Chaucer's Prioress has been an enigma to scholars who have tried to understand her. The fundamental point of contention about the Prioress centers upon the question: "Is Chaucer presenting her as a satiric figure supposedly dedicated to the Church but worldly in her pursuits, or is Chaucer presenting her as a sincere member of the clergy, typical of those who fulfilled the requirements laid down by the Church?” A study of selected critical statements brings one to no resolution of the question. The statement of one orthodox critic, Sister M. Madeleva, who measured the Prioress against the Benedictine Rule, does riot end the search since this critic chooses to discuss only points on which she can score the Prioress saintly, thereby ignoring vital details in Chaucer's portrait. One must look at historical studies of the English medieval nunnery to see Madame Eglentyne in her milieu. The exhaustive study, Medieval English Nunneries by Power, supported by historical evidence, indicates medieval prioresses generally were strong and pious though worldly. Power feels there is no reason to believe Chaucer's Prioress departed from that norm. One returns to Chaucer's poetic method to search for further evidence on those areas slighted by Sister Madeleva. A study based on W. C. Curry's work reveals the Prioress as more noble than ignoble, atypical of the norm, but the balance of conviction is on the side of Power's contention that the Prioress is typical of prioresses of her day. / Master of Arts

Queer theory emphasizes the circulation of power through sex-gender-sexuality systems to trace methods of normalization for the purposes of political intervention. Within literature, queer theory functions as a lens into historical gender and sexual ideologies. My thesis attempts to bridge queer theory with medieval studies to highlight queer and non-normative sensibilities within a particular medieval text: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales develops characters who straddle the line between the queer and the licit, and he creates situations that disrupt the expected hetero-normative, masculine ideology of medieval England. Queering Canterbury explores how queer-gender, queer-bashing, queer humor, and the queynte function within Chaucer's Canterbury Tales while relating the overarching struggle for masculinity and power.

William Morris’s Kelmscott Press was founded specifically for the purpose of producing handmade printed works in a rapidly industrializing age. The techniques he and his confederates employed to make the Kelmscott books resulted in beautiful publications with remarkable material fortitude, as exemplified in the Press’s masterwork, “The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer Now Newly Imprinted”. This thesis examines the condition of the copy of the Kelmscott Chaucer in the Scripps rare book collection from a book conservator’s perspective to analyze the connection between William Morris’s personal philosophies, his resulting artistic decisions, and the longevity of the book as an art object.

Vollst. zugl.: Marburg, Univ., Diss., 2007

Both Chaucer and the Gawain-poet use the Matters of Troy and Thebes as material for a critique of courtly life, applying these literary matters to the events and actions in and around Ricardian England. They use these classical matters to express concerns about the effectiveness of the court of Richard II. Chaucer uses his earlier works as a testing ground to develop his views about the value of duty over courtly pursuits, ideas discussed more completely in Troilus and Criseyde. The Gawain-poet uses the Matter of Troy coupled with the court of King Arthur to engage in a critique of courtly concerns. The critiques presented by both poets show a tendency toward duty over courtly concerns.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Full text release at OhioLINK's ETD Center delayed at author's request

This thesis has examined the individual accomplishments of Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio in terms of their parallel characters and stories. The Chaucerian works used in this study are three stories from The Canterbury Tales: The Knight’s Tale, The Franklin’s Tale, and The Clerk’s Tale. Chaucer’s art of story telling, as exhibited within these stories, has been directly compared to parallel characters and plots taken from the works of Giovanni Boccaccio: The Teseida, The Filocolo, and The Decameron. A direct comparison of Chaucer’s method in creation of character, suspense, and plot to those of Boccaccio has allowed a true estimate of the value of both authors.In addition, it has been possible to examine what Chaucer and Boccaccio found in separate sources but wished to treat differently, what Chaucer saw directly in the works of Boccaccio and wanted to change, and the method of treatment as related to the maturation of the separate writers.

It will be the purpose of this thesis to survey and to evaluate twentieth-century criticisms of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Because the topic is so broad, it is necessary to find methods of limiting the subject so that it· may be adequately covered herein. This paper will be limited primarily to books published on the topic under consideration. To cover all the work in periodical literature would go beyond the scope of this study. Perhaps that task can be covered by someone else.

This thesis provides the first account of complaint in Older Scots literature. It argues for the coherent development of a distinctively Scottish complaining voice across the fifteenth century, characterised by an interest in the relationship between amatory and ethical concerns, between stasis and narrative movement, and between male and female voices. Chapter 1 examines the literary contexts of Older Scots complaint, and identifies three paradigmatic texts for the Scottish complaint tradition: Ovid’s Heroides; Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae; and Alan of Lille’s De Planctu Naturae. Chapter 2 concentrates on the complaints in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden. B. 24 (c. 1489-c. 1513). It considers afresh the Scottish reception of Lydgate’s Complaint of the Black Knight and Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite, and also offers original readings of three Scottish complaints preserved uniquely in this manuscript: the Lay of Sorrow, the Lufaris Complaynt, and the Quare of Jelusy. Chapter 3 focuses on the relationship between complaint and narrative, arguing that the complaints included in the Buik of Alexander (c. 1438), Lancelot of the Laik (c. 1460), Hary’s Wallace (c. 1476-8), and The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour (c. 1460-99) act as catalysts for narrative movement and subvert the complaint’s traditional identity as a static form. Chapter 4 is a study of complaint in Robert Henryson’s three major works: the Morall Fabillis (c. 1480s); the Testament of Cresseid (c. 1480-92); and Orpheus and Eurydice (c. 1490-2), and argues that Henryson consistently connects the complaint form with the concept of self-knowledge as part of wider discourses on effective governance. Chapter 5 presents the evidence that a text’s identity as a complaint influenced its presentation in both manuscript and print witnesses. The witnesses under discussion date predominantly from the sixteenth century; the chapter thus also uses them to explore the complaints’ later reception history.

My dissertation examines the presence of the “North of England” in medieval texts, a presence that complicates the recent work of critics who focus upon an emergent nationalism in the Middle Ages. Far removed from the ideological center of the realm in London and derided as a backwards frontier, the North nevertheless maintains a distinctly generative intimacy within the larger realm as the seat of English history—the home of the monk Bede, the “Father of English History”—and as a frontline of defense against Scottish invasion. This often convoluted dynamic of intimacy, I assert, is played out in those literary conversations in which the South derides the North and vice versa—in, for example, the curt admonition of one shepherd that the sheep-stealer Mak in the Wakefield Master’s Second Shepherd’s Play stop speaking in a southern tongue: that he “take out his southern tooth and insert a turd.” The North functioned as a contested geography, a literary character, and a spectral presence in the negotiation of a national identity in both canonical and non-canonical texts including Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, William of Malmesbury’s Latin histories, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the Robin Hood ballads of the late Middle Ages. We see this contest, further, in the medieval universities wherein students segregated by their “nacion,” northern or southern, engaged in bloody clashes that, while local, nevertheless resonated at the national level. I argue that the outlying North actually operates as a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for the processes of imagining nation; that regionalism is both contained within and constitutive of its apparent opposite, nationalism. My longue durée historicist approach to texts concerned with the North—either through narrative setting, character, author or textual provenance—ultimately uncovers the emerging dialectic of region and nation within the medieval North-South divide and reveals how England’s nationalist impulse found its greatest expression when it was threatened from within by the uncanny figure of the North. / text