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The manipulation of gender in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales is utterly opaque. While "The Knight's Tale" potentially entices readers to think that Chaucer defines a woman regarding her relationship to man, "The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale" suggests that the poet views a woman as an independent figure whose identity has nothing to do with man. This apparently controversial portrait of gender causes some critics to read Chaucer as a pro‐woman individual; simultaneously, it inspires other critics to view the poet as anti‐feminist. Such debate may cause readers to misjudge Chaucer's multifaceted approach towards gender as well as other hypersensitive topics, thus adding to the atmosphere of complexity and lack of clarity that dominates The Tales. Accordingly, this paper revisits Chaucer's gender‐oriented philosophy in The Tales sieving what is conjectured by the poem's critics from what is said by the poet himself regarding gender. The paper concludes that Chaucer has never had the choice to overtly be or not to be the friend of woman but has always adopted a fence‐sitting strategy concerning the question of gender due to his sociopolitical status. The paper confirms that Chaucer's viewpoint of women is neither feminist nor anti‐feminist but a realistic amalgamation that mirrors the opaque gender culture of England in the fourteenth century. [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]

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The use of Norse loanwords in Old English poetry seems to be restricted to historical poems in praise of prominent contemporaries. It is demonstrated that the few Norse loans in these poems neither contribute to the laudatory character of such texts nor serve as new, additional means of stylistic enrichment. Instead, the Norse loans in these late Old English historical poems can be shown to have been used to add factual plausibility to such poems as historical texts. This contrasts with the use of Norse loanwords in Middle English poems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]