The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer- A Critical Biography

1980

2015

Most manuscripts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales have placed the fragment that begins with The Shipman's Tale after Fragment VI. Thus, it is usually found as Fragment VII in most modern translations of Chaucer's tales. Although it is the longest tale-cluster in Chaucer's tales, the order of this fragment is still controversial. For instance, Henry Bradshaw insists that this fragment should be moved ahead and placed after Fragment II. On the other hand, most scholars believe that breaking the order of the tales as it exists in the Ellesmere a Manuscript, and as Bradshaw hopes, might ruin the thematic relationship among the tales in different fragments. This research investigates the position of Fragment VII in multiple manuscripts. It evaluates various critical perspectives on the issue and recommend moving fragment VII to be placed after Fragment II. I argue that some amendments to the order found in the Ellesmere a Manuscript and the ones that follow its order might reinforce the thematic relationship among the tales and does not ruin it.

Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2007

Th e battle between the Wife of Bath and her fifth husband, Jankyn, in which she ''rente out of his book a leef, / For which he smoot me so that I was deef,'' 1 enacts the spectacular failure in transmission that results when a coercive literary tradition collides with an audience whose resistance finally wells over into violence. In addition to its commentary on the effects of antifeminist writings in the Wife's autobiographical prologue-the focus of most recent criticism on the Wife of Bath-the battle also figures the very structure of literary tradition, whose motive force is the dynamic interaction of repetition (emulation, imitation) and rupture, 2 as an overt rivalry. As she tells it, the Wife It gives me great pleasure to acknowledge those whose responses to this essay (or to the papers it draws on) have shaped my thinking:

1997

The structure of the Shipman's Tale can be understood in terms of Chaucer's puns on "cosyn," referring to relationship (between the monk and the merchant, and, indirectly, between the monk and the merchant's wife), and "cosynage," referring to deception. Used no fewer than sixteen times, the two meanings of "cosyn" take on different emphases in the two parts of the tale. In the first part the "relationship" aspect of "cosyn" dominates, with the "deception" aspect submerged. In the second part, the deception aspect dominates. The structure of the tale depends, then, on the structure of the pun.

English Studies in Canada, 1987

C ritics who compare Chaucer's tales with their analogues often write as if the sources gave birth to the tale without the necessity of human artistic intervention, or, if they do concern themselves with the particularly Chau cerian aspects of the tales, it is only to demonstrate what they already know, that Chaucer is superior as an artist to his French or Italian colleagues. Similarly, students of the tale/teller relationship too often write as if the given narrator is the author of his tale, and do not give sufficient attention to the way Chaucer the author addresses his audience through the interplay between the tale and the peculiarities of its teller. Not surprisingly, both critical methods have fallen into disfavour in the critical literature, although I expect that their utility is still appreciated in the classroom. Some of the difficulties of each approach may be lessened, however, by applying them both to the texts in concert. As a heuristic device, comparison between a tale and its analogue highlights the particularly Chaucerian elements of a tale, and establishes certain details as privileged content, more in need of explanation and carrying greater weight in the analysis as a whole. These prominent aspects form a system which may then be paralleled to details of the status and personality of the teller as revealed in The General Prologue or the narrator's Prologue, providing a greater coherence between portions of the text on different levels. Such a study is necessitated and validated by the text itself; if we are not to disregard Chaucer's elaborate framework for the tales, or to treat it as description for description's sake, it must be linked to other textual material. This is most effectively done in the context of the general Ricardian concern for the circumstances of speech: to understand an utterance, we need to know who is speaking, to whom, and why.1 The Reeve's Tale2 and the analogous story told by Pamfilo on the ninth day of the Decameron3 provide a useful test case, since they have a basically common structure with some important structural differences and also con trast markedly in details of plot and characterization. In both stories, two young men spend the night in the home of a man who has a wife, a young daughter, and a baby still in the cradle. In the middle of the night, one

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2012

the Gawain poet's Middle English (I think I would have preferred this section to be part of the introductory matter, but that is neither here nor there). Perhaps the most welcome addition is a section with two brief Old French Gawain romances, Le Chevalier a l'Epée and La Mule sans Frein, newly translated by Borroff herself, with bracketed summaries of passages not translated verbatim. One might have wished for additional selections, such as the seduction passages in Yder, but having the complete story arc of a romance makes comparison to Sir Gawain richer. These are followed by a selection from The Alliterative Morte Arthure, the Christmas feast, which not only gives students another prime example of the alliterative tradition but provides an interesting contrast in narrative approach to the Gawain poet. The "Criticism" section is admirably broad and as up-to-date as one could reasonably expect, spanning essays from 1958 to 2001 and covering a variety of topics, from descriptive and stylistic technique to Christian themes, numerology, heroism and courtesy, and the role of the female characters. Again, one might carp that a favorite or important work was excluded (for instance, I would like to have an excerpt from Larry Benson's Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), but the selections are well chosen. They are followed by a historical chronology of Arthurian works, beginning with William of Malmesbury, mixed in with important literary and historical milestones up to 1400. The edition closes with a selected bibliography that also strives for breadth and currency, with historical and cultural, as well as literary, topics in books and articles from 1923 to 2006. Borroff's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a welcome addition to the Norton Critical Edition series. The copyediting could have been a bit more careful (e.g., "La Chevalier" and the amusing "Studies in Medieval English Romance: Same New Approaches"), but, like all in the series, it is a handsome and readable publication. It can serve as a library resource for research papers in a Norton British Literature survey or as a textbook in courses on medieval literature, Romance, or Arthurian Legend. This translation remains a valuable entry into a work, as Borroff says, "crafted by an author whose vision of the human comedy we can still share and savor" (p. xxix).

Medieval feminist forum, 2015

Pitcher's examination of the feminine subjects in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales focuses on the construction, and deconstruction, of the presentation of women in Chaucer's work. Of particular interest to Pitcher are the elements of modern subjectivity that appear within the tales he has selected. This subjectivity is, in his view, not to be found on the surface of the text but is created by the indeterminacy and tensions within the individual texts that appear at once affirming and contradictory, the différance of the symbols Chaucer has provided. Pitcher's text is inherently deconstructionist in its methodology, while firmly grounded in current medieval and feminist scholarship. The strength of this examination is Pitcher' s willingness not only to engage with the source texts and the scholarship, but also to explore the tensions between scholarly readings in an effort to decenter current thought on Chaucer' s work and to show the reader the ideologies and readings that exist in the gaps and conflicts Chaucer creates through his use of rhetoric and wordplay. Three of the tales Pitcher examines, those of the Wife of Bath, the Clerk, and the Franklin, are obvious choices for such a reading as they are the core tales of the traditional Marriage Group and, as Pitcher acknowledges, "the tales on which critical debates about women in the Canterbury enterprise turn" (7). The choice of The Physician's Tale as a complement to these three tales, rather than The Merchant's Tale which would complete the Marriage Group, repositions

Chaucer in Context, chapter 1. , 1996

Argues that a historical approach to Chaucer's work does not depend on seeing the characters of the General Prologue as being based on real-life models or as constituting 'reflections' of reality.