Canterbury Tales Research Articles

What Could the Translation of a ‘Retelling’ Imply for Translation Studies?

The purpose of this study is to scrutinize the implications that The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling (2009) by Peter Ackroyd and its Turkish translation hold for Translation Studies. The study will focus on the translation concepts of ‘retelling,’ ‘intralingual translation,’ ‘indirect translation,’ and ‘retranslation.’ The motivation for this study stems from the manner in which the books were introduced into the English and Turkish literary systems. The Turkish translation entitled Geoffrey Chaucer’ın Canterbury Hikâyeleri (Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury tales) (2017) designates Peter Ackroyd as the ‘author,’ and is presented as a “translat[ion] from the English original” (Ackroyd 2017, 5). In the English edition, on the other hand, Ackroyd appears as the ‘translator’ of this “original,” with Chaucer named as the ‘author.’ Another noteworthy point is that Geoffrey Chaucer’ın Canterbury Hikâyeleri was preceded by other translations of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in Turkish. The current study explores how to conceptualize the translational statuses of The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling and Geoffrey Chaucer’ın Canterbury Hikâyeleri through discussing the existing definitions of ‘retelling,’ ‘intralingual translation,’ ‘indirect translation,’ and ‘retranslation.’ This study argues that the English work is, in fact, an ‘intralingual (re)translation,’ and the Turkish work can be called both an ‘indirect translation’ and a ‘retranslation through indirect translation,’ where ‘indirect’ refers to the process. Along with this, it also offers two new categories for the typology of “intervening texts” in retranslation (Alvstad and Rosa 2015): ‘single intralingual retranslation’ and ‘compilative inter- and intralingual retranslation through indirect retranslation.’ The study ends with a discussion of the implications of the English and Turkish works in question with regard to the ideas of ‘originality’ and ‘authorship.’

Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain by Carissa Harris

Reviewed by: Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain by Carissa Harris Kersti Francis Carissa Harris, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2018 285 pp. Whether or not you like this volume will depend on your methodological point-of-view. Strict historicists will find this book emotional, incendiary, and subjective, yet Harris’ scholarship is one of the most exciting and poignant feminist analyses of the Middle Ages published in a decade. If you’re a scholar who hates the idea of identity politics in the classroom or in one’s methodology, or the thought that “the personal and political are also historical,” this book is decidedly not your cup of tea (4). And that’s a shame, because to miss reading Obscene Pedagogies is to miss what this reviewer hopes will play a major role in the future of medieval studies: an intersectional critique of medieval misogyny. Influenced both by Black feminist thought and Harris’ own lived experience as a mixed-race woman, this is a book that tackles medieval violence against women (whether real or imagined), and exposes the way obscenity can both create and destroy community. Beyond its investment in the Middle Ages, Obscene Pedagogies takes on an equally-ambitious task: “recognizing how the past’s violence lives on in the present” (9). Harris draws connections between medieval lyrics celebrating sexual violence to modern displays of rape culture by athletes, presidents, and, in several powerful moments, examples drawn from both medievalist scholarship and interpersonal interactions. Obscene Pedagogies is indebted in particular to the works of Carolyn Dinshaw, Sara Ahmed’s recent Living a Feminist Life (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2017), and Nicole Nolan Sidhu’s Indecent Exposure: Gender, Politics, and Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Despite the recent publication of Dr. Sidhu’s excellent volume on obscenity, Harris’s monograph deftly distinguishes itself from prior work by arguing for the pedagogical benefit of obscenity for medieval sexual education and its relationship to modern rape culture. It is in these connections that Ahmed’s influence is most apparent. Chapter one, for instance, connects several erotic medieval lyrics voiced by and for women with the impact of twentieth and twenty-first century iterations of gender-segregated abstinence-only sexual education on contemporary cultural consciousness, using examples from Harris’ own upbringing within American Protestant purity culture to powerfully demonstrate the mental efficacy and impact, both harmful and helpful, of same-sex sexual pedagogy. Harris’ prose [End Page 219] is sharp, witty, commanding, and invites debate; excerpts from Obscene Pedagogies would be extremely generative for an undergraduate course on medieval sex, gender, lyric, or women’s writing, while its introduction should be suggested reading for every medievalist in light of our field’s current cultural crisis. In five chapters and two appendices, Obscene Pedagogies covers a wide range of fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Middle English and Middle Scots literature; two appendices, “Songs of Lusty Maidens’ and “Songs of Wantonness” bring to light several previously-unstudied lyrics. Chapter One, “‘Felawe Masculinity’: Teaching Rape Culture in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” connects Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Reeve’s Tale” to the 2016 Ched Evans rape trial in Wales. This chapter is unique as the sole section to focus on a canonical medieval text, making it perhaps the most immediately useful for the medievalist instructor. Focusing on the use of “swyve” in The Canterbury Tales and the treatment of rape and women’s bodily autonomy in the twenty-first century, Harris argues that obscenity “creates gendered pedagogical community and teaches men that sexual aggression is both necessary and predatory” (24). The second chapter, “‘With a Cunt’: Obscene Misogyny and Masculine Pedagogical Community in the Middle Scots Flyting,” also examines the interconnection between masculinity and misogyny in sixteenth-century Scottish insult poetry. As in chapter one, this section argues that men use obscenity to build community and teach each other sexual mores, but whereas the code of masculinity espoused in the Canterbury Tales emphasizes having as much sex with as many women as possible, Harris demonstrates here that the literature of the Scottish court nearly two centuries...

Chaucer's Gifts: Exchange and Value in the "Canterbury Tales" by Robert Epstein

Chaucer's Gifts: Exchange and Value in the "Canterbury Tales" by Robert Epstein

Tragic Nihilism in The Canterbury Tales

Tragic Nihilism in <i>The Canterbury Tales</i>

The Indian Novel in English: A Search for Identity

The Indian Novel in English:A Search for Identity* K. S. Narayana Rao The Indian struggle for independence from the British rule showed a strange paradox: an intense but understandable dislike of the British occupation of the country and an equally strong but puzzling sentimental attachment to the English language. In fact, the departure of the British from India produced a near-violent campaign to retain English as a national language and a unifying tool for the country. The birth of a new nation also generated a new impulse to create new literary works in every language of Indian origin as well as in English, which some claimed as an Indian language. Those who had been writing in English before the country won her independence now took to writing in that language with redoubled vigour, as it were, and many newcomers joined them, with the result that, although the English-speaking Indians were, and still are, a minority, the number of Indian writers who write in English is an impressive one. Of this group of writers who write in English, the Indian novelists are the most conspicuous both for the quantity and quality of their output. Such an output will impress us as an even more remarkable achievement if we bear in mind the fact that there is no such thing as a tradition of novel writing in India dating from the ancient times. Ancient India produced many great things but not a novel as we understand it today. Ā nō bhadrāh rtavō yantu viswatah1—may noble thoughts come to us from all sides—said our ancestors some four thousand years ago. They might well have added, noble things too. For the Indian novel and short fiction in their present form, both in English and in the Indian languages, are an importation from the West generally and from England in particular. While we had several forms of literature before, including such things as champu (a composition which employs both the prose and the verse media), the modern Indian novel and the short story owe their existence to the West. The novel existed in Sanskrit as romance at a time when the English language was still in its infancy. Dandin's Dasakumāracharita (sixth century), Bâna's Kādambari (seventh century), and [End Page 26] Subandhu's Vāsavadatta (seventh century) have been considered standard works of fiction. An English scholar named Horrwitz says that "Bâna has written the best Sanskrit novel."2 Indeed, the word kādambari is used at least in three Indian languages (Kannada, Telugu, and Marāthi) to denote a novel. Even the short story in its present form as a complex, subtle, and highly artistic work is a borrowing from the West. Of course, ancient India was a treasure trove of short fiction, and we exported a good quantity of it to the West and appeared to have got in return the modern short story. It is common knowledge that stories like those of the Panchatantra3 with their device of the frame story travelled west and influenced Western literature including Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Today some of them exist in the West in modified, garbled, or changed versions, such as the Welsh story of Llewellyn's dog, Gelert.4 The very story of the migration of these tales is a fascinating one. The Oxford scholar Macdonell holds that "the history of how Indian fairy tales and fables migrated from one country to another, to nearly all the peoples of Europe and Asia, and even to African tribes from their original home in India, borders on the marvellous."5 But modern Indian fiction is Western in its origin and inspiration. When the Indians awoke to what are now the most popular forms of literature among the authors and the reading public in India, namely the short story and the novel, they must have said to themselves, "But Westward look, the land is bright!"6 The novel is a well-established form in Indian languages, without a readily visible trace, if I may say so, of foreignness about it, although it is perfectly clear that the novels and the novelists have often been inspired...

Preface

Preface Alan Lupack and Barbara Tepa Lupack Kevin J. Harty has a long and distinguished record of highly respected publications in a number of areas. His books on business writing have long been standard texts in the field; his Strategies for Business and Technical Writing, first published in 1980, is still (many editions later) widely used today. But his expertise is multi-faceted, and it is in literary and film studies that he has made his most significant contributions. His essays on Chaucer and on adaptations of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales after the Middle Ages are of great scholarly interest and importance, as are his essays on the Chester Mystery Cycle. Kevin's 1993 Casebook on that cycle remains a seminal text for those interested in medieval drama. Given his extensive knowledge of the history of drama, it is not surprising that he was the obvious choice to be the literary advisor to Films for the Humanities, a well-known and widely distributed resource, when they created their series on The History of World Drama. But it is his work in another field—Arthurian Studies—that is unparalleled. In 1991, when Kevin edited a collection of essays on films based on the Arthurian legends, he was a true pioneer. It was almost unheard of to consider these films as a group with interconnections and with significant cultural insights to offer, but he recognized what scores of medieval scholars and film historians had failed to see. He coined the phrase 'cinema Arthuriana' for these films and—in his many lectures, articles, and books on the subject—essentially created a new field of scholarly inquiry. All the while, he has been incredibly generous to those who have followed in his footsteps, sharing with them his expertise and resources. A simple recitation of Kevin's publications, however, does not do justice to their impact, especially on an entire generation of academics, scholars, and students. It is difficult to overemphasize just how influential his scholarly vision has been on the development of Arthurian scholarship. Over the past two decades, through his writing, editing, and lecturing, Kevin has continued his pioneering research and expanded the field of Arthurian cinema even further. He never ceases to amaze his colleagues with his ongoing discoveries of little-known or neglected Arthurian films. A testament to his standing among Arthurian scholars is his election to a three-year term as president of the North American Branch of the International Arthurian Society, and his position as Associate Editor and board member of Arthuriana, the leading journal in Arthurian studies. [End Page 3] Kevin has also broadened his interests to include all films with medieval themes. His landmark study The Reel Middle Ages, one of those classic and groundbreaking books that provide the research on which others build, is a comprehensive survey of virtually all films in all languages that deal with the Middle Ages, on such topics as the Crusades, the Black Death, the Vikings, Joan of Arc, Alfred the Great, Charlemagne, Beowulf, Robin Hood, King Arthur, and others. His scholarship brought many of these often overlooked films to the attention of those working in medieval studies and medievalism. Obviously the result of years of diligent and meticulous research in film archives in various countries, The Reel Middle Ages is precisely the kind of creative, far-sighted, interdisciplinary scholarship that inspires generalists, students, and other scholars. Kevin has never rested on his laurels: he continues to build on his vast knowledge of cinema based on medieval themes. Vikings in Film, a book that he recently edited, grew out of his research for The Reel Middle Ages and has in turn opened up new areas for scholarly discourse. He is also currently at work on a volume about Robin Hood and Joan of Arc in film that will certainly have the same long-term impact. Kevin has been—and obviously will continue to be—not just a productive and prolific scholar, but one of the most respected experts in the field. On a more personal note: we have contributed essays to some of his collections, just as he has to ours, and we have seen firsthand what high standards he has...

Walter Map and the Matter of Britain by Joshua Byron Smith

Reviewed by: Walter Map and the Matter of Britain by Joshua Byron Smith Neil Cartlidge Walter Map and the Matter of Britain By Joshua Byron Smith. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Few writers in the Middle Ages, or indeed in any period, have enjoyed a more complex, enduring, and incongruous literary afterlife than Walter Map (d. 1209/1210). Within decades of his death, Map was being credited with the composition of several parts of the monumental French prose Lancelot-Grail Cycle--making him, in effect, a founding father of the Arthurian tradition. At the same time, medieval manuscripts so frequently associate him with various Latin satirical poems within what is now generally known as "Goliardism" that he effectively functions as a legendary father of this tradition too. (When Thomas Wright edited much of this material in 1841, he chose to entitle this volume Latin Poems Commonly Attributed to Walter Mapes.) At the end of the eighteenth century Map's reputation still exerted such a hold on Welsh imaginations that the bardic antiquarian Iolo Morganwg (aka Edward Williams, 1747–1826) was moved to create spurious Welsh-language writing in his name. These days it is generally agreed that all of the literary work that can genuinely be attributed to Walter survives only in a single medieval manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 851), where it is rubricated "de Nugis curialium" ("Courtiers' Trifles"). It was under this title that Walter's work was edited in a pioneering edition by Montague Rhodes James in 1914 (followed by a translation in 1923); and James's edition/translation was subsequently reissued (with revisions by R. A. B. Mynors and Christopher Brooke) in a Clarendon Texts volume first published in 1983. Ironically, there is one part of the De nugis curialium (and only one part) that did circulate widely in the Middle Ages, but in most cases without ascription to Map. This is the Dissuasio Valerii, an extravagant polemic against marriage, which survives in dozens of medieval copies (and which was the first work by an Englishman to be printed). The Dissuasio even makes an appearance in the Canterbury Tales (where it is cited as "Valerie")—which means that Walter Map is also one of the relatively few English writers whose work Geoffrey Chaucer can definitely be shown to have read. [End Page 145] Walter Map can thus be described as a figure who is central to several different literary histories of the Middle Ages. He was also a colorful and charismatic personality in his own right, as De nugis curialium amply demonstrates. Yet there have been remarkably few scholarly attempts at a rounded assessment of his work both in relation to his original cultural contexts and his subsequent literary reputation(s). From this point of view, Joshua Byron Smith's Walter Map and the Matter of Britain is something of a landmark. To my knowledge, it is the first published monograph in English exclusively devoted to a study of Walter Map. Fortunately, it is also a lively, wide-ranging and original book, distinguished by an impressively energetic reluctance to allow any received assumptions to pass unscrutinized. It makes a number of substantive suggestions in relation both to the interpretation of De nugis curialium in detail (including some interesting possible solutions to some of the specific textual difficulties posed by the one surviving manuscript) and to its placing in a wider socio-intellectual context—foregrounding in particular the networks centred on St Peter's Abbey, Gloucester, and on the tradition of Welsh-Latin saints' lives represented by London, BL MS Cotton Vespasian A.xiv. It also makes some compelling arguments about Map's attitudes to (and knowledge of) Wales; about what Smith calls "Britonicization" (i.e., the setting of stories in an "ancient British past"); and about the nature of the authority that Map came to exert within the tradition of Arthurian romance. Overall, this is an important book, and engagement with it will be essential for all future work on Map. All that being said, there are some problems with the way its claims are presented. For example, Smith uses his introduction to suggest that "this book makes two larger arguments concerning the literary...

Decoding Early Modern Cryptography

Decoding Early Modern Cryptography William H. Sherman (bio) Katherine Ellison A Cultural History of Early Modern English Cryptography Manuals new york: routledge, 2017 xiii + 218 pages; isbn: 9781472457646 Katherine Ellison and Susan Kim, editors A Material History of Medieval and Early Modern Ciphers: Cryptography and the History of Literacy new york: routledge, 2018 xii + 285 pages; isbn: 9781138244641 stories about code-breaking are now more popular than ever, but readable and reliable histories of cryptography have always been hard to find. David Kahn's magisterial survey, The Codebreakers (first published in 1967), remains the only attempt to offer a comprehensive account stretching from the ancient world to the advent of the internet.1 Most recent books (as well as popular novels and films) have focused on the work of Alan Turing and other modern mathematicians involved in solving the Enigma code used by the German military and on the development (by Turing and his successors) of computational tools for encryption and decryption.2 For scholars interested specifically in the use of codes and ciphers in the early [End Page 315] modern world, the best available overview is buried in an obscure Dutch handbook on The History of Information Security.3 It may be appropriate that we should remain largely in the dark about the shadowy world of secret communication: the very term cryptography, after all, means "hidden writing." But the lack of literature has made the field seem more obscure than it is and has associated it—more firmly than it deserves to be—with military history and the history of mathematics. Not the least of the achievements in the two books reviewed here are their timely reminder that codes and ciphers played a pervasive role in medieval and Renaissance Europe and their strong suggestion that the topic ought to be of interest to a much wider range of scholars. The titles of the books refer to cultural history and the history of literacy, but their publisher, Routledge, has put them under the subject heading of "Literature," and both Katherine Ellison and Susan Kim teach in the Department of English at Illinois State University. Together, they and the other authors they have assembled make a compelling case for seeing cryptography—like the study of language and literature—as part of the history of communication. Whereas Kim is an expert on Old English and Ellison on the eighteenth century, it is fitting that they should meet in the middle in these volumes. Thanks to the invention of printing, the rapid expansion of global diplomacy, and a series of hot and cold wars, the early modern period witnessed what might be described as a cryptographic renaissance. In all of these areas there were genuine inventions during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, but there were also continuities with the Middle Ages—as the first four essays in Material History explore. It is also appropriate that these volumes should issue from the state of Illinois: as Ellison and Kim explain in the introduction and afterword, there was a veritable renaissance of cryptography in and around Chicago during the first few decades of the twentieth century. The city of Geneva was home to Riverbank Laboratories, founded and funded by textile magnate George Fabyan. Though much of its work was devoted to the then-fashionable argument that Francis Bacon had written the texts attributed to Shakespeare, Fabyan spared no expense in acquiring at least one copy of virtually every key text in the field,4 and his "Department of Ciphers" would come to include the man who would serve as the U.S. government's chief code-breaker from the 1920s to the 1950s.5 Riverbank's intellectual and bibliographical firepower [End Page 316] was such that it served as the freelance cipher bureau for the U.S. government during World War I, earning it the title "Cradle of Cryptology."6 And the University of Chicago was home to the great medievalist John Matthews Manly, who not only became the leading authority on the texts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales but also was widely considered to be the country's greatest civilian expert on codes and ciphers.7 In inviting us to look at the...

Chaucer's Decameron and the Origin of the Canterbury Tales by Frederick M. Biggs

Reviewed by: Chaucer's Decameron and the Origin of the Canterbury Tales by Frederick M. Biggs Greg Waite Biggs, Frederick M., Chaucer's Decameron and the Origin of the Canterbury Tales (Chaucer Studies, 44), Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2017; cloth; pp. xii, 275; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781843844754. The vexed question of Chaucer's knowledge and use of Boccaccio's Decameron is revisited in this study. Frederick M. Biggs argues that three novelle from the eighth day of the Decameron—8.1, 8.2, and 8.10—formed Chaucer's source for the Shipman's Tale, originally intended for the Wife of Bath, and that Chaucer's reading of these novelle crucially reshaped the way he conceived of how to create tales from diverse sources. Furthermore, Chaucer's idea of the Canterbury Tales, thematically and structurally, owes much to the influence of Boccaccio's account of Licisca's outburst in the Introduction to the sixth day of the Decameron, where she reveals her contempt for the attitudes of men regarding women, marriage, power, and class inequality. From this passage and its effects on stories told in the days following, Chaucer learned how to construct frames for his narratives that would create dramatic roles in the debates that they developed. Biggs's analysis hinges on these passages from the Decameron, and is further developed by the working out of a chronology for the early Tales as Chaucer developed and revised his ideas. Biggs focuses upon the apparent quarrel between Chaucer and Gower, involving Gower's retelling, in his Tale of Florent, of the Wife of Bath's Tale, given to her to replace the tale she was originally intended to deliver, but which Chaucer transferred to the Shipman. This Tale was intended originally to have been set against the already written Melibee, originally assigned to the Man of Law. Biggs claims that the Miller's Tale was the third to be written as Chaucer's radical new approach was developing. Within a wide-ranging examination of the tale and its narrative elements, he advances Dom Felice's speech in Decameron 3.4 as one of Chaucer's sources. Biggs may not convince all Chaucerians with his elaborate theory, but this book deserves to be read and recognized for its deep learning and astute critical analysis of Chaucer's tales, the historical and cultural contextualization of them, and beyond that, the nature of source study itself. [End Page 235] Greg Waite University of Otago Copyright © 2019 Parergon

Chaucer's Biblical Turn

In the Miller's Tale Chaucer turns away from classical sources and a classical authorial persona towards biblical source material in order to craft a providential mode of self-asserting and self-effacing authorship, a turn fraught with generative possibilities for the Canterbury Tales. The Miller and Nicholas theorize God's authorial production as ‘Goddes pryvetee’, concealed meaning they ignore when adapting the Bible but whose concealment they can imitate when claiming its authority. Chaucer writes the Miller's Tale, then, as God would have: its clear design revealing decisive authorial agency, its meaning hidden in the inscrutable transcendence of that agency.

Chaucer's "Squire's Tale," "Franklin's Tale," and "Physician's Tale": An Annotated Bibliography 1900–2005 ed. by Kenneth Bleeth

Reviewed by: Chaucer's "Squire's Tale," "Franklin's Tale," and "Physician's Tale": An Annotated Bibliography 1900–2005 ed. by Kenneth Bleeth Daniel J. Ransom Kenneth Bleeth, ed. Chaucer's "Squire's Tale," "Franklin's Tale," and "Physician's Tale": An Annotated Bibliography 1900–2005. Chaucer Bibliographies 9. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Pp. xxvi, 570. $133.00. Reviewers of Variorum Chaucer fascicles have observed that readers know what to expect in each of those volumes. The same is true for the Chaucer Bibliographies series, the ninth volume of which has now appeared. Having reviewed Monica McAlpine's bibliography of The Knight's Tale (SAC 15 [1993]: 229–32), I certainly had a fair idea of what I would find upon opening Kenneth Bleeth's excellent addition to the Toronto series. Indeed, most Chaucer scholars have the same anticipations, but since they also have expectations of book reviews, let me begin by providing the requisite thumbnail sketch of the contents of Professor Bleeth's volume. Because the book treats more than one tale, and because two of the tales, those of the Squire and the Franklin, constitute a single "fragment" or "group," Bleeth deploys the following system of organization in the first fifth of his book. He puts the introductions to The Squire's Tale and The Franklin's Tale in sequence (3–19 and 20–33, respectively). Each of these is divided into topics. For The Squire's Tale, he includes the categories of "Source Study," "Genre," "Teller and Tale," "Orientalism and the Exotic," "Magic, Science, and Technology," and "The Squire's Tale, Part 2." Last in this sequence is "The Tale as Fragment," itself subdivided into two sets of bullet points. The first set surveys opinions on the story's incompleteness as expressed before 1990. The second set summarizes responses to these earlier assessments, positive and negative. Following this section is the introduction to The Franklin's Tale, which identifies the following topics: "Sources and Analogues," "The Franklin's [End Page 338] Tale and the Marriage Debate," "The Teller and the Tale," "Characterization," "Astrology and Magic," "Setting," and "Six Passages" (each passage a focus of commentary). In all of these sections, Bleeth paints with a broad brush and supplies cross-references (bold-face entry numbers) where summaries of the individual treatments are to be found. Then follows a joint section on "Editions and Modernizations" (34–59), which treats the two tales as a unit. Thereafter, Bleeth lists and summarizes publications focused on "Sources, Analogues, and the Posterity of The Squire's Tale" (60–82). Next appears "The Franklin's Tale: Sources, Analogues, and Later Influence" (83–111). In each of these last three sections, as in the general surveys of criticism that follow, items are arranged chronologically; items published in the same year are presented in alphabetical sequence. Given the careful subdivisions of most of the sections mentioned above, it is surprising that the section on "Editions and Modernizations" has no subdivisions at all; mere chronology and alphabetization are its principles of arrangement. The editor has, I think, missed an opportunity. It would be easy to introduce categories. One could simplify the model employed in Eleanor Hammond's Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual (1908). By separating the thirty-six comprehensive editions (including editions both of the complete works and of the Canterbury Tales alone) and the eighteen more-or-less complete translations (of the works or of CT), one could more readily see the relative prominence of The Squire's Tale and The Franklin's Tale over the last hundred or so years. There are twenty-six editions of selected works; SqT and FranT appear in six of them, SqT without FranT in seven, and FranT without SqT in thirteen. Sifting further, one finds seven editions dedicated to SqT alone and eight to FranT alone. Among translations of selected works, there are four that have both SqT and FranT, seven with SqT but not FranT, and eighteen with FranT but not SqT. Furthermore, there are three freestanding translations of FranT (items 76, 94, and 119), and one (item 44, omit the erroneous "the" from the title as printed) that includes The Clerk's Tale but...

Fit for a Dog? Food Sharing and the Medieval Human/Animal Divide

Abstract Medieval unease with human animality manifests itself strongly in attitudes toward and proscriptions concerning food sharing. This is particularly true with dogs, the nonhuman animals with whom humans most intimately share both the procurement and consumption of food, and who are routinely figured as embodying many of the best and worst characteristics associated with humans. Through a range of late medieval texts, this paper will probe the precarious boundary between human and nonhuman animals in the medieval imagination by considering the portrait of Chaucer’s Prioress and her lapdogs in The Canterbury Tales; depictions of dogs in the hunt in medieval romance; and the strange tale of Sir Gowther, whose penance is to eat only what he receives from the mouth of a dog. Rather than supporting claims for an essential difference between human and nonhuman animal, such examples further emphasize the fluidity of the two categories.

Walking as Memorial Ritual: Pilgrimage to the Past

Walking as Memorial Ritual: Pilgrimage to the Past

Рыцарство в структуре средневекового общества: социально-философский анализ (на примере «Кентерберийских рассказов» Джеффри Чосера

Рыцарство в структуре средневекового общества: социально-философский анализ (на примере «Кентерберийских рассказов» Джеффри Чосера

Putting the Plowman in His Place: Order and Genre in the Early Modern Canterbury Tales

Abstract In ca. 1550, the apocryphal Plowman's Tale was moved from the position it occupied in the 1542 edition of Chaucer's Workes, at the end of the Canterbury Tales, to a position between the tales of the Manciple and the Parson. This move represents an early and influential intervention into the order of Chaucer's collection, and had profound consequences for the interpretation of the Canterbury Tales, which were read in this order for hundreds of years. In particular, the placement of the Plowman's debate between the Pelican and the Gryphon established a “Beast Group” among the Canterbury Tales, bringing the apocryphal work into dialogue with the tales of the Nun's Priest and the Manciple, and arguably exerting a considerable influence on the development of political beast fable in the sixteenth century and beyond.

Trans textuality: Dysphoria in the depths of medieval skin

This article proposes a theoretical method of approaching manuscripts, such as the Ellesmere manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, through transgender theory, called trans textuality. Beyond looking for transgender identities in medieval texts, such a method asks, ‘what is a trans way of reading?’ and ‘how might non-human objects function in trans ways?’ The study is informed by foundational texts in trans psychoanalysis concerning the processes that trans skin undergoes during transition, texts which are put in conversation with medieval manuscript studies and new materialisms. The resulting response focuses on the threefold work of trans textual skins: depth, duration, and dysphoria. Whether the object is the organ of a transgender body or a medieval manuscript, such trans texts are skin constructs which relate through materiality and metaphor the ongoing narrative of bodies in transition. The article concludes with a twofold study of Fragment VI of the Ellesmere manuscript where the images and writing of the Physician and Pardoner demonstrate the principles of trans textuality: the depth of meanings from other times and genders, the duration of a body through transitions in form, and a dysphoric soul striving in the deeps of medieval skin.

BioEssays 7∕2018

BioEssaysVolume 40, Issue 7 1870071 Cover PictureFree Access BioEssays 7∕2018 First published: 21 June 2018 https://doi.org/10.1002/bies.201870071AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Graphical Abstract Life, Branscomb and Russell argue in article number 1700179, owes its existence not to chemistry but to engines; engines of disequilibria conversion. And it therefore owes its emergence to a context that can abiotically provide both the needed engines and the disequilibria to drive them. Only the Alkaline Hydrothermal Vent model of abiogenesis provides that context --“Of which vertu engendered is the flour” (Chaucer, prologue to The Canterbury Tales, 1400). Volume40, Issue7July 20181870071 RelatedInformation

Pseudotranslation: Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Taiwan

Two editions of translations of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales have been read for decades in Taiwan, but they have only recently been proven to be pirated copies of Fang Zhong’s translation produced in...

The Canterbury tales: a western canvas in an eastern frame

The Canterbury tales: a western canvas in an eastern frame

The translator writes back

AbstractThe translation of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales into Persian poetry required many innovations. Because Chaucer used rhyme to rhetorically enhance meaning—what Shklovsky called the resurrection in words—the translation was a challenging recreation. However, translating Chaucer is aided by several commonalities between his medieval English culture and modern Iranian culture: formal similarities between Chaucer's narrative verse and the form of masnavi; common themes in their literatures; and important resonances between Christianity and Islam, especially contemporary Shi'ism and its emphasis on pilgrimages to sacred sites. For these reasons, the translated text appears so natural that despite translator's loyalty to his source text, the translation appears familiar to those otherwise unfamiliar with the Tales.