and back-of-volume notes are difficult to use for many readers. It must be acknowledged that the Norton Chaucer is not a replacement for Riverside as a standard scholarly edition. The glories of Riverside are its voluminous explanatory and textual notes, detailed (albeit now out-dated) discussions of the critical tradition, and an authoritative list of primary texts. In contrast, Norton includes no textual notes and relatively few explanatory notes, treats the critical tradition only minimally, presents a selective three-page bibliographical note that ignores primary sources, and prints only fifty lines from the G-text of the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women (those related to "Chaucer's library" [1117]). Recommendations for reading about Chaucer's life are limited to Derek Pearsall's 1992 biography and two articles by Christopher Cannon on raptus and rape (though a careful eye will find Marion Turner's massive Chaucer: A European Life mentioned in relation to "Chaucer's place as a European writer and thinker" [51]). Norton's twenty-six-page glossary hardly compares with Riverside's hundred pages of Middle English words and seventeen pages of proper names. What the Norton Chaucer does offer is a splendid volume for classroom use. Lawton's General Introduction (fifty-three pages) speaks lucidly of Chaucer's life, reading, afterlives, and reception; of the urban and national [End Page 421] political and social environments that he inhabited; and of the manuscripts and principal editions of his various works. An additional section (eleven pages) offers a cogent treatment of Chaucer's language and meter, and a rationale for mild modernization of the manuscript spellings. Brief descriptive analyses introduce each of Chaucer's longer works, the different parts (fragments) of the Canterbury Tales, and the shorter poems. This presentation facilitates "reading Chaucer in his original language" by recognizing that "nonspecialist readers … may need less apparatus and more help than standard scholarly editions provide" (45). A CD included with the book introduces readers to the sounds of Chaucer's Middle English. Twenty-nine admirably clear recordings from across Chaucer's work—by Lawton, Jennifer Brown, Ruth Evans, and Elizabeth Robertson—capture the energy and many voices of Chaucer's poetry. What matters most in a Chaucer edition is, of course, the quality of its texts, and Lawton's texts are reliable. He has reedited "[e]very line of Chaucer's poetry, consulting manuscripts, [E. Talbot] Donaldson's text [in the 1958 Chaucer's Poetry]), and the decisions of other editors" (ix), including light adaptation of Kathryn Lynch's Norton Critical Edition of the dream poems. Chaucer's prose texts are newly edited by Jennifer Arch. Following on Donaldson's lead, Lawton has rethought punctuation and modernized spelling, though not to the extent of his predecessor, and he has retained the traditional Canterbury Tales line numbering by part instead of Donaldson's separate numbering of each tale...

Tolkien's Lost Chaucer by John M. Bowers

Reviewed by: Tolkien's Lost Chaucer by John M. Bowers John D. Rateliff Tolkien's Lost Chaucer, by John M. Bowers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. xv, 310 pp. £21.99/$32.95 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-19-884267-5. "It is easier to plan a big book than to write it." —J.R.R. Tolkien re. The Canterbury Tales (Tolkien's Lost Chaucer 163) In the spring of 1922, J.R.R. Tolkien undertook a major scholarly project, on par with his edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with E. V. Gordon, then still in progress (Oxford University Press, 1925): The Clarendon Chaucer—or, as it was more formally known, Selections from Chaucer's Poetry and Prose. For six years Tolkien and his collaborator, George Gordon, struggled over the project, increasingly at loggerheads with each other and with their editor, Oxford University Press stalwart Kenneth Sisam. Finally, the project imploded and was abandoned, [End Page 208] forgotten by medievalists and Tolkien scholars alike, until rediscovered by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull in their researches into Tolkien's publishers' archives. Now John M. Bowers, medievalist and Chaucer scholar, has delved into the surviving draft material that would have gone into this attempted edition and presented excerpts and summaries to give us an idea of what the finished work might have been like. There are two ways to proceed with a project such as this: as author or as editor. The first is to write a history of the project, from conception (1922) to partial realization (1924–26) to abandonment (1928), followed with fleeting futile attempts at later times (1951, 1956, 1960) to bring the project out of abeyance and to some kind of satisfactory conclusion. The result would essentially be a highly focused piece of biography about specific events in Tolkien's life and career. Or one can put personalities aside and present all that is legible and coherent of Tolkien's and Gordon's unfinished and previously unpublished material as clearly as possible. Bowers has opted to take the first route, devoting several chapters to a history of the project, then following this with an account of Tolkien's engagement with Chaucer, including description of and quotations from Tolkien's draft text. He concludes by discussing in detail Tolkien's later work on Chaucer that grew out of the abandoned project: his major essay "Chaucer as Philologist" (1934) and his engagement with The Reeve's Tale (1939).1 Throughout, Bowers points out in passing many passages where he feels a case can be made for Chaucer influencing Tolkien's fiction and poetry on numerous specific points.2 This book's two strongest points are its inclusion of previously unpublished Tolkien material and the reevaluation of Tolkien's scholarly career it forces upon us. We have long known of his engagement with the Gawain-poet; now we can add to this evidence that he was deeply engaged with the work of the Gawain-poet's great contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer,3 the man widely considered to be the greatest of all English medieval writers. Bowers' account is discursive, and initial descriptions of his book made it difficult for those who had not yet seen it to judge its proportion of quotation to critique. Even now, having read the whole, I have only a vague sense of what proportion of Tolkien's unpublished work on the project is included herein—twenty percent? a quarter?—and how much still remains unpublished. Hence in evaluating Bowers' presentation of this material, and to get a better idea of the material itself, it is helpful to reconstruct the lost book and the two collaborators' respective roles. The most important fact about The Clarendon Chaucer, and the hardest [End Page 209] for a contemporary reader to fully grasp, is that Tolkien was very much the junior partner in this project. George Gordon seems to have been the one who proposed the Chaucer anthology to the press (Bowers 20–21). It was he who selected which of Chaucer's works would be included, and in what order. Tolkien approved the selection, so far as we can tell, but seems to have had no voice in...

Chaucer the Alchemist: Physics, Mutability, and the Medieval Imagination by Alexander N. Gabrovsky

Reviewed by: Chaucer the Alchemist: Physics, Mutability, and the Medieval Imagination by Alexander N. Gabrovsky Joe Stadolnik Alexander N. Gabrovsky. Chaucer the Alchemist: Physics, Mutability, and the Medieval Imagination Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. xix, 291. $119.99 cloth; $89.00 e-book. In Chaucer the Alchemist, Alexander N. Gabrovsky proposes to read Chaucer's poetry for the ways he "exploits the scientific thinking of his day in order to conceptualize and aestheticize his own unique philosophy of physics," and more broadly, of worldly change and mutability. Chaucer is cast as a perceptive observer of a world ever in motion and ever in flux; these natural-scientific interests encouraged him to study up on physics, alchemy, and logic, and then to translate this learning into a [End Page 469] number of his poems as narrative programs or interpretive keys. Gabrovsky praisingly calls these poems "thought experiments," and so described, these texts are made to exemplify Chaucer's genius as both literary maker and natural philosopher. Chaucer the Alchemist invites readers, in its title and in its arguments, to reimagine his poetry as the thoughtful, methodical reworking of elemental subject matter: contemporary medieval philosophies of the mutable, the transforming, and the contingent. An introduction argues that references to physical transformation across Chaucer's poetry together reflect that captivation by worldly change. Gabrovsky here provides a survey of "clerical cultures" that may have served as conduits of learning to medieval society broadly and Chaucer's London milieu specifically: namely the mendicant orders and medieval universities; he also places his arguments within the scholarship on Chaucer and medieval science. Four chapters then focus upon one poem matched with a series of academic concepts or modes of thinking. Gabrovsky argues that The House of Fame follows a "philosophical formula for [its] action" (29) as a "product of fourteenth-century debates on the science of mechanics" (28). Two subsequent chapters scour The Franklin's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde for "a network of alchemical imagery" that "guides Chaucer's whole narrative project" in each (189). The fifth chapter understands the avian debate of the Parliament of Fowls to be a logical exercise in conditionals and possibilities, written expertly after a Scholastic pattern of ars obligitoria. A conclusion suggests that the monadic and dyadic concepts of Neoplatonist thought offered Chaucer another way to think abstractly about change, and to write about it. Gabrovsky deserves praise for how Chaucer the Alchemist assembles anew a set of natural-scientific texts and ideas from the corners of medieval intellectual culture for a generalist Chaucerian readership. For instance, his chapter on The Franklin's Tale highlights an alchemical discourse of astrological and sexual conjunction with reference to the Latin Epistola solis ad lunam crescentem. This is the "book Senior" of the Canon's Yeoman's reading list, translated from the Arabic of Muhammad ibn Umail. The mingling of the astrological with the alchemical in the Epistola serves well to warrant Gabrovsky's claim that the zodiacal preoccupations of the learned "philosopher" of Orléans and his client Aurelius chimed with a cognate alchemical allegory, the wedding of sun and moon. Passages from the Epistola and texts such as Albertus Magnus's Liber mineralibus and the De compositione alchimiae of Morienus illuminate [End Page 470] how alchemical theory might underwrite an interpretation of the physical and psychological transformations wrought by the tale's narrative. Gabrovsky grounds another tidy claim for Chaucer's poetic adaptation of physical concepts on solid, convincing ground in his chapter on The House of Fame. Geffrey's changing sense of the wicker labyrinth's motion—whirling from without and "stente" from within—presents readers with a problem of relative perception and, more broadly, worldly and celestial mechanics. Gabrovsky tracks how such questions were taken up in Aristotle's De caelo and Aquinas's commentary upon it, as well as via figures of thought such as John Buridan and Nicole Oresme's example of the observer on a moving ship. When Geffrey claims to "know where he stands" with confidence, to his readers he appears to stand unsteadily and with uncertain shiftiness in the chaotic, spinning world of the poem. At a few points like these...

Chaucer's Poetics and Purposes in the Legend of Good Women

Abstract Reading the Legend of Good Women within the context of Chaucer's other poetry, this article addresses the difficulties modern readers encounter with the tone and style of the Legend by a close reading of Chaucer's multiple registers of speech, his mixing of French and English vocabulary and his poetic choices of phrasing, narrative pace, and rhythm. It argues that the Legend is not an outlier in the canon of Chaucer's poetry, but closely related to Anelida and Arcite as well as Troilus and Criseyde. It reads the supposed awkwardness of the language and the compressed, seemingly rushed portions in several narratives as reflections of Chaucer's larger project to transform exemplary narratives purportedly about women's fidelity in love into stories examining a wider variety of social interactions that contribute to or undermine the creation of social harmony, stories in which women's desires and choices are often central.

Lynn Arner, Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace after 1381. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Pp. ix, 198. $64.95. ISBN: 978-0-271-05893-1.

Lynn Arner, <i>Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace after 1381</i>. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Pp. ix, 198. $64.95. ISBN: 978-0-271-05893-1.

Chaucer, Kant, and Continental Materialism

Chaucer, Kant, and Continental Materialism Manish Sharma (bio) [End Page 54] Although Geoffrey Chaucer is often still accorded the status of "father of English poetry," even his earliest readers detected in his writing a sensitive attunement to philosophical problems.1 Nevertheless, it would be surprising today to see his name grouped with medieval philosophers, such as Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham, rather than associated with medieval poets, such as his fourteenth-century contemporaries, John Gower, William Langland, and the Pearl Poet. In fact, Chaucer discourages us from considering him as a philosopher, insisting on a number of occasions that the subtle questions of philosophy are the province only of the university-trained "clerk" (scholar), not the layperson or dilettante.2 He represents himself instead as a theoretical expert on love, though one comically unsuited to the practicalities of the erotic game because of his socially maladjusted, bumbling, bookish manner and portly figure.3 What I will argue in this essay is that the Chaucerian conception of love is in fact an important, if so far unremarked, intervention into late fourteenth-century thought, and one that has significant implications for post-medieval philosophy. In order to prosecute this argument, I will first interpret anew what is widely acclaimed as Chaucer's chef d'oeuvre, the Nun's Priest's Tale from the Canterbury Tales. I will then turn to the Franklin's Tale and read it in light of the Nun's Priest's Tale. Finally, I will rely on both of these readings to stage encounters between Chaucer and a series of Continental thinkers, from Immanuel Kant to François Laruelle, with whom he has unexpected affinities. Chaucer was born around the mid-point of the fourteenth century in England, a time of great intellectual ferment, characterized particularly by the debate between the realists, whose chief medieval proponent was Thomas Aquinas, and the nominalists, whose chief medieval proponent was William of Ockham. Though scholars have attempted to assimilate Chaucer's poetry to one or both of these camps, I believe these attempts are misguided.4 In the Canterbury Tales there is evidence that Chaucer has generated an alternative position that has so far, and perhaps unavoidably, eluded notice. In what follows, I will make the case that the Nun's Priest's Tale serves as Chaucer's Logic and the Franklin's Tale as his Ethics. I can only elucidate Chaucer's intervention into his intellectual milieu by means of a strategic reductionism that largely passes over the vast complexity of the Canterbury Tales: the dazzling profusion of voices, genres, themes, echoes, and intertexts with which they have confronted and delighted readers since their first circulation. I propose instead to reduce the Canterbury Tales to only two elements, form and matter, and only two relations, formalist and materialist. This strategy entails one complication: some relations can serve recursively as elements of other, higher-order relations. Though they go by many names, form and matter are the atomic constituents of philosophy. Form is the principle of order, universality, spirituality, intelligibility, actuality, identity, and necessity. In the Western intellectual tradition, form is almost always gendered masculine.5 Matter—almost always gendered feminine—is the principle of chaos, particularity, corporeality, incomprehensibility, potentiality, multiplicity, and contingency. Form is clean, but restrictive; matter is dirty, but intoxicating. Philosophy begins, [End Page 55] perhaps, when a thinker isolates what is clean, with all its attendant ramifications, from what is dirty, with all its attendant ramifications. There are two basic ways that form and matter interact both in Chaucer's writing and in philosophy. When the formalist relation holds, form is related to matter, imposing upon chaos the vector of a final cause. When the materialist relation, or more precisely non-relation, holds, form is not related to matter, and chaos evades the constraint of order. Plato in book 10 of the Republic makes an instructive distinction between two kinds of poetry. Acceptable poetry, strictly limited to hymns to the gods and eulogies for virtuous men, has been formalized and therefore orients its audience toward the idea of the good. Bad poetry, by contrast, is aimless, not related to any form, and can...

Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems by A.J. Minnis, V.J. Scattergood and J. J. Smith

REVIEWS A.J. MINNIS with V.J. SCATTERGOOD and J. J. SMITH. Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. xiv, 578. $72.00. Compared to its predecessors (Helen Cooper, The Canterbury Tales (1989}; Barry Windeatt, Troilus andCriseyde (1992}), this third and last volume of the Oxford Guides to Chaucer (OGC) is heftier (578 pages, vs. 437 for the Tales and 414 for the Troilus), and, more significantly, it brings the series very much into the 1990s in critical style as well as date. A. J. Minnis's discussions of The Book ofthe Duchess (BD), The House ofFame(HF), The Parliament ofFowls (PF), and The LegendofGood Women (LGW) adopt a personal, often tendentious voice and undertake to en­ gage aggressively many of the critical issues and perspectives that have entered, and to a great extent transformed, Chaucer criticism during the last 20 years. (By contrast, the appended survey of the lyrics by V. J. Scattergood does not overtly manifest Minnis's concern "to consider the ideological implications of various readings" of Chaucer's poetry [p. 1}.) Responding positively (if not without some ambivalence) to the evo­ lution of the "New Historicism," Minnis offers his "readings of Chaucer's love-visions within an anthropology of courtly didacticism and play and as inscriptions of aristocratic ideals of conduct and processes of cultural fashioning" (p. 4), while resisting the notion that Chaucer is to be understood exclusively "as occupying the position of sophisticated princepleaser"-an understanding that runs counter to Minnis's "identifications of certain prospects of dissidence in Chaucerian fiction," specifically with respect to "aristocratic mores, tra­ ditional misogyny, [or} authoritarian literary theory" (p. 5). Overall, Minnis rejects attempts to read the dream-poems in ways that he regards as anachronistic or overly generalized. He has no pa­ tience with the Robertsonian, allegorizing school (Chaucer, to him, is clearly a secular poet who avoids opportunities to allegorize, as when he borrows details for his version of the Ceyx and Alcyone story in BD from the Ovide moralise, but avoids its moralitas). And in at least partial op­ position to feminist critiques of the representation of women in the dream poems, he aims at "a historicized gender criticism which at­ tempts to respect the room for dissent which the culture of Chaucer's day allowed, in so far as that can be recuperated by recourse to such ev­ idence as is available to us" (p. 5). (To this end, Minnis distinguishes between the "structural antifeminism" of late medieval European civi­ lization, by which Chaucer could not avoid being somewhat affected, 275 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER and "phobic antifeminism," that special animosity most characteristic of clerics, from which he largely absolves the poet [see pp.427-32}.) Two introductory chapters locate the dream-poems with respect to vernacular literary traditions and the social ideologies of Chaucer's au­ dience."The Shorter Poems: Social and Cultural Contexts" offers an ex­ cellent summary of recent theorizing about Chaucer's social and profes­ sional placement and its impact on his poetic development. Minnis argues for the crucial influence of the "international [i. e. , French-based} court culture," promoted by Edward III and Richard II, both on Chaucer's poetic formation and on the "receptive company of courtiers who shared an interest in poetry and a highly personal and earnest piety" (p.19)-the so-called "Lollard Knights" who collectively estab­ lish a "horizontal axis [on which} may be sought the audience of Chaucer's courtly poetry" (p.22 ). "Chaucer and the Love-Vision Form" first examines the ambiguous, often indeterminate dream taxonomies of Chaucer's heritage and demonstrates how his dream-poems reproduce and exploit the ambigu­ ities of significance and interpretation associated with dreams.In the second part of this chapter, dedicated to the analogously complex issue of fin' amors, Minnis considers "the implications of the conventions of courtly love for the construction of gender" (p.60).Responding to the spate of recent analyses-singled out are those of R. Howard Bloch, Maud Ellmann, and Elaine Tuttle Hansen-that depict courtly love as a "patriarchal conspiracy" (p.67), Minnis argues that such judgments, while obviously valid in part, ultimately constitute...

Dream Vision in Chaucer's Poetry

Dream vision is an important and well _ known medieval narrative genre in poetry . The basic framework is that the confused narrator falls asleep and dreams , then his dream will be the main story. The dream often takes the form of allegory , enigmatic , and it needs a kind of interpretation on the part of the reader .After the troubled narrator is awakened , he determines to write his dream in a poem . 1 Dream vision poetry has an impressive and extensive image, which has been widely commented upon . Falling asleep, dreaming , dream vision , prophetic visitations and oracular guidance are familiar motifs from a number of widely known literary sources , like for example in the Bible , Greek and Latin classics , continuing in to the late antiquity and in to the medieval period . 2 Dream visions have important elements in common , firstly, all dream visions are written in the first person . The narrator becomes the dreamer and tells the story as his own experience . Sometimes , the dreamer becomes the protagonist of the dream fiction , and other times , he is only an observer as in Chaucer 's Book of the Duchess .3

Introduction

Introduction

Teaching Chaucer and Popular Culture:

This essay is inspired both by an increasing disciplinary contention that Chaucerians engage with popular culture and by a refreshed critical interest (reflected in the burgeoning field of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) in sharing pedagogical innovations and interests with peers within a public forum.2 Notwithstanding lingering professional suspicions about the value of the popular, engagement with popular culture involves the need both to better communicate Chaucer’s aesthetic distinction to the culture at large and to embrace the popular in our teaching. This essay offers a brief meditation on the value of the popular and offers two theoretical approaches that one might use to introduce the study of Chaucer’s popular constructions into the classroom. I suggest, in short, that Chaucer’s reproduction in popular culture has both pedagogical and critical value—both as interpretations of his poetry as it is adapted to

Versions of “Manliness” in the Poetry of Chaucer, Langland, and Hoccleve

The terms for manliness to be considered here, manhood, man, and manly, did not belong to the official moral discourse of medieval England, as displayed in the many sermons and treatises of the time. Rather, they represent judgments passed in common parlance, at a level of everyday usage for which the evidence is more scanty. In his book The Structure of Complex Words, William Empson was able to devote three whole chapters to a single such “rich and shifting term of praise,” the word honest, drawing on the great range of post-medieval writings that display its various senses and implications.1 Medieval sources allow no such fullness of treatment, but they are enough to exhibit some more modest complexity in their versions of “manliness,” even where consideration is confined, as here, to some poems of the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Since manly was a term not subject to the discipline of clerical definition, unlike words such as patient or charitable, its meanings are to be inferred from whatever in the broad general background of ideas about masculinity may seem to be called for in each particular context. Most prominent among these was the idea of male courage and prowess in battle.2 When Troilus rides with his posse past Criseyde’s house, Chaucer describes him thus:

What Chaucer Did to Shakespeare: Books and Bodkins in Hamlet and The Tempest

This article is less concerned with what Shakespeare did to Chaucer than with what Chaucer did to Shakespeare: that is, how the experience of reading Chaucer, in certain cultural and bibliographical contexts, engaged Shakespeare throughout his career, not only providing sources but provoking his imagination. Like so many of his sources and inspirations, Chaucer's poetry came to Shakespeare not as a performative tradition but as a published book. We take a close look at Thomas Speght's 1598 volume, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, reprinted in 1602, the only edition to appear in Shakespeare's lifetime. And we examine, in particular, Chaucer's treatment of the death of Julius Caesar in the Monk's Tale, in order to show how Chaucer's handling of this political assassination provoked Shakespeare's exploration of this subject in his own Julius Caesar, as well as in Hamlet and The Tempest.

Wayward Sons and Failing Fathers:

It has been a long time since anyone has taken seriously the possibility that a literary source might ever be identified for Chaucer’s Cook’s Tale. The reason for this is not simply that this tale has been preserved only in what appears to be an accidentally truncated form.1 Even at fifty-eight lines long, it remains a substantial “stub,” and it provides a number of potential clues to the nature of the story that Chaucer probably intended to tell.2 Indeed, it defines its dramatis personae and its thematic concerns so fully as to create what is actually quite a detailed profile for the identity of its source, and it is perhaps precisely because this profile is so detailed that it has always seemed so difficult to find an exact enough match for it among all the classical or medieval stories that Chaucer is likely to have known. In other words, it is not an absence of

Lydgate Rewrites Chaucer:

Lydgate Rewrites Chaucer:

The Poetry of Praise

Book Review| December 01 2011 The Poetry of Praise Burrow, J. A.The Poetry of Praise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 203 pp. Cloth $87.00, paper $39.99. Robert J. Meyer-Lee Robert J. Meyer-Lee Indiana University, South Bend Robert J. Meyer-Lee did his graduate work at Yale University and is currently an associate professor of English at Indiana University, South Bend, where he teaches courses in medieval literature and linguistics. He is the author of Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (2007), as well as several articles on such late medieval English poets as Hoccleve, Lydgate, Chaucer, Ashby, Audelay, and Skelton. His first article, on Hoccleve, won the Medieval Academy of America's Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize. He is currently working on a study of the relation between socioeconomic value and literary value in Chaucer's poetry. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature Studies (2011) 48 (4): 603–606. https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.48.4.0603 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Robert J. Meyer-Lee; The Poetry of Praise. Comparative Literature Studies 1 December 2011; 48 (4): 603–606. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.48.4.0603 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressComparative Literature Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2011 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2011The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Loci of Solitude: The Idea of "Pryvetee" in Chaucer

Few studies of solitude in the Middle Ages have been able to transcend the influence of Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of Renaissance in Italy, in spite of the fact that it does not tackle the issue of solitude but rather that of the rise of individualism in the renaissance. In this paper, while not questioning the central debate of Burckhardt's thesis, I wish to examine the idea of privacy as it arises in the work of Chaucer. My paper places particular emphasis on loci of solitude concerning Criseyde and Nicholas in order to argue that, as I see it, a distinctive bourgeois ideology of privacy emerged in later medieval England. By looking at what Chaucer specifically says about his characters' environment, their physical surroundings, their behavioral patterns, and their social interactions in The Miller's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde, I hope to show that in Chaucer's work collective privacy did exist, but we can detect signs of personal privacy within the collective privacy. I am particularly interested in cases where Chaucer's idea of privacy refers not merely to loci of solitude or places of ”pryvetee” (say, bedchambers, gardens, or one's cold grave) but the activity of being alone, with private thought, or to access of solitude, a kind of privacy of the psyche. Such an enquiry of the idea of ”pryvetee” in the late medieval time strives to open a new way to appraise the modernity of Chaucer's poetry.

Vituperations in Chaucer's Poetry

Vituperations in Chaucer's Poetry