This book is designed to explore the various kinds of association found in Chaucer's lexical usage, and so to alert the reader to the wider implications of particular words and phrases. By concentrating on the architecture' of the language, Dr Burnley offers what is in some respects an antidote to the skilled contextual glossing of the editor, whose activities may often obscure important connections. Such connections are vital to the interpretation of any work as a whole, and awareness of them is what distinguishes the scholar from the student who can translate' Chaucer perfectly adequately...

This volume makes available in translation the texts that lie behind Chaucer's dream poems - l>The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, The House of Fame/l> and l>Prologue to the Legend of Good Women/l>. Chaucer's dream poems are now being increasingly studied and appreciated. With their attractively bookish dreamer figure and their graceful use of conventions and traditions, they have their distinctive place in Chaucer's work. But the nodern reader of these medieval poems particularly needs a sense of their literary context in the tradition of comparable narrative poems - largely in...

The purpose of this book is to give an outline of structural features of Chaucer's poetic syntax that are relevant to the study of style, and to define some general tendencies in his construction of sentences. What emerges is a fondness on Chaucer's part for discontinuity in the order of words and phrases and for certain forms of expression which have a wider application t: han their modern counterparts. In order that Chaucer's usage may be seen in its historical context, comparative material is drawn from the writings of his contemporaries - Langland, Gower, and the l>Gawainl>-poet - and...

Professor Minnis argues that the paganism in Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight's Taleis not simply a backdrop but must be central to our understanding of the texts. Chaucer's two great pagan poems, l>Troilus and Criseyde/l> and l>The Knight's Tale/l>, belong to the literary genre known as the romance of antiquity' (which first appeard in the mid 12th century), in which the ancient pagan world is shown on its own terms, without the blatant Christian bias against paganism characteristic of works like the l>Chanson de Roland/l>, where the writer is concerned with present-day rather than...

Translation of fifteen lyrics marked -Ch- found in University of Pennsylvania MS French 15, along with a detailed inventory of the contents and a study of English and Chaucerian connections. When Chaucer began his service in the English courts in the late 1350s, the French lyric in the l>formes fixes/l> of ballade, rondeau, virelay, and chant royal was the poetry of the court. Chaucer no doubt composed such poetry. Among extant anthologies of lyrics in the fixed forms from that time, University of Pennsylvania MS French 15, comprising 310 poems of which about half are anonymous, seems the...

lThe House/of/Fame/l> is one of Chaucer's most intellectually challenging poems, drawing on diverse traditions such as dream poetry and mythology, but unified by the central concept of Fame. It is this concept, and the imaginary world' which surrounds it, which Professor Boitani explores in this volume in the Chaucer Studies series. He begins with a brief outline and discussion of the poem, showing what problems it poses, and then turns to explore the history and meaning of the idea of Fame, such as Chaucer might have received from tradition', a quest which leads him into Biblical, classical...

There is fairly general agreement that the modern reader's appreciation of Chaucer's writings can be enhanced by providing the reader with guides to Chaucerian background' - literary, historical and cultural - and students of Chaucer are fortunate in having at their disposal a large number of books covering various aspects of Chaucerian background. One field which is less well covered is Chaucer's language: it is true that certain aspects of Chaucer's syntax and lexis have been dealt with in fairly recent years, but other subcategories of Chaucerian English, such as phonology and morphology,...

Counters the view of Chaucer's complaints as exercises in a worn-out French tradition by demonstrating how his effort to fuse lyric and narrative modes led him to experiment with complaint. His analyses give new perspectives on several of Chaucer's works -- an intelligent, original and profitable view.'STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER

This collection of 32 modernised versions of The Canterbury Tales which appeared in the 18th century offers basic material for studying the history of attitudes to Chaucer, and Chaucer scholarship, duringthe period. Reception data so precise and extensive is available only for Chaucer among English authors. At least seventeen known and anonymous writers produced thirty-two modernised Canterbury tales during the century, plus tale links and adaptations of each other's work. The present collection contains only modernisations that have not seen print since 1796, thus excluding those by Pope and...

(see revs) This study of the manuscripts of the Canterbury Talescalls into question previous efforts to explain the complexities, the different orderings of the tales and the extraordinary shifts in textual affiliations within the manuscripts. Owen sees the manuscripts that survive, most of them collections of all or almost all the tales, as derived from the large number of single tales and small collections that circulated after Chaucer's death. This theory takes issue with all modern editions of the Canterbury Tales, which in Owen's view reflect the effort of medieval scribes and...