Chaucer's Text Research Articles

Who Has Intention? Chaucer Studies and the Search for Meaning

Chaucer criticism has always grappled with the question of intentionality. While early critics saw no trouble in identifying the voices in Chaucer's texts with the author's intention, authorial intention—not to be confused with autobiographical readings—became the elephant in the room from the early twentieth century onward. This article reviews the various approaches critics have put forward within Chaucer studies to avoid ascribing intention to Chaucer the poet. Starting with the concept of the narrator (a twentieth-century invention), three different approaches to the Canterbury Tales and their narrative situations are discussed, in which authorial intention looms large: the “dramatic,” the “detached,” and the “animated.” Then a case is made for the unavoidability of intentionalist readings by drawing on cognitive literary theories, in particular the intentional stance. When engaging with Chaucer, critics need to embrace intention as a key generator in the meaning-making activity of interpretation.

Mobility and Identity in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Mobility and Identity in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Intertekstualnost u drami Dva plemenita rođaka

The central plot of Fletcher and Shakespeare's play The Two Noble Kinsmen derives from Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, so it could be interpreted through the theory of intertextuality and transtextuality. The prototext of these literary works is identical, but it has been modified over the centuries. It has changed from a mythological story into a universal symbol of love, friendship, authority, honor, and death. Apart from the permutation of texts by different authors, The Two Noble Kinsmen is also a curious collection of Shakespeare's earlier works, despite the frequent contestation of his contribution to this play. Such self-citation is an interesting phenomenon, especially if we consider the fact that this play is Shakespeare's last work and not The Tempest, as traditionally stated in literary histories. Therefore, this paper aims to determine the similarities and differences between Chaucer's famous story and Fletcher and Shakespeare's play, to point out the degree of intertextuality in it, and to highlight the original dramatic episodes and characters, their function, meaning, and significance. With the assumption that Fletcher and Shakespeare intentionally and purposefully chose the mode of adaptation and transformation of the famous Chaucer's text, the obtained results indicate that certain elements were modified due to the requirements of the dramatic form and its theatrical function, but also for commercial and socio-political reasons. The transposition of the well-known ancient story into Renaissance England, with new episodes and characters in the subplot, offers a different and somewhat subversive picture of conventional social norms and relations.

What Is a Woman? Enclosure and Female Piety in Chaucer's The Knight's Tale

What Is a Woman?Enclosure and Female Piety in Chaucer's The Knight's Tale Roberta Magnani and Liz Herbert McAvoy Early responses to Geoffrey Chaucer's works and his position in the burgeoning canon of English literature cast him as a patriarchal foundational figure and literary production as an exclusively patrilineal genealogy.1 Chaucer-the-Father thus validates the authorial agency of his literary "sons," and this masculinist way of accounting for canon formation as a father-to-son "straight" trajectory has endured to the present day. Indeed, women's wider intellectual agency and its influence have been largely overlooked. This article, therefore, aims to begin such a process of reparation and posit the profound cultural relevance that women's intellectual practices had on the canon—and on Chaucer, in particular. Accounting for the role of female-coded forms of literacy would derail the conveniently linear patriarchal paradigms on which traditional criticism is founded. Recuperating the centrality of the feminine would unseat male dominance over the canon and demand, at best, its total dismantling and reconstruction, or, at the very least, a concerted interrogation and repudiation of its hegemonic validity. In other words, a radical revisioning of canon formation is made possible by positioning women as queering agents. Recentering "woman" as category and unpacking the question "What is a woman?" in capacious ways extricate it from binary epistemologies. As Sara Ahmed asserts, the queer deviates [End Page 311] from the "straight" lines of heteronormativity founded on an ineluctable patrilinear progression that, through marriage (so central to the narrative and ideology of medieval romance) and reproduction, trace a teleological sequence from birth to death.2 "Woman" reorients the epistemologies of the canon. Far from being marginal, the bodily and the excessive are celebrated for their salvific and generative power; in fact, they turn out to be the shared vocabulary harnessed by the intellectual fathers of medieval culture. We will focus on romance, a genre that is markedly invested in reproducing heteronormative structures couched in a narrative of apparent male subservience to a superior lady, and will demonstrate the extent to which widespread female-coded discourses of spirituality and literacy are profoundly embedded in the modes of writing that Chaucer deploys and the epistemologies he inhabits. The Booke of Gostlye Grace, the Middle English translation of the Liber specialis gratiae produced at the Benedictine nunnery of Helfta in northern Germany under the spiritual direction of the visionary nun Mechthild of Hackeborn (d. 1298), will serve as our case study because of its exemplarity; the centrality of Mechthild to the mystical tradition; and the wide circulation of her writing across Europe, both in Latin and in multiple vernacular translations. We are not interested in assimilating Mechthild into a patrilineal genealogy, however: quite the opposite. Nor do we claim any direct influence of Mechthild upon Chaucer, although that is entirely possible. For our purposes, Mechthild functions as an example of the importance and ubiquitous quality of women's literacy and spirituality that saturate the narrative fabric of Chaucer's texts—The Knight's Tale in particular—and that become ostensible in the Amazonian women populating the tale, and the tropes of enclosure and flourishing associated with them, but embedded in non-binary ways in the narrative as a whole. While there is evidence that the book attributed to Mechthild had, indeed, reached England at the time Chaucer was writing the Canterbury Tales, we cannot know for certain whether he was familiar with it, but there is evidence of her widespread renown during the fourteenth century.3 Instead [End Page 312] of claiming direct influence upon Chaucer, we harness Mechthild's spiritual and literary authority as a model for queering traditional theological discourse predicated upon feminine modes of literacy, which, rather than linear, hierarchical, paternal and filial, are collaborative and entangled; as such, they serve as ideal tools for a wider examination of issues such as the discursive elision of gender nonconformity and queer cultural agency.4 And we contend that what is defined as the literary canon, here exemplified by the works of one of its fathers, was profoundly influenced by (and participated in) this model—but in ways that...

The Canterbury Tales Handbook by Elizabeth Scala

Reviewed by: The Canterbury Tales Handbook by Elizabeth Scala Kim Zarins Elizabeth Scala. The Canterbury Tales Handbook. New York: Norton, 2020. Pp. x, 312. $27.50 paper; $10.00 e-book. Norton has been publishing a number of Chaucer editions recently and has finally published a guidebook. The Canterbury Tales Handbook by [End Page 445] Elizabeth Scala is tailor-made for college students; the writing is smart, jargon-free, and delightful. The stated goal is deceptively simple: "This book helps you enjoy Chaucer by showing you how to read him more fluidly in the language in which he wrote. Some careful work at the beginning of the semester pays dividends later" (1–2). This comforting promise of enjoyment is gently followed by the promise that the hard work of reading Middle English will be worthwhile. Scala's book is a pleasurable and thought-provoking entry into Chaucer's text. Much as expected from a guidebook, the chapters, organized by tale, move through the text more or less in order, a structure designed to help students keep track of plot strands and, at the same time, discover deeper meanings. What makes Scala's book feel different from other guidebooks is attentiveness to its primary audience, the college undergraduate; pragmatic questions as to whether students should read from the handbook before or after Chaucer's text, or perhaps consult a translation, are addressed with refreshing transparency. Scala keeps her readers in mind particularly when their expectations might be challenged—for example, readers new to The Knight's Tale might be surprised to find a story set in classical Athens, or surprised that, given all these knights, there is very little action and a whole lot of lengthy descriptions and speeches. The handbook acknowledges such small surprises as well as graver discomforts, such as anti-Semitism in The Prioress's Tale. The voice of the text is very much that of an experienced professor addressing her students (often directly in the second person), sometimes pointing out ambiguity and leaving it open-ended, sometimes making a more decisive pronouncement. The handbook's focus on close readings is well exemplified by a detailed breakdown of Chaucer's opening lines in The General Prologue. In this deep exploration of a single Middle English sentence, Scala introduces terms such as "connotation" and "denotation" in order to persuade readers that the way a thing is said can matter more than what is said: Getting the connotation right is important and often tells us a good deal more than the denotation might reveal on its own. In this first half of the sentence, the denotation of many of these words and expressions is the same: "it is raining" or "everything is wet." But the connotation of the words is vastly different. It's raining in a rather elegant and literary way that makes us think of other places, mentioned in other texts, rather than the local environment literally [End Page 446] being described. Chaucer here is aggrandizing England in the style of some Continental precursors. (15–16) Students learn how to read more closely, and Scala shows how such things as literary rain matter and work as part of Chaucer's strategy. Scala brilliantly unpacks the poem's twists and turns at the level of the line, revealing contradictions that beg pondering. Here is a lovely example from her analysis of the Clerk's protestation that "yvele it sit / T'assaye a wif whan that it is no neede" (ClT, 460–61): These first-person statements on the narrator's part have garnered a great deal of critical attention. The Clerk alerts us to what Griselda emphatically cannot: the sadistic unfairness of Walter's tests. For Griselda has promised never to gainsay any of Walter's decisions … the Clerk narratively revels in the suffering ("anguisshe and … drede") of Griselda, at the same time that he distances him-self from it. Since Griselda is forbidden to show any dissent or emotion because of the vow she made to Walter at their wedding, the Clerk is the only means by which Griselda's anguished emotional life is ever known. Just as Walter does within the tale, the Clerk gets...

The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635 by Megan L. Cook

Reviewed by: The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635 by Megan L. Cook Alexandra Gillespie Megan L. Cook. The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. x, 288. 12 illus. $59.95. We—and I use that "we" advisedly, to mean we readers of the reviews section of Studies in the Age of Chaucer—know that Chaucer was an important figure in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Writers of the period tell us so quite plainly. In Spenser's Faerie Queene, [End Page 397] he is "Dan Chaucer, Well of English, undefiled." For John Foxe, he is likewise an inspiration, a "right Wiclevian, or else was never any" (Cook, 123, 73). Chaucer's works were a model for Wyatt and Surrey, and a source for Shakespeare and Milton. They were proof that, even in a distant and darker age, an English writer could foot it with the greats—"kis the steppes where as thow seest pace / Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace" (TC, V.1791–92). Filled with the same yearning—hoping he might "their high steps adore"—Spenser could defend the vernacular of his Virgilian Shepheardes Calender by pointing to Chaucer himself. Caroline Spurgeon's Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Allusions is still a useful survey of this and similar literary evidence of Chaucer's early modern reputation. E. P. Hammond's Chaucer: A Bibliography is a thorough record of manuscripts and printed books, which, circulating widely in the 200 or so years after his death, earned Chaucer that reputation. In recent decades, many critics—Kathleen Forni, Helen Cooper, Thomas A. Prendergast, Seth Lerer, Joseph Dane, Stephanie Trigg, and James Simpson among them—have framed our assessment of the mark that Chaucer made on early modern England in many different ways—from study of bibliographical ghosts and a canon of apocrypha to myth of congeniality and the revolution—to "scramble" to claim Chaucer's authority for a host of different causes (Cook citing Cooper, 200). Megan Cook's study is a welcome new landmark in this rather crowded landscape. The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635 picks up the story of the Chaucerian inheritance at the moment that that story becomes, as Cook's title suggests, an antiquarian and scholarly one. Her book describes the movement of the early moderns' Chaucer out of the hands of scribes such as John Shirley and early printers such as Caxton, De Worde, and Pynson (who was Richard, not Robert [18]) as he became not just a literary model, but a subject of antiquarian and scholarly interest. In the period 1532–1635 Chaucer's texts increasingly required explanation—full as they were of "hard words" (see Cook, Chapter 4)—but they also opened up all kinds of historical topics to contemporary view. These topics included the corruption of the pre-Reformation ecclesiastical establishment and the abuses rife among the regular orders (Chapter 3), and also the life, noble connections, family, and tomb of the poet himself (chapters 2 and 4). Chaucer became, in Cook's central argument, "an ideal figure with which to think through early modern [End Page 398] England's relationship to its medieval past" (20), a past worth celebrating, but from a useful distance. The result of this historical negotiation was, argues Cook, a "'secret history' of Chaucerian reading," and it here forms the basis for Cook's new account of the influence of England's old poet. Two words from Cook's title are particularly important to this account. One is the title "antiquary," which was first applied by Henry VIII to his subject John Leland, who was famous for laboriously journeying around England, taking stock of the libraries of religious houses on the eve of the Reformation. One result of these researches was Leland's De viris illustribus, a collection of biographies and bibliographies of England's great men: Chaucer was among them, his life story, as Cook shows, confected by Leland's bookish scraps, hearsay, and hopeful invention. As self-identifying English antiquaries increased...

Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion ed. by Glenn D. Burger and Holly A. Crocker

Reviewed by: Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion ed. by Glenn D. Burger and Holly A. Crocker Jennifer Sisk Glenn D. Burger and Holly A. Crocker, eds., Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 107. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. x, 249. isbn: 978-1-108-47196-1 (cloth), isbn: 978-1-108-67247-4 (e-book). $99.99 (cloth), $80.00 (e-book). This collection of essays offers sophisticated interpretations of medieval texts that foreground what the editors call the 'necessary intersectionality' (p. 2) of traditional histories of emotion, contemporary affect studies, and historicist approaches to literature. This orientation positions Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion to make valuable interventions in the scholarly realms of both medieval studies and affect studies. The volume prioritizes secular contexts, thus offering a corrective to the disproportionately large place affective piety has held for medievalists in histories of emotion. In its attention to premodern texts, the volume likewise offers a corrective to the insistent 'presentism' (p. 3) of affect studies by demonstrating again and again that medieval texts can and do represent, imply, and urge intensities of feeling that exceed culturally legible emotions. Moreover, the volume demonstrates the necessary ways that affect studies and histories of emotion must come together in any effort adequately to address the range of embodied experience we call feeling. The eight essays featured in the volume share a commitment to this work but contribute to it in refreshingly varied ways. Stephanie Trigg's 'Weeping Like a Beaten Child: Figurative Language and the Emotions in Chaucer and Malory' explores the polysemous potential of proverbial expressions by considering how the same figure of speech is used by two medieval authors to generate radically different emotional responses. Patricia DeMarco, in 'Imagining Jewish Affect in the Siege of Jerusalem' examines the text's suggestion that male aristocratic Christians in the religious wars of the Middle Ages secured their difference from Jews through the careful regulation of affect. Holly Crocker's 'Engendering Affect in Hoccleve's Series' likewise considers the regulation of affect, but from the vantage point of an individual subject's construction of masculine identity. In 'Becoming One Flesh, Inhabiting Two Genders: Ugly Feelings and Blocked Emotion in the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale,' Glenn Burger reads Chaucer's text against the background of conduct literature and the changing subject positions marriage offered to husbands and wives in late medieval England to show how the text invites readers to tap into 'subaltern, blocked emotions' (p. 99) and to stand, empathetically and affectively, 'beside the Wife' (p. 95), uneasily in between the pressures of both tradition and innovation. Brantley Bryant turns to manorial bookkeeping in 'Accounting for Affect in the Reeve's Tale' to argue that the [End Page 122] tale shares with manorial texts an interest in the affective experience of surveillance and accounting systems that quantify and objectify all things, including people. Sarah Salih's 'Affect Machines' considers how Hector's tomb in Lydgate's Troy Book generates affect in viewers, extrapolating more broadly to consider the affective work of objects in contexts of worship and thus the usefulness of descriptions of pagan devotional practices in the image wars of the later Middle Ages. In 'Witnessing and Legal Affect in the York Trial Plays,' Emma Lipton offers an intervention in the study of medieval religious drama by describing what she calls 'legal affect' (p. 158), through which we can best understand the affective work of the plays, since viewers' engagement with the plays resembles the engagement of witnesses to a trial in late medieval England, who were subject not only to individual feeling but also to socially generated emotions. Finally, Anke Bernau's 'Affecting Forms: Theorizing with the Palis of Honoure' argues that Gavin Douglas's notorious lists effectively connote affective intensities experienced by his dreamer, whose successful submission to poetic authority only leads to an ultimate goal that carries a moral imperative poetically limiting in its absoluteness. The volume's Afterword, by Anthony Bale, not only wraps up this diverse yet topically focused collection but also counts as a contribution in its own right, as it explores what we can learn about medieval affect and...

“Burn all he has, but keep his books”: Gloria Naylor and the Proper Objects of Feminist Chaucer Studies

Abstract Through a reading of Gloria Naylor's 1992 novel Bailey's Cafe, this article asks whether feminist scholarship can engage Chaucer without reproducing the misogynist and white supremacist values that shape the canon and his central place in it. By evoking and undercutting references to the Canterbury Tales in Bailey's Cafe, Naylor's literary allusion both illuminates how a desire for Chaucer shapes interpretation and reframes Chaucer's text in terms of its relation to Naylor's novel and African-American literary traditions. Following the intersectional feminist methodology proposed in Bailey's Cafe, this article centers Naylor's medievalism in feminist medieval studies of the early 1990s and reads the Franklin's Tale for its allusions to Bailey's Cafe. Ultimately, it concludes that proper objects for new feminist approaches to Chaucer include the sources suppressed in the Canterbury Tales and the legacies of black feminist thought elided in our own critical genealogies.

Chaucer's Bibles: Late Medieval Biblicism and Compilational Form

The use of the Bible in fourteenth-century English secular literature has been surprisingly neglected in the last two decades, largely in response to postwar scholarship carried out under the banner of Robertsonianism and championing allegorical modes of interpretation. Robertsonian exegetics remains (as Lee Patterson said) the “great unfinished business” of medieval literary studies. This essay argues for the rejection of Robertsonianism as an inadequately historicist approach to the medieval Bible, and, by focusing on formal details of the biblical manuscripts evoked in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, it argues that interpretations of the Bible dependent on these codicological forms are more germane to the understanding of Chaucer's text than Robertsonian hermeneutics. Attention to three kinds of manuscript compilations that include biblical material illustrate some of the ways a medieval poet could harness the material forms of books to achieve specific literary ends.

The Emergence of Standard English by John H. Fisher

REVIEWS natural fay" to the "evil witch in later medieval romances" to a rehabil­ itated twentieth-century Morgan who becomes an "admirable oppo­ nent" and "the true love and worthy companion" of Arthur. Thompson argues that her new role points, primarily among female writers, to the "recognition that the best hope for a better world lies in cooperation, rather than competition, between men and women" (p. 342). It is a hopeful conclusion to a volume that brings together a number ofexcel­ lent articles, with only an occasional exception. The critic who ap­ proaches this volume looking for much new research will be disap­ pointed. However, while there is little that is significantly new in Arthurian Women, the volume will no doubt be a useful addition to the library of many Arthurian scholars. JUNE HALL MCCASH Middle Tennessee State University JOHN H. FISHER. The Emergence of Standard English. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996. Pp. 208. $34.95 cloth, $14.95 paper. This collection ofJohn H. Fisher's essays on Standard English provides a welcome and useful arrangement of several related arguments that he has made over the past twenty years. In it one can see more clearly the recent (and older) scholarly traditions on which he has drawn, the orig­ inal contributions that he has made, and the discoveries by others that have followed from those contributions-from his ideas about the processes of linguistic standardization, and specifically about the situa­ tion in England; from his hypotheses and tentative suggestions along the way; and from his collaborative archival work. Fisher's analyses ofthe emergence ofStandard English have made use of an approach to Middle English dialectology laid out by Angus McIntosh and M. L. Samuels in a series of programmatic essays during the 1950s and 1960s. A key element in that approach is the scrutiny of variations that might seem part ofthe writing system only and not nec­ essarily indicators of variations in the spoken language. In some of the early work on that project Samuels noted the importance ofthe Central Midlands dialect in the formation of written Standard English and 241 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER coined the term "Chancery Standard." With attention to Samuels's find­ ings Fisher has argued the double hypothesis that the rise of Standard English was more separate both from the English of London and from the spoken language of any region (because it was a written language) than the traditional histories of the language have recognized. A part of Fisher's argument that especially captures the imagination is the idea that a few individuals, particularly the Masters of Chancery in the early fifteenth century, were strategically placed to alter the course of the English language as no individuals have been able to do since. This idea led Malcolm Richardson to investigate the individuals so placed, including Henry V; and it led John Fisher, together with Richardson and Jane L. Fisher, to collect and edit An Anthology of Chancery English (1984), a valuable complement to R. W. Chambers and Marjorie Daunt's Book ofLondon English: 1384-1425 (1931). Fisher's investigations in sociolinguistics and historical philology have worked well with his skill and learning as an editor and critic of the great Middle English poets to accommodate within his story the evi­ dence from both literary and bureaucratic sources. Three chapters on Chancery English and European chancelleries are followed by two chap­ ters on Chaucer's texts and languages, one chapter on Piers Plowman, one on Caxton, and a final chapter on the history of Received Pronunciation. Whereas literary and sociolinguistic approaches to the history of the lan­ guage are sometimes opposed, Fisher sees the treatment of Chaucerian manuscripts in the early fifteenth century as consistent with the idea of implementing a national language policy. When published in 1988, chapter 5, "Animadversions on the Text of Chaucer," was an essay that focused on the psychology of Chaucer and the reasons why he did not su­ perintend the preservation of a single one of his poems. In the present context, especially in light of chapter 2, "A Language Policy for Lancastrian England" (1992), the essay becomes an implicit "prequel" of sorts, setting up the...

Joseph Holland and the Idea of the Chaucerian Book

The antiquarian Joseph Holland (d. 1605) owned a large, but damaged, Chaucerian manuscript from the early fifteenth century (now Cambridge University Library Gg.4.27). Holland recognized in the manuscript an effort to construct a collection based on Chaucerian authorship, and he repaired and added to it using a copy of the 1598 printed edition of Chaucer’s collected Works. From this edition, he took not only the text of Chaucer’s poems, but paratextual materials as well, including a glossary, biographical information, and a frontispiece. His activities reveal how a distinctly post-medieval understanding of what the collected works of Chaucer should look like shaped the history of this fifteenth-century manuscript, and underscore impact of later stages of transmission can have on the way medieval books are read and preserved.

Chaucer and Array: Patterns of Costume and Fabric Rhetoric in The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and Other Works by Laura F. Hodges (review)

LAURA F. HODGES, Chaucer and Array: Patterns of Costume and Fabric Rhetoric in The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and Other Works. Chaucer Studies Vol. 42. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. xi, 232. isbn: 978-1-8438-4368-9. $99.Laura Hodges has spent much of her scholarly career studying medieval clothing, particularly what she calls costume rhetoric (the sociological and economic implications of medieval dress). Two of her previous books have explored this topic in a more limited way by covering the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, where Hodges cataloged the variety of Chaucer's techniques in depicting clothing but could not determine an overarching pattern in Chaucer's artistic choices. However, in Chaucer and Array, Hodges knits together her earlier work and expands upon it by analyzing Chaucer's descriptions of clothing in the entirety of his writings. In particular, Hodges argues that when we examine Chaucer's writings collectively, he reveals several tendencies in his depictions of wardrobe going beyond mere characterization; these range from meeting genre expectations, to subverting or reversing those same expectations, to creating comic incongruity. The genre of the particular work influences which strategy Chaucer will employ.Hodges is meticulous and thorough. Her book's copious footnotes sometimes threaten to eclipse the entire page, but her writing style is uncluttered by jargon and her arguments are always cogent and careful in their claims. Although Hodges occasionally nods to Michael Camille, Carolyn Dinshaw, and Lorraine Stock in her footnotes, her explications focus less on gender politics and medieval sexuality than one might expect, given the content of the tales. Instead, her readings will be of special benefit to scholars interested in the semiotics of clothing, materialist criticism, and medieval expectations of genre. For the most part, as she explores these topics, her mission is one of augmentation rather than revolution; she usually provides new information that supports older understandings of the text rather than radically seeking to revise how we read a given work. A notable exception to that tendency is her rebuttal of some of the more dated annotations in the standard scholarly text of Chaucer's works, The Riverside Chaucer published in 1987, where Hodges is quick to point out unhelpful, incomplete, or potentially misleading understandings of clothing terminology.In Chaucer and Array, the most thorough explorations are of Chaucer's Knight's Tale, Troilus and Criseyde, The Clerk's Tale, The Miller's Tale, and Sir Thopas, each of which has its own chapter of discussion. …

Pregnant Desire:

Abstract This article examines the scene in Chaucer's Merchant's Tale in which May declares both that she is pregnant and that she suffers from a pregnancy-induced hunger for pears that must be satiated to preserve her life. Contextualizing Chaucer's text within medieval scientific discourses on pica (the medical term for often deviant pregnancy cravings), conception, and the physiological stimulation of desire, the article argues that the scene allows Chaucer to complicate more traditional narratives of human culpability and sinfulness in regards to the body's lusts.

Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts ed. by Carolynn Van Dyke (review)

carolynn van dyke, ed., Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Pp. 286. isbn: 9-781-13704-073-2. $90.The ethically and philosophically praiseworthy purpose of Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts, a collection of sixteen essays, is to push the vertical axis of traditional humananimal relations on its side. In part this involves resisting, and sometimes actively deconstructing, metaphoric animals (e.g., 'the greedy wolf')-those that are to be decoded as readily as livestock to be butchered. In her essay 'Among All Beasts: Affective Naturalism in Late Medieval England' (a kind of theoretical prologue), Aranye Fradenburg argues that, 'when animals appear, they are never simply symbols for something else; the very feet that they can serve as such is already the sign of our commonality with them' (27). Hardly subservient, animals exist alongside humans in an interdependent, sometimes co-adaptive, earthly community.While too often instrumentalized by Homo sapiens, animals in Chaucer's texts are not, according to these authors, easily reducible to anthropocentric conceptualization and activity; they may, for example, point to what Karl Steel describes as all mortals' shared 'noncapacity...to elude exposure to injury and decay (189). Similarly, the image of 'p roude Bayard' subdued with the lash in book five of Troilus and Criseyde, Carolynn Van Dyke argues, suggests not that Troilus is compelled by erotic impulse but instead that humans (like horses) are vulnerable to an indifferent fortune that puts both on the same plane and thus 'limits human exceptionalism' (110). This is probably for the better, as humans' egotistical objectification of nonhumans' is cousin to other forms of domination-sexist, feudal, theocratic. And as Jeremy Withers reveals about animal imagery in the Knight's Tale, masculine elites seek to naturalize their violence with fallacious notions of nonhuman predators, so that beings like boars and lions doubly suffer, becoming prey and pretext.Of course, Van Dyke reminds us that the horse functions as an idea, not a concrete being, in Troilus. Other authors draw attention to the nonhumans that occupy physical space and interact with humans: the Nun's Priest's protagonist Chauntecleer has real agency, and while we might assume that the rooster figures for a man as in a beast feble, we find, writes Carol Freeman in 'Feathering the Text,' that the narrative privileges Chauntecleer by endowing him not only with more vitality than his marginalized human keeper but also with the desire to live beyond the enclosure that 'protects' him. …

Teaching Chaucer and Popular Culture:

This essay is inspired both by an increasing disciplinary contention that Chaucerians engage with popular culture and by a refreshed critical interest (reflected in the burgeoning field of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) in sharing pedagogical innovations and interests with peers within a public forum.2 Notwithstanding lingering professional suspicions about the value of the popular, engagement with popular culture involves the need both to better communicate Chaucer’s aesthetic distinction to the culture at large and to embrace the popular in our teaching. This essay offers a brief meditation on the value of the popular and offers two theoretical approaches that one might use to introduce the study of Chaucer’s popular constructions into the classroom. I suggest, in short, that Chaucer’s reproduction in popular culture has both pedagogical and critical value—both as interpretations of his poetry as it is adapted to

The Walking Dead in Chaucer's Knight's Tale

The Walking Dead in Chaucer's <i>Knight's Tale</i>

Chaucerian Obscenity in the Court of Public Opinion

Chaucerian Obscenity in the Court of Public Opinion

Lydgate Rewrites Chaucer:

Lydgate Rewrites Chaucer:

Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches (review)

Reviewed by: Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches Roger Nicholson Fein, Susanna and David Raybin, eds, Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009; cloth; pp. 280; 3 illustrations; R.R.P. US$65.00; ISBN 9780271035673. In the Preface to his recent collection of essays, the Yale Companion to Chaucer, Seth Lerer notes ‘there is no dearth of Companions to Chaucer’: Chaucer has become indeed ‘something of an industry’. Susanna Fein and David Raybin, editors of Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches, promote this general enterprise extravagantly as a ‘renaissance of new collections … attesting to an esprit in the scholarly community’. Inevitably, however, they face the same question Lerer imagines: ‘Why … produce another assembly of essays?’ The first problem of a Companion’s editor, then, becomes its orientation. Fein and Raybin claim to address the specialist less than an undetermined audience of ‘thoughtful readers’. Their collection is sponsored by Chaucer Review; it will present, therefore, a modern scholarly history and invite its readers ‘to engage with present Chaucerian discussion points of most contention, innovation, and promise’. And these essays too will serve as a ‘blueprint for Chaucer studies in the future’. Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches does have a certain advantage over its competitors – its economy. Its eleven essays are impressively concise accounts of current thinking on issues that place Chaucer’s achievement. They seem more angled, more provisional than most performances in this scholarly genre. My reservations about the volume have less to do with the essays than with its general perspective, represented in the list of topics the contributors were asked to discuss, which seems to have been shaped by the tradition laid down in the Rowlands and Boitani/Mann collections. Modern scholarship here mostly stays within established frames, while re-conceiving the character of issues addressed, typically emphasizing the problematic. So Chaucer’s relation to France and Italy gets discussed in a sequence that actually challenges the traditional history of Chaucer’s influences as he heads towards Englishness; Italy (Robert Edwards) means a ‘transformative encounter’, but never fully comprehended, and the gaps and failures are telling; France (Ardis Butterfield) is not just French sources, but a deep experience of a language that is both native – English, in fact – and not fully possessed, since in some sense it comes from elsewhere. The dream poems (A. C. Spearing) lose their familiar purchase in French sources that underwrite an apparent visionary status, leading instead to emphasis on the fractured experience of dreaming itself. Chaucer’s fabliaux get submerged in a larger question, humour (Laura Kendrick). The gain is immediate since it takes analysis beyond formalism to the psychic moves performed by humour [End Page 206] when it employs incongruities, social reversals, and the kind of refocusing that Bakhtin notes: ‘everything that makes us laugh is close at hand.’ Critical attention to perspective shifts does much to explain the comic force of many textual moments, notably ‘The General Prologue’. The only text that actually gets designated as a topic for discussion – unlike practice in most other Companions – is the dream poem. Other texts do get discussed in exemplary applications of arguments made by these writers about Chaucer’s practice, as when Karla Taylor analyses discursive collisions in The Reeve’s Tale in order to demonstrate how language studies can serve literary interests. Taylor makes a fine point, but also engages with a larger issue, the study of language as also ‘the study of culture’. In this respect, her essay joins others in emphasizing the contextual, the social, the grounds of production, rather than the debatable poetic text itself. In some cases, this shift does indeed seem strictly ‘contemporary’, as when Simon Horobin details the gains in reading the Chaucer text as a manuscript production, while placing Chaucer in a larger field, the study of textual transmission, ‘reading circles’, and the irregular development of an emerging literate society. Mostly, in fact, the social here becomes the object of ‘contention’ and the means by which Chaucer is problematized. Seth Lerer’s study of Chaucer’s reception, shifting emphasis from literary homage towards ‘the common reader’, stresses the recent emergence of reception as ‘sociology of authorship’, citing Victor Kahn: ‘the aim of literary studies should be not the interpretation...

Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer's Pandarus. Gretchen Mieszkowski . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Pp. xi+218.

<i>Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer's Pandarus</i>. Gretchen Mieszkowski . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Pp. xi+218.