Ambiguous Signs and Authorial Deceptions in Fourteenth-Century Fictions.

Incidental references to PPl contrast earlier medieval fictions (e.g. Grail romances, the Divine Comedy), in which the characters resolve the complexities and ambiguities of their quests, with late-medieval fictions, in which signs tend to accumulate meanings and in which the struggle to understand is presented as an end in itself. Contrasts Chaucer’s description of himself as a “jogelour” (i.e., as one who constructively challenges the appearance of things) with WL’s self-indictment as one of the foolish ‘Japeres and jangleres.”