Poetics of the Past, Politics of the Present

Contemporary Chaucer across the centuries

For 700 years, Geoffrey Chaucer has spoken to scholars and amateurs alike. How does his work speak to us in the twenty-first century? This volume provides a unique vantage point for responding to this question, furnished by the pioneering scholar of medieval literary studies, Stephanie Trigg: the symptomatic long history. While Trigg's signature methodological framework acts as a springboard for the vibrant conversation that characterises this collection, each chapter offers an inspiring extension of her scholarly insights. The varied perspectives of the outstanding contributors attest to the vibrancy and the advancement of debates in Chaucer studies: thus, formerly rigid demarcations surrounding medieval literary studies, particularly those concerned with Chaucer, yield in these essays to a fluid interplay between Chaucer within his medieval context; medievalism and 'reception'; the rigours of scholarly research and the recognition of amateur engagement with the past; the significance of the history of emotions; and the relationship of textuality with subjectivity according to their social and ecological context. Each chapter produces a distinctive and often startling interpretation of Chaucer that broadens our understanding of the dynamic relationship between the medieval past and its ongoing reevaluation. The inventive strategies and methodologies employed in this volume by leading thinkers in medieval literary criticism will stimulate exciting and timely insights for researchers and students of Chaucer, medievalism, medieval studies, and the history of emotions, especially those interested in the relationship between medieval literature, the intervening centuries and contemporary cultural change.

Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2021

Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2007

Th e battle between the Wife of Bath and her fifth husband, Jankyn, in which she ''rente out of his book a leef, / For which he smoot me so that I was deef,'' 1 enacts the spectacular failure in transmission that results when a coercive literary tradition collides with an audience whose resistance finally wells over into violence. In addition to its commentary on the effects of antifeminist writings in the Wife's autobiographical prologue-the focus of most recent criticism on the Wife of Bath-the battle also figures the very structure of literary tradition, whose motive force is the dynamic interaction of repetition (emulation, imitation) and rupture, 2 as an overt rivalry. As she tells it, the Wife It gives me great pleasure to acknowledge those whose responses to this essay (or to the papers it draws on) have shaped my thinking:

In the construction of his authorial persona, Chaucer sought to identify himself with genres of literature that may have been associated with female readership in the medieval cultural imagination, including vernacular devotional writing (Pseudo-Origen's De Maria Magdalena), conduct literature (the Tale of Melibee), and hagiography (the Introduction to the Man of Law's Tale). By exploiting the cultural resonances of these stereotypically women's genres, Chaucer positioned himself as a writer for an emerging bourgeois audience and distinguished his works as compassionate and socially productive.

Chaucer Review 54.3, 2019

Geoffrey Chaucer is one of English’s most prolific authors and his works are widely read and celebrated even today, hundreds of years later. Many of his works contain vivid portraits of a vast spectrum of people and professions, but perhaps most interestingly he created portraits of women characters that broke away from the mold of the literary tradition and social context of his time. By focusing on Chaucer’s portrayal of women in “The Prologue of the Wife of Bath,” “the Parliament of Fowls,” and Troilus and Criseyde, this paper examines his use of parody, and additions to literary traditions and traditional texts. Contextualizing the proto-gender theory of his time, the popular literary traditions that preceded and coexisted with his, and the factual historical treatment and existence of women, this paper detects certain methods through which Chaucer creates verisimilitudinous women. Although the exact intentions with which Chaucer wrote his women is lost to history, it is easy to see that Chaucer intentionally wrote a few of his women characters in such a way as to break with the tradition of his time and provide a voice to an otherwise voiceless community, and liberate his women from the bonds of literary tradition.

Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020

Studies in the Age of Chaucer is the yearbook of the New Chaucer Society. It publishes articles on the writing of Chaucer and his contemporaries, their antecedents and successors, and their intellectual and social contexts. More generally, articles explore the culture and writing of later medieval Britain (1200-1500). SAC also includes an annotated bibliography and reviews of Chau cer-related publications.

Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2005

Arthuriana, 2016

2014

This is an English Language version of an article which is published in French here: https://lamop.univ-paris1.fr/fileadmin/lamop/publications/Cahiers_Histoire_Textuelle/CEHTL_6__2013_/Davis.pdf I recommend that the work is cited in its published French version

Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2008

Over the last several decades, the "religious turn" in Chaucer studies has opened up numerous avenues for analysis of Chaucer's poetics without completely resolving questions about their specifically Christian character, or lack thereof. Approaches to answering such questions include biographical analysis, which in Chaucer's case seems least likely to yield substantial conclusions: we simply don't have enough biographical data to be confident that Chaucer held strongly to one, or another, or no version of Christian faith. Our limited sources of knowledge about Chaucer's distinctly secular professional life certainly give us no basis for confident assertions about his own personal piety. Unlike his contemporary John Lydgate, for example, Chaucer was no monk. On the other hand, given the numerous, lively and vigorous forms of lay piety in Chaucer's era, his lack of religious vocation and/or sacerdotal ordination is not per se a limiting factor on the possibility that his poetics is robustly Christian at a deep philosophical level. One important movement of lay piety, founded on protest against ecclesial corruption, was inspired in large part by the indignation and influence of another Chaucer contemporary, John Wyclif, and this movement has been the focus of a substantial body of scholarship over the last several decades. Not surprisingly, possible allusions to Wyclif's ideas found in Chaucer's poems, placed under various scholarly lenses, have led to recurrent speculation as to the possibility of a generally heterodox or, indeed, a decidedly Wycliffite bent in Chaucer's poetic oeuvre. ii In order to test the notion that Chaucer's poeisis reflects a Wycliffite bent, scholars must consider most especially the Wycliffite doctrines themselves, many of which are more negative than positive: that is, they express a piety that is characterized above all by objection to and protest against real or perceived ecclesiastical abuses of a divine calling. Many scholars have speculated that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, with their pungent, pointed satire directed at the foibles of errant clergy and vowed religious, could well share a common spirit with the Wycliffite reformist agenda. That Wyclif's ideas and the movement he sparked have long been considered a type of "premature reformation" is no surprise, and if in fact Chaucer's poetics is distinctively Wycliffiteleaning, we should be unsurprised by the manifestation of a "Protestant Chaucer" across prior generations of Chaucer scholarship. On the other hand, in spite of the pungent anticlerical satire that features so prominently in the Tales, there is much evidence to suggest that Chaucer's poetics is more genuinely Catholic than heretical, and scholars are quite right to continue to subject the "Wycliffite" Chaucer to careful, multivalent scrutiny. The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards, a late fourteenth century precursor to Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, provides a handy summary of the accusations leveled by Wyclif and his followers at the late medieval church. Among the aspects of Wycliffite thought and polemic which are represented in the Conclusions and relevant to the Canterbury Tales, the third and eleventh conclusions rail against the celibacy mandated for secular clergy, for monks, and for nuns, while the ninth conclusion rejects the sacrament of penance. Certainly Chaucer had a keen eye for manifestations of clerical corruption, but it is doubtful that his Tales, taken as a reasonably complete and unified work of art, reflect the outright heretical loathing of ecclesial foibles that characterizes iii the most savage aspects of Wycliffite polemic. Furthermore, there are some important indicators, deserving of deeper investigation, that Chaucer's poetic ecclesiology as crafted in the Tales, is consciously an orthodox ecclesiology characterized especially by the theological virtue of hope, as against the heretical ecclesiology of suspicion, fear, and contempt proffered, all too often, by Wyclif and the polemicists whom he inspired.

1994

Messages, Sages and Ages, 2016

The article explores how Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales discusses human sexuality as a major thematic concern in both its normative and its performative dimension, and sex, an (in)tractable issue throughout the Middle Ages, as a core motif that helps the author to explore the extant tension between the human and the ideal. On the other hand, parody and audience/reader response are important instruments in the medieval poet’s strategy of approaching delicate matters in his pilgrims’ tales, which become readily apparent in the ‘order of play’ in which the tales come. The Miller disrupts the story-telling order because this disruption serves Chaucer’s purpose of questioning the validity of the courtly love concept through a parody of courtly romance, much like the poet’s purported distancing from the heretical views upon human sexuality expressed by the Miller can be decoded as an attempt to restore the balance of power between doctrinal inflexibility and humans’ timeless desire f...