• John Lydgate's prologue to the Siege of Thebes (BL Arundel 119)
• The ploughman's tale (Christ Church Oxford MS 152)
• The cook's tale (Bodley MS 686)
• Spurious links (BL Lansdowne 851 and BL Royal 18.C.ii)
• The Canterbury interlude and Merchant's tale of Beryn (Northumberland MS 455)

• Speech and the Commonwealth
• The dream visions : discourse at play : The book of the Duchess, The house of fame, The Parliament of fowls
• Speche in Troilus and Criseyde
• The Knight's tale and the discourse of authority
• Discourse and freedom in The Wife of Bath's prologue
• Words and deeds in The Squire's tale and The Franklin's tale
• The Monk's tale and Chaucer's idea of the listener
• The Manciple's tale and the poetics of guile
• Discourse and closure in The Canterbury tales.

The author believes that for Chaucer speech is the heart of culture and that his major work comprises a copious and subtle analysis of the spoken word. By paying close attention to this underlying view of discourse and to Chaucer's fascination with communication as a reciprocal process between speaker and listener, Grudin provides unexpected readings of Chaucer's poetry. These diverge radically from conventional "dramatic" interpretations and from "exegetical" readings that see Chaucer in sympathy with the orthodox Christian fear of and contempt for the work of the tongue. In readings of the "Book of the Duchess", "House of Fame", "Parliament of Fowls", "Troilus and Criseyde", and many of the "Canterbury Tales", Grudin explores Chaucer's questioning of whether the social order can survive the discord of human voices. She offers insights into such topics as discursive situations and the frame narrative; misinterpretation and the role of the listener; and the poetics of guile and the place of the poet's own discourse. Grudin also locates Chaucer's view of discourse in the tradition of early humanism. She finds that, like Petrarch and Boccaccio, Chaucer considers speech of paramount importance in civic life, but that he goes far beyond them in his persistent scrutiny of the personal and political transactions in which discourse defines culture. Grudin shows that in a society where free speech was severely threatened, Chaucer found a way to sponsor it through dialogue, an instrument that is potentially subversive of all absolute authority.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

"The freshest and most challenging work on Chaucer to have appeared in many years." -Chauncey Wood, McMaster University "Saving the appearances of the Ellesmere Manuscript order by means of a bold and brilliant hypothesis about the composition of the Canterbury Tales, Dolores Frese offers Chaucerians some of the most original and persuasive readings of the poem to appear in recent memory; in particular, her demonstration of Chaucer's intertextual strategies with the Pardoner's Tale and the Roman de la Rose are most impressive and will probably inaugurate new and vigorous debate about Chaucer's reading and his allusive sophistication." -R.A. Shoaf, University of Florida in a daring, original study, Frese argues that the Ellesmere Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales represents Chaucer's own final plans for the order and number of the Tales, traditionally thought to be unfinished at the time of the poet's death. Frese contends that Chaucer devised a final plan for the order and number of the Canterbury Tales, that he inscribed this plan into the poetic text, and that this order and number are integral to the poem's meaning. The poet's final intentions can be retrieved, reconstructed, and internally verified, she claims, by an intertextual reading of the work as a whole. Frese maintains that the instructions found in the text are retrievable only through the Ellesmere Manuscript, held at the Huntington Library in California. The author discusses number itself as an important textual trope and provides an analysis of the medieval poetic practices of intnegumentum and involucrum. Finally, she postulates how and why early exemplars of Chaucer's poem became "disordered" in the arrangements represented in the early Hengwrt manuscript and suggests that Chaucer created the "Canon's Yeoman's Tale"--included in Ellesmere but not in Hengwrt--to comment on this disaster. Chaucerians, literary theorists, and scholars of medieval French and Italian literature will welcome this modern reading of the Canterbury Tales.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Brenda Deen Schildgen takes a new path in Chaucer studies by examining the "Canterbury Tales" set outside a Christian-dominated world - tales that pit Christian teleological ethics and history against the imagined beliefs and practices of Moslems, Jews, pagans, and Chaucer's contemporaries, the Tartars. Schildgen contends that these tales - for example the Knight's, Squire's and Wife of Bath's - deliberate on the grand rifts between the Christian or pagan past and Chaucer's present and between other cultural worlds and the Latin Christian world. They offer philosophical views about what constitutes "wisdom" and "lawe" while exploring alternative moral atitudes to the Christian mainstream of Chaucer's time. She argues that their presence in the "Canterbury Tales" testifies to Chaucer's literary secularism and reveals his expansive narrative interest in the intellectual and cultural worlds outside Christianity. Making impressive use of mediaeval intellectual history, Schildgen shows that Chaucer framed his tales with the diverse philosophies, religions and ethics that coexisted with Christian ideology in the late Middle Ages, a framework that emerges as political and not metaphysical, putting these beliefs deliberately in the context of literary discourse, where their validity can be accepted or dismissed and, most important, debated.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

This book explores the late medieval literary legacy of early Christianity's relationship to its Judaic origins. Catherine S. Cox demonstrates how the works of three canonical 14th-century authors - Dante, the Gawain-poet, and Chaucer - express conflicting aspects of Jewish and Christian religious identity. In their support of Christianity's view of history, she argues, their poetry replicates Christianity's inclination to appropriate and reconstruct Jewish texts. All three writers shared the challenge of reconciling their Christian agenda with their literary agenda and their desire to excel as artists while perpetuating an evangelical message. Looking at some of their major texts - in particular, the Commedia, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Canterbury Tales - she situates their work in relation to the history of supersessionism and its ideological perspectives. She demonstrates that their representations of the Judaic. "Other" and their exclusion of Hebrew scriptural tradition helped establish an instructive frame for late medieval theological, literary, and cultural debate. By engaging ancient scholarship with contemporary theory, Cox offers provocative readings of both the texts and the cultural conditions from which they emerged and in which they were received. Informed by a broad range of literary, historical and recent critical debates, her study will bring about a new understanding of numerous and sometimes perplexing aspects of work by monumental figures in literary history.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)