Search

A literary criticism of the fantasy novel "The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkien is presented. Topics discussed include the possible influence of the Middle English poem "Sir Orfeo" on "The Hobbit," a comparison of the Faerie hunting party in "Sir Orfeo" and the hunting elves in Mirkwood in "The Hobbit," and the portrayal of abduction and the otherworld in both the novel and poem.

Showcasing some examples of Gower's artistic use of form to serve content, this article argues that the formalistic structure of 'The Tale of Jason and Medea' is a rhetorical means deployed by the poet to manage his narrative content and highlight its center. The article introduces Medea as the center of the tale under discussion providing a textual reading of the formalistic structure of the lines that are said by or about Medea. Acknowledging the tale's iambic tetrameter structure and its role in orchestrating the narrative, the article explains how Medea's narrative centrality gets defined syllabically and accentually. The article concludes that the formalistic structure of 'The Tale of Jason and Medea' is not a poetic decoration or part of traditional poetic templates used by Gower unconsciously, but a rhetorical device deployed by the poet to manage the focus of the narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The episode of Chauntecleer's dream found in Chaucer's "The Nun's Priest's Tale" is a controversial topic for Chaucer critics. Some critics argue that the downfall‐escape experience of Chauntecleer is worthy of investigation because animal figures in fables symbolize people (Finlayson, 2005, 495) and thus their rise and downfall sometimes allude to certain theological or philosophical issues such as the original Fall of Adam and Eve (Payne, 1976, 211–112). Other critics propose, on the contrary, that the episode of Chauntecleer is a "joke" and therefore should not be overestimated (Eliason, 1972, 172). These two opposing perspectives have their own rationale; nevertheless, the centrality of Chauntecleer's dream to the narrative of "The Nun's Priest's Tale" is hard to ignore. Considering the philosophical reverberations of the tale concerning the medieval concepts of destiny and free will, this paper argues that the Chauntecleer episode is not a "joke" but a philosophical exemplar that proposes the absence of any demarcating lines between destiny and free will, bearing in mind that destiny refers to the many options decreed by the deity to be available in every single situation for each individual, while free will refers to humans' freedom to decide what to say and do. The paper contends that Chauntecleer's dream shows how free will and destiny—though they are "inconsistent" forces (Boethius, 1785, 195)—mysteriously connive together to form what can be called conditional free will. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The higher frequency of auxiliary do in poetry than in prose in Middle English (1150-1500) is one of the puzzles of the history of this construction. Previous studies have argued that the role of auxiliary do in poems was to place the infinitive at the end of the verse to make rhyme easier. The aim of this article is to examine to what extent auxiliary do was used for rhyme purposes and, furthermore, to determine whether it had other functions. On the basis of a conditional inference tree and random forests, this paper shows that auxiliary do was indeed used as a metrical tool to place the infinitive at the end of the verse to facilitate rhyme, although the degree to which poets used auxiliary do varied from dialect to dialect. The statistical analysis reveals that the auxiliary construction served also other functions, particularly in the Eastern Midlands and Northern dialects, where do favored the integration of verbs of foreign origin and ensured the metricality of the verse by maintaining a regular distribution of the beats in the line. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notorious divergence between the three extant texts of Sir Orfeo has tripped up some past studies and seemingly makes the poem forbidding ground for literary criticism. Yet study of those texts informed by Paul Eggert's recent revitalization of the concept of the 'work' reveals that some aspects of form and versification persist surprisingly well across the three known copies. Criticism has frequently noted the two points in Sir Orfeo which use descriptive comparisons to Paradise. The standard referencing edition, however, presents the first paradisiacal comparison with deceptively little information about its textual state. Scholars, even those alert to manuscripts, have consequently erred when discussing the relevant passages. Attention to aspects of the poem's versification such as through-rhyme, rhyme-pairing, and rhyme-breaking can offer a partial solution to the problem. This insight opens up a broader approach to reading the verse-craft of Orfeo across its extant witnesses. A study of the poem's use of comparison offers a trial of that approach. Though individually formulaic, the poem's comparisons would have had a significant cumulative effect on readers. This effect has implications for scholarship's understanding of the figure of Orfeo and of the poem as a whole. Future research on this text might fruitfully attend more closely to textual problems, to verse form, and to the relationship between the two; future studies of Middle English texts in general might benefit from the concept of the work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses early Middle English complaints against simony, corruption, and monetary abuses within the church, focusing on an overlooked poem titled 'When Holy Church Is Under Foot' from Oxford, England, Jesus College MS 29. The work, dating around 1257–61, predates other known Middle English complaints and brings a historical English perspective to light.

The article examines the use of universalizing doublets by poet Geoffrey Chaucer across his Middle English poetic works. Topics discussed include the existence of universalizing doublets in other medieval European languages, a selection of universalizing doublets that are commonly used by Chaucer, and a comparison of Chaucer's verse with a body of Middle English romance works by writers.

The article focuses on importance of rhyme generalized in Middle English poetry and alliterative poetry that poses exception and mentions medieval theorizations of rhyme that occurs as poetry. Topics discussed include formalism of grammar and rhetoric, principle of inertia observed by symmetry and mathematics of symmetry, poetic form that becomes an embarrassment.

This article examines power and coercion in five Middle English and Middle Scots lyrics voiced by pregnant, abandoned singlewomen. It focuses on the language of consent and embodiment in these pregnancy laments, arguing that they both protest and normalize masculine violence in heterosexual erotic relations, highlight the various factors that undermine young singlewomen's consent, articulate acute dissatisfaction with gendered power inequalities, and demonstrate the devastating consequences of sexual ignorance. It explores the different ways that we can read these lyrics when considering issues of voice, audience, performance, and manuscript context. The essay closes by linking the popularity of medieval unplanned pregnancy narratives to modern-day reality television programming, arguing that the trans-historical popularity of these stories merits further exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1550, Robert Crowley published three editions of the late medieval poem The Vision of Piers Plowman. These editions have often been seen as violently appropriative, wrenching the poem into a role as Reformation prophecy and propaganda. However, Crowley's preface and marginalia demonstrate a persistent anxiety about the prophetic matter of Langland's work. Repeatedly, Crowley constrains the possibility of a reader's viewing parts of the text as prophecy. This nervousness is produced by the sharply contemporary connections drawn between verse prophecy and sedition following Kett's rebellion (1549), in the period in which Crowley was preparing his editions of Piers Plowman. This connection is intimated in near contemporary accounts of Kett's rebellion which were echoed and remembered throughout the sixteenth century, legislation produced by the Edwardian government in the midcentury, and finally in Crowley's own writing published in 1550, much of which was produced in direct response to Kett's rebellion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a pedagogical game-playing program called "Reacting to the Past" that was developed by Mark Carnes. The author describes the role playing involved in the games which reenact historical subject matter. She notes her introduction to the program as a defender of the historical figure Anne Hutchinson. The author also notes aspects of the teaching method including political and legal arguments, caucuses among players, proposals and petitions for and against a particular position, and a final judgment of the outcome.

The neglected thirteenth-century English poem on the subject of Jacob and Joseph is striking for the addition, within the brief (and fragmentary) but lively narrative, of material that is not found in the Vulgate, and as such forms part of the popular vernacular tradition of the Bible. The text can be related to an Anglo-Norman or French narrative pattern represented in a number of (larger) biblical poems, though it is not as close to the Bible of Herman de Valenciennes as has been suggested. The relationship with the later English Cursor Mundi is also complex. Some of the extrabiblical elements are matched in iconography. In spite of the focus upon the much-retold romance of Joseph, the central figure is Jacob, something made clear at several points. The clearly didactic work (by a clerically trained poet or minstrel) may have been intended for a baronial audience as a warning against injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When at the conclusion of theConfessio amantisof John Gower (c. 1330–1408) the protagonist Amans is revealed to be old and hoar, Gower’s representation of Amans’s impotence depends on the now little-known elegies of Maximianus (fl. c. 525). A contemporary and critic of Boethius (c. 480–524), Maximianus uses his poems for recounting his sexual activities and erectile dysfunction. Although (or possibly because) Maximianus was pornographic, his writing became a standard school-text in late medieval Western Europe, and his influence can be traced in a number of Middle English poets, including Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) and now Gower. At a crucial concluding point of theConfessio, Gower quotes Maximianus. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While recent scholarship has taken a more benign attitude toward the Middle English romances, Chaucer's Tale of Sir Thopas is still generally read as a satire or parody of the genre. Yet Chaucer's period did not have a compelling tradition of satire, nor did his contemporaries necessarily disdain romance. The claim that Thopas is parodic is stronger, but only if we recognize that the target of the poem may still not be romances but be internal to the Canterbury Tales. A new route to parsing the tale involves considering it within the larger frame of Fragment VII / Group B² as a requital to the Host's puerile literary pretensions and joking homosocial insults to Chaucer-pilgrim. Thopas's effeminate feebleness responds to the Host's emasculating jibes, and the story's failed tropes and nugatory plot humorously answer his demands for 'myrthe'. The incongruity between the story's register and content also signal the intentionality of the tale's bungling, which heightens the requital's comic effect when Harry Bailly fails to recognize it and overlooks the intricately crafted poetics of the seemingly-botched story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dame Sirith is often discussed as the earliest Middle English comic narrative. I argue that this designation is misleading: Dame Sirith is better considered as a distinct representative of a well-developed multilingual tale tradition. This tradition descends from an exemplum in Petrus Alfonsi's Disciplina clericalis. When considered in the context of its French and Latin analogues, Dame Sirith shows consistent features that recast its central tensions as an opposition between ecclesiastical and mercantile values. In the poem's use of the rich Middle English term "wis," the Dame Sirith-poet emphasizes this tension between church and market in a manner consistent with fabliau verbal play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author presents a transcription of the anonymous Middle English poem "Short Charter of Christ." He discusses the discovery of the poem in MS Rowlinson poet. 26 in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, the theme of redemption, and the textual transmission of the poem.

This article investigates one of Laȝamon’s most significant transformations of his source material, namely his greatly expanded use of dialogue. This is discussed in the context of Old English literature to examine what it might teach us about Laȝamon’s literary heritage. Many different theories have been proposed for Laȝamon’s connections to earlier English literature, but, in terms of dialogue, it is classical Old English poetry, particularly the saints’ lives and heroic verse, which most closely resembles Laȝamon’s work. The use of dialogue is one of a number of major divergences between Laȝamon and the poetry of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and, in light of this, arguments linking Laȝamon to the Chronicle poems in particular are critically reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Some sixteen so-called "fragments" of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde still survive in addition to its major (though sometimes incomplete) textual witnesses. These fragments have, not without cause, been largely ignored as valueless. Yet, actual perusal of these odd bits as physical evidence of the poem's circulation discloses a variety of interpretive protocols practiced by Chaucer's earliest readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers the first comprehensive survey of the combination of a third person singular pronoun and the demonstrative pronounthis, which is assumed to be peculiar to Middle English. Through a close analysis of the data extracted from the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, particular attention is paid to how far this usage is attributable to direct Latin influence, as has been previously suggested. A detailed study of theWycliffite Bibleexamines how often Latin demonstrative pronouns which refer to persons in the Vulgate (e.g.hic,iste) are translated ashe/she this. It will be demonstrated that, other than such translation effects, the pronominal combination is also subject to several conditioning factors such as the Northern dialect, metrical requirements and the set of contexts where a special emphasis is very likely to be intended on the person in question. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Currently, we read the late 14th-century Middle English poem Piers Plowman as a form that fails to keep the promises it makes, and its form does make promises, most overtly in its initial fantasy of perfect and lucid meaning embodied in the figure of Holy Church. This article will argue that Holy Church's propositional discourse at the beginning of the poem actually declares itself penultimate and promises with all its authority the messy and muddled epistemological adventure that follows. Holy Church makes promises she keeps by establishing the relationship between the poem's unresolved quests for truth and a hermeneutics, within and without the poem, that can salvage and sanction the partial results of those quests. Allegorically she represents the love of the incarnate Christ; for her, this 'love' means experiencing truth through an incarnate moral self, a desiring life in time. Implicit in her embodied definition of divine love is a temporal structure: a desire for how to 'do best' honed through a history of privation, whetted through cycles of partial and inadequate resolution, ever incomplete on earth but operating in hope of heavenly clarity. The love she authorises is a principle not just of moral praxis but of open narrative form, after the example of Augustine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of the words seide and quod in the poem "Piers Plowman" by poet William Langland. Topics include the uses of the words in marking direct speech, the levels of narrative used in the poem, and the use of tense in Middle English syntax such as Langland's poem. The historical present tense is addressed.

The ‘English’ have an ambiguous relationship with the language of their nearest neighbour, France. There is a history, ‘1066 and all that’. Christmas Day 2016 saw the 950th anniversary of the crowning at Westminster Abbey of the French Duke William of Normandy as King of England (not, please note, of ‘Britain’); William having defeated King Harold – and so the very last ‘English’ monarch – at the battle of Hastings. (The other ‘nations’ of these European off-shore islands have different trajectories.) Sooner or later the English at least would have to come to terms with French. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the literary value of the Middle English poem titled "Pearl." Topics discussed include the manifold singularity of the poem provided by the fact that only one copy exists, which gives rise to different forms of interpretation of the poem by readers, the ways in which the manifold singularity of the poem adds to its literary value and the reasons why the relationship between uniqueness and value is important in reading the poem.

Chaucer's Book of the Duchess explores the essential relationship between language and memory. When language appears inadequate or contrived, as it is for the Black Knight, then memory falters. However, by modeling Ovid, Chaucer uses language to transform painful memories, such as death or unrequited love, into an aesthetic experience that is emotionally and physically restorative. Emphasizing the therapeutic potential of language on memory, the Book of the Duchess foreshadows Freud's psychoanalytic method; for both the doctor and the poet, language's metaphorical capacity can productively redefine memories that are traumatic and psychically destructive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the ambiguity underlying Conscience's call for vengeance in the final lines of Piers Plowman (B.20.385-86). Thorough analysis of Langland's treatment of vengeance as a form of justice elsewhere in the poem reveals a process of redefinition that transforms vengeance from a violent act of retributive justice to a tempered act of restorative justice. By contextualizing this process within the popular literature and influential moral theology of Langland's day, one discovers a theory of justice that includes a considered awareness of human psychology, specifically the influence of negative emotions like hatred and anger. Viewed in light of these factors, Conscience's call for vengeance becomes a cry for mercy and love in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Franklin's Tale provides an answer to the ethical question par excellence: how ought one to live in order to secure happiness? It will be shown how Chaucer carefully chooses and constructs a fitting teller, for the Franklin's most distinctive characteristic, liberality or generosity, is essential to the solution of the ethical problem presented in his story. Moreover, the tale itself implicitly questions the coherence and efficacy of law-based morality, specifically that of deontological obligations. As an alternative, the Franklin recommends virtue ethics, that is, living in accordance with the value system of gentillesse in order to develop a gentil character, which secures such happiness as is possible in an imperfect world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reward for the best storyteller among the pilgrims in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is a meal: "soper at oure aller cost" (I 799). This narrative detail gives tangible form to the traditional association between literary creation and arable farming. Chaucer's diverse pilgrims and the tales they tell are woven together by the language, tropes, and contemporary concerns relating to anxieties about the production, supply, distribution, purity, and quality of food. Focusing on the figure of the Plowman, the apocryphal Plowman's Tale, and the Reeve's Tale, and reading them in the context of sociopolitical and religious dissent (the 1381 Peasants' Revolt and Lollardy respectively), this essay traces the ways in which the Canterbury Tales engages with the politics and poetics of food supply in the final decades of the fourteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ottoman Empire was a geographically, economically, religiously and politically powerful empire that lasted from the late thirteenth century to the early twentieth century, expanding its influence not only to Europe but also to the Middle East, Asia Minor and North Africa. Especially in the late fifteenth century and the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire, as the leader and spreader of Islam, began to have a profound impact on three continents and achieved several military victories, which led Western Europeans to fear that it would bring the downfall of Christianity. The conquest of Constantinople (contemporary Istanbul) by Mehmed II giving the Ottomans a foothold in Europe, and Selim I's becoming the caliphate in the Muslim world strengthened the idea that the Ottoman Empire was the leader of Islam which made the Ottomans a growing threat to Europe with its unavoidable advances. Accordingly, this article intends to discuss the representations of the Turks/Ottomans affiliated with the Muslims/Saracens in both medieval and the Elizabethan English poetry within the framework of The Turke and Gowin, Roland and Vernagu, The Romance of Otuel, Richard Coer de Lyon, Octovian, King Horn, Sir Ferumbras, The Sow done of Baby lone, The Sege off Melayne, Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella and The Defense of Poesy and their associations as the religious, cultural and ethnic 'other' in both periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on two Middle English medical charms in verse that appear in the British Library MS (manuscript) Sloane 2187. Details are presented on the metrical and rhyming patterns of the charms, referred to as Longinus and Job. The article goes on to discuss the popularity of charms in later-medieval England.

A literary criticism is offered on the Middle English poem "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and English poet Geoffrey of Vinsauf's treatise "Poetria Nova" and prose poem "Documentum de Arte Versificandi." Particular focus is given to the use of the Latin work inculcatio, including its use for praise and blame, in the aforementioned works.

This article brings together evidence from three disciplines to support a new and more detailed analysis of Chaucers pentameter line. First, it draws upon linguistics, explaining the concepts and terms introduced by American scholars working in the field of generative metrics. Second, it embraces the use of statistical techniques in the analysis of poetic meter, first pioneered by Russian metrists. Third, it examines textual evidence from European literary history of how poets before Chaucer versified in France, Italy, and England. This combination of data suggests that Chaucers pentameter owes more to the Italian endecasillabo than the French vers de dix, and confirms that Chaucer molded Middle English words and phrases to meet the iambic norm of the Modern English long-line canon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary practice may be more deeply shaped by basic literacy training than we have noticed. This is particularly true for English writers of the late fourteenth century, when the constant movement out of Latin into English in schoolrooms both ensured that translation exercises became a method for making vernacular poetry and demonstrated that English had a grammar of its own. As the most basic grammatical concepts and the simplest exercises of literacy training evolved into resources for literary technique, the style of writers such as Chaucer, Langland, and Gower became "grammaticalized." For this reason, a more detailed understanding of the forms of pedagogy employed in grammar schools can be equivalent to a genealogy of the important elements of a style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the sole Middle English language version of the prologue of "Legenda aurea," a Latin compendium of saints' lives and feasts compiled by Jacobus da Voragine. According to the author, this Middle English version exists in the anonymous 15th-century poem "The Assembly of Gods." A summary of the prologue is included.

A literary criticism is presented of the Middle English poem "Book of the Duchess" by Geoffrey Chaucer, focusing on themes such as idleness, melancholy, and gender in the poem and in medieval culture. Queer theory, writer's block, and gossip in the poem are discussed, as well as themes of the future, friendship, and grief.

A literary criticism is presented of the Middle English romance poem "Sir Isumbras," focusing on the historical context of the poem and references to the British crusades against Islam and the Turks in the Holy Lands of Jerusalem. The depiction of Saracens, Christianity, and infidels in the poem are discussed, as well as the circulation of manuscripts that feature the poem, popes such as Clement V and Boniface IX's calls for money for crusades, and the character Isumbras' pilgrimage.

The image of the Proleptic Passionmdash;the Christ Child bearing the wounds of the crucifixion—figures in Robert Southwell's representation of time and immediacy, that is, his temporal rhetoric. This image was ceasing to be conventional in his lifetime because of Reformation attitudes toward the Eucharist and toward the mimetic possibilities of poetry itself; thus, Southwell's use of it harkens back to medieval traditions. In the "Burning Babe" and "New Heaven, New Warre," the governing images collapse temporal sequences in Christ's life, merging his birth and death and making his sacrifice present to the meditating poet, imitating divine eternity, with the Child as nexus of eternity and time. Southwell's understanding of the unitive power of both the Incarnation and sacrifice informs the first poem more than does the emblem tradition. Medieval lyrics, patristic writings on the Incarnation that link the Eucharist and the Nativity and depict the newborn Christ as a warrior, and Flemish depictions of the Nativity no doubt familiar to Southwell lie behind both poems. In the multivalent image of the mighty Babe, Southwell is able to portray the Christ Child as both suffering redeemer and powerful judge at the end of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first half of the medieval English Auchinleck romance Amis and Amiloun, Amis faces hardship and is rescued by Amiloun, and these roles are reversed in the second half. At the centre point lies the combat between Amis–Amiloun and the steward, forming the narrative and moral nexus of the story, as it sets in motion the successive action of the second portion of the poem. Yet the narrative gives a secure and happy ending to Amis and Amiloun while condemning the steward, whom even the narrator concedes ‘hadde the right’. However, upon finer inspection, a consistent morality does function in the poem justifying its categorisation as homiletic: duty given freely and humbly in Christian love is preferable to the self-righteous legalism of private vows. Whereas much recent criticism identifies the protagonists' blood-brotherhood rites and friendship as a central theme, Amis and Amiloun actually reveals treuþe itself to be the problem. The two finally learn to transcend the human-centred limitations of such oaths by undergoing heavenly correction towards a more Christ-like caritas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A literary criticism is presented of the Middle English poem "Confessio Amantis" by John Gower, focusing on the depiction of pagan gods, especially the Roman goddess Venus, in a poem intended for a Christian audience. Ethics, erotic love, and Christian conversion in the poem are discussed, as well as Medieval authors' knowledge of classical philosophy, Gower's depiction of appropriate behavior for a given age, and Venus' rejection of the poet-lover character.

An essay is presented about a hypothetical argument in favor of attributing the poem "Piers Plowman" to Medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer instead of poet William Langland, based on 16th century literary critic John Leland's book "De uiris illustribus." The apocryphal Chaucer story "The Plowman's Tale" is mentioned, as well as 18th century critic Humfrey Wanley, Medieval English manuscripts, and 18th century atheist Joseph Ritson.

The Middle English poem Cleanness is regularly marked off into four-line units in its sole surviving manuscript, British Library Cotton Nero A.x, and I argue that reading Cleanness with attention to these divisions helps the poem emerge as a more complex piece of verbal and homiletic art. By suggesting reading strategies for the lines that they mark off, the stanza marks evoke the interpenetration of the visual and the verbal that the poem proposes more broadly. The author's words and the scribe's activity thus combine to shape the poem's interpretive potential. The crucial issue is therefore not whether Cleanness was intended by its author to be written or read in stanzas, but rather the fact that the poem's uniquely surviving physical form encourages us to consider whether it is so, and what that might mean for our engagement with its content--how we should go about finding, in short, the literary, codicological, and homiletic forms of Cleanness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a literary criticism of "Prik of Conscience," an anonymous Middle English poem that depicts salvation, damnation and the Last Judgment, in order to assess issues surrounding 21st-century reading practices. The poem is considered an ideal text for engaging students in productive dialogue about changing definitions of literature and of reading itself. The poem is centered on mortality and judgment, making it applicable to all people regardless of social status.

An essay is presented which focuses on the absence of rubrication in reproductions of manuscripts and how the lack of visual clues can affect the reader's interpretation of a text. The essay discusses manuscripts of the medieval poem "Piers Plowman" by William Langland, the role of the scribe in providing emphasis in a text and the influence scribes can have when copying a text. The essay goes on to discuss the significance of capitalization and alliteration in manuscripts.

An essay is presented on the rhyming pattern of "Sir Thopas," a chapter of the medieval poem "The Canterbury Tales" by the 14th century poet Geoffrey Chaucer. The essay discusses the rhyming pattern, called a tail rhyme, the rhyme's similarity to a liturgical song and the way in which the layout of the poem suggests that it is a parody. The essay goes on to discuss the significance of the poem's form and the different ways in which it could be recieved.

The article examines dramatist William Shakespeare's portrayal of the unvirtuous Trojan War character Cressida in his play "Troilus and Cressida" in comparison with her portrayal in the poem "Troilus and Criseyde," by English author Geoffrey Chaucer. It is argued that Shakespeare's work relates to a medieval poetic tradition in which feminine virtue is problematized.

The author discusses the concept of alliterative rank in Old and Middle English poetry, and cited literary critiques such as the books "Stab und Wort im Gawain" by August Brink and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Stylistic and Metrical Study" by Marie Borroff. The use of nouns and adjectives in alliteration are discussed, as well as poems such as "Sir Gawain & the Green Knight" and "Beowulf." Semantic fields, synonyms, and phonemic diversity are discussed, as well as scholars such as Dennis Cronan.