1. All Chaucer citations follow The Riverside Chaucer. On the Book of the Duchess, see Minnis, Oxford Guides, 73–160; Hanning, “Chaucer's First Ovid.”
2. The best recent biography (necessarily in part hypothetical, given gaps in records) is Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography. See Crow and Olson, eds., Chaucer Life Records, for the extant documents that refer to Chaucer's various appointments. On Chaucer's circle see Strohm, Hochon's Arrow, chapter 2, “‘A Revelle!': Chronicle Evidence and the Rebel Voice,” and chapter 5, “Queens as Intercessors”; Kerby-Fulton and Justice, “Langlandian Reading Circles.”
3. See Dane, Who Is Buried in Chaucer's Tomb?; Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers; and Fisher, The Importance of Chaucer, on the evolution of Chaucer's reputation and stature in the decades after his death.
4. “The term auctor denoted someone who was at once a writer and an authority, someone not merely to be read but also to be respected and believed” (Minnis, Medieval Theory, 10).
5. Cooper, “Chaucer and Ovid,” 72.
6. See Donaldson, “Chaucer the Pilgrim.”
7. See Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Windeatt, 3–24.
8. “Facesti come quei che va di notte, / che porta il lume dietro e se non giova, / ma dopo se fa le persone dotte” (Purgatorio 22.67–69). “You were like the one who goes by night and carries the light behind him and profits not himself, but makes those wise who follow him.” Immediately after these lines, Dante translates the key lines from Vergil's fourth Eclogue. See Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, chapter 6.
9. See Miller, Poetic License, 3–4, on the complicated attitudes toward authority implicit in the works of a poet such as Chaucer: “The poet's relation to authority usually seems complicated by a pull in two directions: does he rest upon his status as a reflector of an already authorized truth, a spokesman for something other than himself, or do his status and function reside in the exercise of his own creative power?”
10. See Hanning, “Chaucer's First Ovid,” 141–58; Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid, chapter 2, “Chaucer's Faulty Vision: The House of Fame.”
11. Whereas many dreams in French dream-vision poems take place in the springtime, the season appropriate to newly awakened desire, this dream is set on of December 10 (HF 111–12), suggesting an altogether less cheerful theme; it's also, according to the Julian calendar in use in Chaucer's day, almost the longest night of the year, allowing plenty of time for dreaming
12. See Simpson, “Ethics and Interpretation,” 82–83, 82–83nn. 23–26; also Scanlon, “The King's Two Voices,” 218–26.
13. Hanning, “Chaucer's First Ovid,” 146–47.
14. Cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses 12.53–55: “Atria turba tenet: veniunt, leve vulgus, euntque/mixtaque cum veris passim commenta vagantur/milia rumorum con-fusaque verba volutant.” “The halls/Are filled with presences that shift and wander, / Rumors in thousands, lies and truth together/Confused, confusing” (Humphries trans., 287).
15. The saying is Alan of Lille's (see this chapter, pages 120–21); cited in Minnis, Medieval Theory, 265n. 100.
16. For interpretation of The Plaint of Nature, see Economou, The Goddess Natura; Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry, chapter 5.
17. On Chaucer's possible role in establishing St. Valentine's Day as a day for professing one's love or choosing a mate, see Oruch, “St. Valentine, Chaucer, and Spring.”
18. See Ganim, Chaucerian Theatricality, chapter 7, “The Noise of the People”; Strohm, Hochons Arrow, chapter 2; Crane, “The Writing Lesson”; Justice, Writing and Rebellion, chapter 5, “Insurgency Remembered.” Cf. the use of animals, making animal noises, to stand for the rebels of 1381 in the harshly judgmental first book of the Latin poem Vox clamantis (The voice of one crying [in the desert]”), by Chaucer's contemporary, John Gower. esp. chaps. 1–11; Justice thinks that the noisy barnyard chase in Chaucer's animal fable “The Nun's Priest's Tale” of The Canterbury Tales (see this chapter, pages 166–67) is a parody of Gower. It does in any case mention Jack Straw, one of the leaders of the rebellion.
19. There's near unanimity that the sequence of versions of the Prologue is F before G; for a defense of the opposite sequence, see Delany, The Naked Text, chapter 1. Cowen and Kane defend the authenticity of the G text in their edition of LGW (124–39). After a long period of neglect, LGW has been much studied in recent years; for a review of scholarship and a general interpretation, see Minnis, Oxford Guides, 322–454. My reading of the tales constituting the body of LGW is close to Fyler's (Chaucer and Ovid, chapter 4, “The Legend of Good Women: Palinode and Procrustean Bed”), while my reading of the G prologue focuses on its depiction of the trajectory of a poetic career during which the poet must confront, and negotiate, challenges posed by political authority, translation, and “courtly” composition in the English vernacular. By contrast, Wallace sees “the ultimate effect of the G revision” as “an attempt to save or withhold the text from history by denying it the force of occasion” (Chaucerian Polity, 370).
20. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 354: “Once the deity's gaze falls upon him, the deamer is subjected to intensive scrutiny as the court shifts from Hof to Gericht, from court of love to court of law.”
21. “Legende” (from Latin legenda, that which should be read) has a somewhat different meaning from today's “legend”; it implies a narrative of moral or religious edification, such as the lives of saints read aloud in medieval monasteries while the monks or nuns ate their main meal of the day.
22. The most thorough-going, political reading of the F Prologue is in Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 357–70, who offers a learned and provocative, though speculative, interpretation of the Dreamer's relationship to Alceste in that version as a fictional inflection (and deflection) of the coincidence of interests between Chaucer and Richard's queen, Anne of Bohemia (whom Richard married in 1382), in seeking to restrain the monarch's tendencies toward an Italian-style absolutism that Alceste identifies with “tyrants of Lombardy” (see this chapter, page 148). But cf. Staley's convincing argument (“Gower,” 70–77) that LGW, like contemporaneous works by Gower and Clanvowe, “need[s] to be seen as emerging from a more congenial courtly environment and as directed toward a king who was receptive to and conversant in the festively serious modes of princely advice” (70); in this account, the later recomposition of the G Prologue has less to do with Queen Anne's death in 1394 than with the poet's retreat from direct, courtly engagement with a monarch grown more tyrannical. For recent considerations of the nature, evolution, and policies of Richard II's monarchy, and its violent end in his removal and murder by Henry of Lancaster, crowned as Henry IV in 1400, see Saul, Richard II, and the essays in Goodman and Gillespie, Richard II: The Art of Kingship.
23. To quote Palmer, in his note to this passage, “Rabbit-hunting in the courtly texts of the period is often a slyly oblique way of referring to the pursuit of women (based on an obscene double entendre [con/conil]). Machaut does not reproduce the double entendre here, so it is not certain whether he meant the passage to be read in other than a literal sense” (JKN 215). The poet's extended and rather coy description of his hunt for “lievres [hares]” (505) does suggest an invitation to be read metaphor ical ly (and erotically).
24. Cannon, “The Lives of Geoffrey Chaucer,” 46, defines the list of Chaucer's works as “a surprisingly assertive self-defense.”
25. Wallace, noting that “Chaucer, in representing his relationship with a figure of… authority, chooses to position an eloquent wife between himself and his lord” (Chaucerian Polity, 364), proposes that “Chaucer's dedication to exploring the domestic dynamics and political efficacy of female eloquence [in LGW and various Canterbury Tales]… seems peculiarly a phenomenon the years of Richard [II]'s first marriage, 1381–94” (376).
26. Chaucer has transferred to the God of Love the anger expressed in Machaut's poem by the lady Bonneurte, in effect politicizing the poet's transgression.
27. Cf. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 354: “The God of Love clearly arrogates both religious and secular authority to his own person.”
28. Simpson, “Ethics and Interpretation,” 81n. 22, suggests that by the time Chaucer wrote the G version of the Prologue (after 1394?), “its references to heretical textual practices, and their punishment, must have been more pressing in the context of Lollard activity.” (He mentions unpublished papers by Wendy Scase and Helen Phillips supporting such a view.) Cf. Treatise of the Astrolabe, Prologue (Riverside, 662); interestingly, Chaucer refers in the Prologue to King Richard as “lord of this langage,” i.e., English. On Lollardy, see Hudson, The Premature Reformation; on Lollards and English translation, see Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change”; on Trevisa—his service as vicar of Berkeley and relationship with Thomas IV, Lord Berkeley; his translations; and his possible role in the English translation of the Bible under Wyclif's direction—see Fowler, The Life and Times. Trevisa's two dialogues on translation have been edited by Waldron. See further Delany, The Naked Text, 83–85, 120–21, on echoes of Wycliffite Bible translation issues in LGW.
29. Kiser, Telling Classical Tales, 71, 94.
30. The Wife of Bath, in The Canterbury Tales, accuses clerics who hate women and marriage of the same senility-induced antagonism; see her Prologue, CT 3.707–10.
31. Cf. Wallace, 356: “It is certain that Chaucer was learning a great deal about the art of calumny and betrayal at court in this desperate period” (i.e., 1386–88).
32. See Simpson, “Ethics and Interpretation,” 81.
33. Note the continuity between the Proem to Book 2 of TC, discussed earlier in this chapter, and the present passage, with respect to the poet's worry that his audience will misjudge, or judge harshly, his good faith efforts.
34. If LGW was really, commissioned or not, destined for Queen Anne, the poet must either have had a high estimate of her sense of humor or a very low estimate of her ability to comprehend English; she was Bohemian. But cf. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 355–70.
35. For example, Franchise, as part of her attack on Guillaume's hierarchy of griefs in JKB, extrapolates from the classical stories of Jason's betrayal of Medea and Theseus's of Ariadne this hyperbolical conclusion: “So Guillaume, that's the most important point: / No man ever is as loyal/As women are” (2809–11). To which Guillaume fairly snorts this deconstructive reply: “Damsel, the treason/Of either Theseus or Jason/Has nothing to do with the issue we're arguing, / And this is hardly the first, / Nor will it be the last betrayal/To be discovered among lovers, / Both women and men. / I wouldn't give two apples/For proving your point/By the introduction of examples such as these [“par si fais exemples trouver”]. / For if I intended to argue my case/With examples, I could find more than/Ten, truly more than twenty of them” (2823–36). Having thus dismissed the worth of “historical” examples, he proceeds to introduce several of his own—the lover of the Chatelaine de Vergy, Lancelot, Tristan—from more recent literature in support of a conclusion contrary to Franchise's.
36. See Riverside, 1178, for a list of MSS containing LGW (none is complete) and 1179 for those containing locutions such as, “Explicit Legenda Didonis martyris” (“Here ends the legend of Dido the martyr”).
37. Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid, 97, suggests that Chaucer was inspired in part by the relationship between book 3 of Ovid's Ars amatoria—a supposed “arming” of women against men's erotic strategies—and the two preceding books.
38. These lines conclude the legend of Dido, which Chaucer adapted from both Vergil's Aeneid, book 4, and Dido's supposed letter to the fleeing Aeneas in Ovid's Heroides. That Chaucer's version follows the orders given the Dreamer by Alceste and the God of Love is clear from interventions such as this one: “O sely wemen, ful of innocence [foolish], / Ful of pite, of trouthe [fidelity] and conscience [tender feelings], / What maketh yow to men to truste so?/Have ye swych routhe [such pity] upon hyre [their] feyned wo, / And han swich olde ensaumples yow beforn [have before you]?/Se ye nat alle how they ben forsworn [traitors]?” (LGW 1254–59).
39. Some of Chaucer's earlier poems deploy admonitions against male reprobacy proleptic of LGW's narratorial rants. I've already mentioned the HF narrator's cautionary comment on Aeneas's abandonment of Dido (see page 114), a passage that begins, “Loo, how a woman doth amys/To love hym that unknowen ys!/For, be Cryste, lo, thus yt fareth [turns out]/‘Hyt is not al gold that glareth.’ / For also browke I wel [as I hope to keep] myn hed, / Ther may be under godlyhed [(apparent) goodness]/Kevered many a shrewed [cursed] vice” (HF 269–75).
Even more apposite to LGW is the dry run for it at the end of TC. With a nervousness that betrays his fear of adverse reaction, and possibly his bad conscience, the narrator stumbles awkwardly from an apology for having retold a famous story of female betrayal to an overly emphatic, and irrelevant, warning against male betrayal: “But for that I to writen first bigan/Of [Troilus's] love, I have seyd as I kan/… Bysechyng every lady bright of hewe, / And every gentil womman, what she be [of whatever station], / That al be that Criseyde was un-trewe, / That for that gilt she be nat wroth with me. / Ye may hire gilt in other bokes se; / And gladlier I wol write, yif yow leste, / Penelopees trouthe [loyalty] and good Alceste.” (Is the God of Love, mutatis mutandis, already waiting in the wings? Or will be he subsequently created in the alchemy of Chaucer's imagination from a synthesis of the skeptical, putatively male audience defensively evoked in the “Proem” to TC's book 2 and the equally hypothetical (and analogously threatening) “lad[ies] bright of hewe” here propitiated?) “N'y sey nat this al oonly for thise men, / But moost for wommen that bitraised [betrayed] be/Thorugh [by] false folk—God yeve hem sorwe, amen!— / That with hire grete wit and subtilte/Bytraise yow. And this commeveth [compels] me/To speke, and in effect yow alle I preye, / Beth war of men, and herkneth what I seye!” (TC 5.1768–69, 1772–85).
The oracular, universal (and bathetic) condemnation-cum-self-puffery that concludes this passage is particularly proleptic of the LGW narrator's bombast at the end of the legend of Phyllis.
40. Cf. Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid, 98–115.
41. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 364, speaks of LGW's “intimate imagining of a relationship between an eloquent queen and a productive poet.”
42. Travis, “Chaucer's Heliotropes,” 411–16, sees the heliotropic daisy as an entry point for a consideration of the notion of metaphor as explored in the French daisy poems and in Chaucer's poetry.
43. Among recent critics of LGW known to me, Williams comes closest to my emphasis on Alceste's multiple significances, albeit pointing toward a different explanation: “A faithful wife, a daisy, a literary character, a queen, and an object of desire…, Alceste's many hats gesture towards the multivalent acts of interpretation required of readers of the dream vision” (“The Dream Visions,” 175). An earlier essay, Carlson, “Alceste and Chaucer's View of Poetry,” which came to my attention after I completed this discussion of LGW, also anticipates some aspects of my argument, noting that “as the poet's inspiration, his subject, his patron, and his audience, Alceste becomes a model of the poet's dynamic and unpredictable relationships to both his art and his audience…. [I]n her, Chaucer explores the sometimes confusing, often confounding realities of the sources and powers of poetry” (185). Carlson's analysis of the LGW Prologue deals primarily with the so-called F Prologue.
44. On daisy poetry see Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid, 116–18; Lowes, “The Prologue”; Wimsatt, The Marguerite Poetry; Travis, “Chaucer's Heliotropes,” 403–5. For part of Machaut's daisy poem, see Travis, “Chaucer's Heliotropes,” 404. For the courtly conventions of flower and leaf rivalries, see Minnis, Oxford Guides, 296–98, 327–29; Pearsall, The Floure and the Leafe, 20–29.
45. I owe this observation to Karen Bezella-Bond's Columbia University Ph.D. dissertation, “Florescence and Defloration: Maytime in Chaucer and Malory.” For the quibble on flowers, see further Travis, “Chaucer's Heliotropes,” 399–401.
46. See Strohm, Hochons Arrow, chapter 5, “Queens as Intercessors.”
47. See Strohm, Hochons Arrow, 99–102, on this episode, including excerpts from Froissart's text, and for the context, his chapter 5, 95–119.
48. See Kiser, Telling Classical Tales, 28–49, on Alceste as an emblem of poetry's mediating role as “an earthly version… of some heavenly truth” (50).
49. Burnley, Chaucer's Language, chapters 1–3; Ferster, Fictions of Advice, chapters 1–3.
50. On Richard's relations with his barons, cf. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 367. Chaucer's balade, editorially entitled, “Lak of Stedfastnesse,” is said in some manuscripts to have been addressed to Richard II, in accord with its concluding envoy, or message to the recipient; its admonitions to the “prince” (22–28) are extremely general, in the tradition of advice to rulers mentioned in this paragraph. Wallace, noting that in 1388 Simon Burley, Richard's tutor and Anne's ally at court, was executed by the Appellants despite Anne's attempted intercession for him, opines that “the helplessness of king and queen before the events of 1388 makes the delicate politics and rhetoric of the F Prologue seem anachronistic… almost as soon as they were written” (371), thus preparing the way for Chaucer's depoliticized G version, which, Wallace suggests, at a certain point “loses contact with (or washes its hands of) contemporary history” (374); in his reading, Anne's death “sapped the text of its political vitality and its occasional (that is, historical) force” (375).
51. Cf. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 369; Simpson, “Ethics and Interpretation,” 80: “however much Chaucer is ‘excused,’ the real ‘trial’ is conducted wholly within the dynamics of Cupid's relationship with Alceste, the narrator's own defense being wholly irrelevant.”
52. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 369: “Chaucer must accept the social and judicial reality of his ‘trespas’ and serve the life sentence of supervised ‘makyng’ that is handed down to him.”
53. Simpson, “Ethics and Interpretation,” 92, puts it elegantly: the narrator, in effect, “asks us to read… with an eye to authorial intention, an intention that is visible precisely in the traces of its effacement.”
54. Cf. Staley, “Gower,” who appears to believe that Richard and his queen would have known LGW with the F Prologue.
55. Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury and formerly close associate of King Henry II, was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral in December 1170, by four knights possibly acting at Henry's behest. A shrine erected on the site of his martyrdom quickly became a major goal of Christian pilgrims from all over Europe, but by Chaucer's day it had long since been exceeded in popularity by other European sites and, in England, by the shrine to the Virgin Mary at Walsingham. See Kendall, Medieval Pilgrims, 109–117 (with medieval illustrations); Sumption, Pilgrimage; and Dyas, Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature, part 3.
56. On the standard ordering of the sections, or fragments, that make up CT in all its manuscripts but vary widely in their ordering from manuscript to manuscript, see Cooper, Oxford Guides, 6–8. The order usually followed is that of the so-called Ellesmere MS of CT, a deluxe copy made within a few years of Chaucer's death, perhaps commissioned by his son, Thomas.
57. The commercial motive behind the Host's proposal is hinted at in line 719 of the “General Prologue,” which tells that Harry Bailly's “gentil hostelrye” (718) is called “the Tabard, faste by the Belle”; that is, it is in close proximity to, and constant competition for pilgrim custom with, its neighboring taverns and (as we would say) B&Bs.
58. On the legal language and underlying legal concepts evoked in Harry's request and the Lawyer's reply, see, e.g., Hornsby, Chaucer and the Law, 33–35; also Bras-well, “Chaucer's Court Baron.”
59. On the argument that follows concerning the Man of Law's excursus, cf. Hanning, “‘And countrefete the speche,’” 33–36.
60. See Shoaf, “‘Unwemmed Custance,’” 298, on “the inexorable fact of belatedness.” Cf. Miller, Poetic License, 20: “The relation between predecessors and successors is but one manifestation of the general tension between the assertion and denial of authorship, between the attribution of authority to self and to other sources.”
61. John Gower's Confessio amantis (The lover's confession), a framed collection of tales broadly contemporaneous with Chaucer's work on LGW and CT— all dating is hypothetical—contains stories of Apollonius of Tyre and Canacee that include incest. But many versions of the story that Chaucer adapts as “The Man of Law's Tale” also depict, or hint at, incest. See Shoaf, “‘Unwemmed Custance’”; Archibald, “The Flight from Incest.” Canacee is a character in the tale told by the Squire in CT, though the tale breaks off before indicating whether or not incest will figure in it.
62. Cooper, “Chaucer and Ovid,” 81: “Chaucer is the ventriloquist behind the Man of Law: the poet can function as both Muse and magpie.”
63. On Pilate's voice and all the references to medieval mystery plays in the Miller's Tale, see Prior, “Parodying Typology.”
64. See Askins, “All That Glitters.”
65. For other versions of the story, beginning with the one in Ovid's Metamorphoses, book 2, see Wheatley, “The Manciple's Tale.” With respect to the last of these potential morals, the situation is a perfect illustration of the “cognitive dissonance” described by Tavris and Aronson, Mistakes Were Made. Cf. Hazleton (“The Manciple's Tale,” 4): “Chaucer seems to have noted what escaped all the moralizers: namely, that this ‘moral’ fable creates more moral problems than it solves. Indeed, the ‘moral’ traditionally imposed on the fable is all wrong. The fact that the well-meaning truth-teller is often rewarded with punishment rather than praise lends itself to paradoxical or ironic statement, but it is not a secure ground on which to build a serious moral argument for the wisdom of holding one's tongue.” I would only demur from Hazleton's description of Phoebus's crow as “well-meaning”; in my argument, “self-serving” seems a more accurate characterization (see page 165). On the perils of bringing bad news, see the comic treatment of the theme in Ovid, Amores ii.2, 47–54, 59–62; the poet is pleading with his puellas eunuch/guardian to let him spend time with his beloved and to say nothing to the husband. Don't forget the trouble people get into by telling husbands they've been cuckolded, he counsels. The New York Times for January 18, 2006, reports a contemporary “version” of this oft-told tale—Sarah Lyall, “Kiss and Tell: She Kisses and the Parrot Tells”—in which a London woman's secret lover is revealed to her “official” boyfriend by the latter's parrot, who has observed (and perfectly imitates) the live-in girlfriend's amorous encounters while the boyfriend is not at home. The outraged “cuckold” divests himself of both woman and parrot, leading the offending ex-girlfriend to say (as quoted in a London newspaper), “I'm surprised to hear he's got rid of that bloody bird. He spent more time talking to it than he did to me.” No comment from the parrot.
66. Cf. Raybin, “The Death of a Silent Woman,” 21.
67. Economou, “Chaucer's Use of the Bird”; Raybin, “The Death of a Silent Woman,” 23–25.
68. Of the crow, we're told, “And countrefete the speche of every man/He koude, whan he sholde tell a tale” (CT 9.134–35). As Axton notes (“Gower,” 34), “The syntax is ambiguous here. Who originates tales, a man or the crow? The crow is a mimic, but does he counterfeit the speech of a man-telling-a-tale or does he counterfeit the speech of the right sort of man when he (the crow) wants to tell a tale?” This insight is especially relevant to the climax of the tale, when the crow, apprising Phoebus of his cuckoldom, not only does so by imitating the voice of another bird, the cuckoo—famous in European folklore as an announcer to husbands of the bad news of their wives’ adultery—or perhaps the voice of a man singing a song with a “cuckoo, cuckoo” refrain (cf. Askins, “The Historical Setting,” 93–94), but also by lapsing into the Manciple's own nasty and cynical “tale-telling voice.” (In none of the many versions of the story Chaucer could have known does the crow speak so harshly to his master.) Cf. Hazleton, “The Manciple's Tale,” 27: the Manciple's “curious projection of himself into the role of the crow, to the point of identification, is worth noticing…. [T]here is more here than a vague resemblance between a plain-speaking narrator and a plain-speaking bird. The two use the same language.”
69. Cf. Raybin, “The Death of a Silent Woman,” 24–25: “Throughout his career, Chaucer uses women (and, curiously, birds too) as a principal vehicle for talking about such issues as free will, sinfulness, and determinism, often bringing patriarchal structures into question…. Phebus's wife… rebels against her jealous spouse, taking a lover apparently not for his superiority, for he has none…, but, as far as one can tell, for the sake of taking a lover—that is, for the freedom from enforced restraint obtainable only by this independent action.”
70. Raybin, “The Death of a Silent Woman,” 26–31.
Legend of Good Women. Ed. Janet Cowen and George Kane. East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Press, 1995.
The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. Gen. ed. Larry D. Benson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
Troilus and Criseyde. Ed. B. A. Windeatt. London: Longman's, 1984.
Alan of Lille. The Plaint of Nature. Trans. James J. Sheridan. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980.
Crow, Martin M., and Clair C. Olson, eds. Chaucer Life Records. Oxford: Clarendon, 1966.
Dante. Purgatorio. Trans. Charles Singleton. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Gower, John. The Voice of One Crying [Vox clamantis]. In The Major Latin Works of John Gower. Trans. Eric W. Stockton. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962.
Guillaume de Machaut. The Judgment of the King of Bohemia. Ed. and trans. R Barton Palmer. New York: Garland, 1984.
——. The Judgment of the King of Navarre. Ed. and trans. R. Barton Palmer. New York: Garland, 1988.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. 2 Vols. With a translation by Frank Justus Miller. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971; London: William Heinemann, 1971.
——. Metamorphoses. Trans. Rolfe Humphries. 1955. Repr., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974.
Pearsall, Derek, ed. The Floure and the Leafe and The Assembly of Ladies. London: Thomas Nelson, 1962.
Vergil. Aeneid. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Bantam, 1972.
——. Works. Rev. ed. 2 Vols. With a translation by H. Rushton Fairclough. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934; London: William Heinemann, 1934.
Archibald, Elizabeth. “The Flight from Incest: Two Classical Precursors of the Constance Theme.” Chaucer Review 20, no. 4 (1986): 259–72.
Askins, William. “All That Glitters: The Historical Context of The Tale of Sir Thopas.” In Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning, ed. Robert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior, 271–89. Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 2005.
——.“The Historical Setting of The Manciple's Tale.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 7 (1985): 87–105.
Axton, Richard. “Gower—Chaucer's Heir?” In Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, ed. Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt, 21–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Bezella-Bond, Karen. “Florescence and Defloration: Maytime in Chaucer and Malory.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 2003.
Braswell, Mary Flowers. “Chaucer's Court Baron: Law and The Canterbury Tales.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 16 (1994): 29–44.
Burnley, J. D. Chaucer's Language and the Philosophers’ Tradition. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1979.
Cannon, Christopher. “The Lives of Geoffrey Chaucer.” In The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Seth Lerer, 31–54. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006.
Carlson, Paula. “Alceste and Chaucer's View of Poetry in the Legend of Good Women.” Mediaevalia II (1985): 139–50.
Comparetti, Domenico. Vergil in the Middle Ages. 1885. Trans. E. F. M. Benecke, intro. Jan M. Ziolkowski. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Cooper, Helen. “Chaucer and Ovid: A Question of Authority.” In Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literaturefrom the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. Charles Martindale, 71–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
——. Oxford Guides to Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Crane, Susan. “The Writing Lesson of 1381.” In Chaucer's England, ed. Barbara Hanawalt, ed., 201–21. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
Dane, Joseph. Who Is Buried in Chaucer's Tomb? Studies in the Reception of Chaucer's Book. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998.
Delany, Sheila. The Naked Text: Chaucer's ‘Legend of Good Women.' Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Donaldson, E. Talbot. “Chaucer the Pilgrim.” PMLA 69 (1954): 928–36.
Dyas, Dee. Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature, 700–1500. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001.
Economou, George D. “Chaucer's Use of the Bird in the Cage Image in the Canterbury Tales!” Philological Quarterly 54 (1975): 679–84.
——. The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1972. Repr., Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 2002.
Ferster, Judith. Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.
Fisher, John Hurt. The Importance of Chaucer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992.
Fowler, David C. The Life and Times of John Trevisa, Medieval Scholar. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995.
Fyler, John. Chaucer and Ovid. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979.
Ganim, John. Chaucerian Theatricality. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Goodman, Anthony, and James L. Gillespie. Richard II: The Art of Kingship. Oxford: Clarendon, 1999.
Hanning, Robert W. “‘And countrefete the speche of every man/He koude, when he sholde telle a tale': Toward a Lapsarian Poetics for CT.” Biennial Chaucer Lecture, presented at the New Chaucer Society Congress, Paris, 1998. Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 27–58.
——. “Chaucer's First Ovid: Metamorphosis and Poetic Tradition in The Book of the Duchess and The House of Fame” In Chaucer and the Craft of Fiction, ed. Leigh A. Arrathoon, 121–63. Rochester, Mich.: Solaris, 1986.
Hazleton, Richard. “The Manciple's Tale: Parody and Critique.” Journal of English and German Philology 62 (1963): 1–31.
Hornsby, Joseph Allen. Chaucer and the Law. Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1988.
Hudson, Anne. The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988.
Justice, Steven. Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Kendall, Alan. Medieval Pilgrims. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1978.
Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, and Steven Justice. “Langlandian Reading Circles and the Civil Service in London and Dublin, 1380–1427.” New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997): 59–84.
Kiser, Lisa. Telling Classical Tales: Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983.
Lerer, Seth. Chaucer and His Readers. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993.
——, ed. The Yale Companion to Chaucer. Hew Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006.
Lowes, John Livingstone. “The Prologue to the Legend of Good Women as Related to the French Marguerite Poems, and the Filostrato.” PMLA 19 (1904): 593–683.
Miller, Jacqueline T. Poetic License: Authority and Authorship in Medieval and Renaissance Contexts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Minnis, A. J. Medieval Theory of Authorship. London: Scolar, 1984.
——. Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995.
Oruch, Jack B. “St. Valentine, Chaucer, and Spring in February.” Speculum 56, no. 3 (1981): 534–65.
Pearsall, Derek. The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Black-well, 1992.
Prior, Sandra Pierson. “Parodying Typology and the Mystery Plays in the Miller's Tale.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 16, no. 1 (1986): 57–73.
Raybin, David. “The Death of a Silent Woman: Voice and Power in Chaucer's Manciple's Tale.” Journal of English and German Philology 95, no. 1 (1996): 19–37.
Saul, Nigel. Richard II. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997.
Scanlon, Larry. “The King's Two Voices: Narrative and Power in Hoccleve's Regement of Princes” In Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson, 216–47. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Shoaf, R. A. “‘Unwemmed Custance': Circulation, Property, and Incest in The Man of Law's Tale.” Exemplaria 2, no. 1 (1990): 287–302.
Simpson, James. “Ethics and Interpretation: Reading Wills in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998): 73–100.
Staley, Lynn. “Gower, Richard II, Henry of Derby, and the Business of Making Culture.” Speculum 75, no. 1 (2000): 68–96.
Stein, Robert M., and Sandra Pierson Prior, eds. Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning. Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 2005.
Strohm, Paul. Hochon's Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Sumption, Jonathan. Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion. London: Faber, 1975.
Tavris, Carol, and Elliot Aronson. Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me). New York: Harcourt, 2007.
Travis, Peter. “Chaucer's Heliotropes and the Poetics of Metaphor.” Speculum 72, no. 2 (1997): 399–427.
Waldron, R. A. “Trevisa's Original Prefaces on Translation: A Critical Edition.” In Medieval English Studies Presented to George Kane, by E. D. Kennedy, R. A. Waldron, and J. S. Wittig, 285–99. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 1988.
Wallace, David. Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Watson, Nicholas. “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel's Constitution of 1409.” Speculum 70, no. 4 (1995): 822–64.
Wetherbee, Winthrop. Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century: The Literary Influence of the School of Chartres. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972.
Wheatley, Edward. “The Manciple's Tale.” In Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, 2:749–73. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005.
Williams, Deanne. “The Dream Visions.” In The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Seth Lerer, 147–78. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006.
Wimsatt, James L. The Marguerite Poetry of Guillaume de Machaut. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970.