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Most criticism of the Tale of Beryn deals principally with the 'continuities' between the text and Chaucer's work. Contrary to this position, the present paper concentrates on the points at which Beryn departs from Chaucer, signalling how the later poet engages with and even challenges his predecessor in productive ways. In particular it focuses on the different attitudes to adolescence put forward by the two poets. It is found that the later writer exploits latent discrepancies in Chaucer's text to initiate a debate on youth, sensing a greater level of danger in adolescence than his forebear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

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]

A literary criticism is presented which discusses two cruxes in the "Clerk's Tale," a story in the "Canterbury Tales" by the medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. More specifically, the author argues that the early scribes of the "Canterbury Tales" had a better knowledge of the complexities of Middle English than any non-native speaker, and that at least one of them had enough experience to evaluate a textual puzzle better than the Chaucerian editorial tradition. The work of several Chaucer editors is discussed including Adam Pinkhurst, Simon Horobin and Linne R. Mooney.

The article presents a brief profile of English poet Joseph Beaumont starting from study with Richard Crawshaw and his ejection from University of Cambridge. It mentions his verses of his poetry in which he describes about sexual temptations of Satan and the guardian angel named Phylax. It states that his poem was divided into 20 cantos including the Temptation, the Traytor and the Banquet. It discusses the triumph of martyrs and ancient saints and examines the imaging of mediative piety.

This article discusses the theological sophistication in many Middle English religious lyric. It explores the "A Companion to the Middle English Lyric" by Thomas G. Duncan and "The Middle English Lyric and Short Poem" by Rosemary Greentree which have played a part in the cultural production in the medieval period. It also notes the use of structure for theological purposes and the chasm between amplified didactic, narrative texts and the abbreviated forms of Middle English religious lyrics.

The article discusses annotations and marginalia within 15th century English poetry manuscripts that were written by scribes. The author is broadly concerned with the history of reading and writing, and the interconnected nature of these two activities. Emphasis is given to proleptic reading instructions, the possible misreading of instructive annotations and notes, and the origin and authorship of these annotations. English poets discussed include Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and Thomas Hoccleve.

Presents literary criticism which offers an analysis of structural coherence in the "Book of the Duchess" by Geoffrey Chaucer. The author argues that the parallel between the beginning of the dream and the man in black's autobiography is the key to understanding the images in the chamber and complements critic Helen Phillips' idea of the triptych model of coherence for the book. Literary echoes of French sources within the book are also discussed.

The article presents an analysis of the English sonnet between 1560 and 1580. An in-depth exploration into the form and content of the mid-Tudor era literary form is given, highlighting structural variances from the typical styles and the prominence of love as the central theme. Further discourse analysis is given regarding the use of love to point to deeper social constructions rather than dwell on the emotion itself.

Discusses the shared engagement on the part of the English poets William Shakespeare and Geoffrey Chaucer with the status of poetry as illusion and conjuring act. Similarities between Shakespeare's play "The Tempest" and Chaucer's poem "Franklin's Tale"; Evidence that Shakespeare was influenced by Chaucer; Impression of fiction dissolving into real life and the voice of the narrator becoming the voice of the poet.

An essay is presented in which the author critiques the anachronistic literary trend of applying monolingual, New Historicist assumptions to older literature, and offers examples of 15th century poems in French, English and Latin. Poets such as Charles d'Orléans and Philippe le Bon, Duke of Burgundy are mentioned, as well as poems from personal letters and love poems.