Philological Quarterly articles from June 1994

Philological Quarterly archives from June 1994

Of graves, caves, and subterranean dwellings: 'Eoroscraef' and 'Eorosele' in the 'Wife's Lament.'
June 22, 1994... The past three decades have witnessed a bewildering variety of interpretations of the Old English Wife's Lament. We are no longer even certain that it is, in fact, the lament of a "wife"; critics have suggested that the narrator is a lordless...

The genealogy of Galahad and the new age of the world in the Old French prose 'Queste del Saint Graal.'
June 22, 1994... In the Old French prose romance La Queste del Saint Graal, much is revealed both to the protagonists and the reader in visions.(1) And while the meaning of these visions often seems relatively straightforward, it is characteristic of this...

Chaucer's poetry, versioning, and hypertext.
June 22, 1994... Thirty years ago, Chaucer's poetry, versioning, and hypertext would have been an unlikely triumvirate. Chaucer's poetry had been read and enjoyed for centuries, of course, and was by then the focus of a thriving critical and professional...

A conduct book for Richard II.(Geoffrey Chaucer's poem 'The Parliament of Fowls')
June 22, 1994... So Chaucer identifies, in one of his more explicit source references, the book which he has used for the description of Nature and her parliament of fowls.(1) Unlike the "olde bok totorn" (110), the Macrobius text of and commentary on Cicero's...

New comedy in 'King Lear.'
June 22, 1994... Always more or less implicit in comedy reside energies destabilizing and subversive.(1) From the beginning, Aristotle recognized this darker potential, carefully stipulating that the hamartema, "fault, error or deformity," of comedy be "not...

'The London Merchant' and eighteenth-century British law.(George Lillo's play)
June 22, 1994... There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total...

Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet.
June 22, 1994... Four hundred years after his death, Sir Philip Sidney remains an enigma; however, Katherine Duncan-Jones endeavors to debunk the myth of the perfect courtier, Shelley's "spirit without spot," presenting instead a less-than-perfect man, "spots...

The Rhetoric of Berkeley's Philosophy.
June 22, 1994... George Berkeley and his quaintly lustrous empiricism have long served as whipping-boys for anthology editors. Where better to look for a quick note about fringe-Augustan quacks who drank tar-water while insisting on the immateriality of the...