The Chaucer Review: An Indexed Bibliography (Vols. 1-30)
Return to the Subject ListCaie, Graham D. "An Iconographic Detail in the Roman de la Rose and the Middle English Romaunt." 8 (1974): 320-23.
Medieval authorities depicted those who served sinful love as wearing tight clothing and tight sleeves, so when Amant bastes his sleeves at the beginning of the Roman de la Rose, he suggests that he will seek amour that day.
Goodall, Peter. "Being Alone in Chaucer." 27 (1992): 1-15.
In medieval writing, solitude often results from a lover's desire to be alone in order to complain. Chaucer creates such situations in the Romaunt of the Rose, Troilus and Criseyde, the Knight's Tale, and the Man of Law's Tale. Those moments of aloneness that do not result from love often have melancholy overtones, perhaps because many people in the Middle Ages viewed the desire to be alone as abnormal and associated with secrecy, most likely for the purpose of doing something one should not, often sexually. Culturally, a bedroom did not belong to one person, but to an entire family. Nicholas in the Miller's Tale goes against a number of conventions related to private rooms and university life, though scholars sought private studies before private bedrooms. Nicholas's desire for privacy leads to a number of puns in the Miller's Tale. In Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer gives Criseyde private space to think and to write letters, thereby associating the solitude of the lover and the scholar in a unique way.
Smith, Merete. "Literary Loanwords from Old French in The Romaunt of the Rose." 17 (1982): 89-93.
Though readers would expect Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose to transmit a large number of Old French loanwords, a remarkably small number actually came into English as a result of the translation. Some of the words that did appear in English for the first time, like "camelyne," did not remain current in the language.