'Chaucer's garden in this tale is no longer a place of courtly love or intellectual debate but of lust and sexuality'- 'Chaucer subtly brings into play the very system of values that traditional fabliaux tend to work without'
Laura Varnam on garden
'mutual love between spouses is notably absent'
H.A. Kelly on medieval church reasons for marriage
'halfway to allegory'
Bernard O'Donoghue on the MT
'all good feelings [Chaucer's] audience might have about love and marriage are demolished'
Jay Schleusener in 'The conduct of TMT' on love and marriage
'January shops for his bride'
Stephanie A. Tolliver
'dimly misogynistic and bitter' ... 'a story intending to show the deceitfulness of women'
Martin Stevens in 'chaucer review' on tale
'cynical condemnation of courtly convention'
David L. Shores on radical nature of tale
'we are left with a disturbing notion that a level of happiness is possible through folly and self-deception''no faith in wives, no loyalty in wives, not rectitude in religion, no hope in supernatural powers'
Norman T. Harrington in 'Chaucer and the Merchant's Tale' on happiness through stupidity
'an irony so quiet, so delicate, that many readers never notice it is there at all'
Earle Birney in 'The Beginnings of Chaucer's Irony' on irony
'religion itself if bemocked'
JSP Tatlock on religion in MT
'January's bending of religious authority to his own selfish purposes leaves religion untouched but adds to our sense of his delusion and error'
John Thorne on January's selfishness
'January is subjected to the most unblinking scrutiny throughout the poem' a tale of 'clarity, critical observation, and disgust'
John Burrow on TMT