Browse Items (15783 total)

Anthologizes seventeen essays by Knight, “written over several decades focused on the social and political contexts of medieval literature," three previously unpublished, one of which pertains to Chaucer: Chapter 14, "Chaucer’s Fabliaux and Late…

Argues that Pizan and Chaucer "used their writing to open up educational opportunities" for their readers, seeking "to facilitate practices of engaged reading" for an expanding vernacular audience, with Chaucer modeling "problematic reading…

Demonstrates the importance and central role of the "clerical proletariat"--i.e., clerics who worked "in liminal spaces between the ecclesiastical and lay worlds"--in the proliferation of late medieval books and literature in English, with primary…

Offers advice on how an undergraduate course focusing on Chaucer can serve the curricula of both literary and linguistics programs. Proposes several learning outcomes, and provides classroom strategies and emphases whereby linguistic and literary…

Opens with an account of teaching PrT in comparison with Patience Agbabi's adaptation of it in "Telling Tales" (2015), helping to introduce the goal of the entire volume: promoting resistance to racist, xenophobic, and homophobic distortions and…

Analyzes the relationship between conceptions of social class and literary representations of them in Britain from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. Chapter 2, "Perceptions of Class in the Late Middle Ages," addresses William Langland's…

Discusses the Pardoner's "queerness and fitness to tell a moral tale" in light of ethical concerns about J. K. Rowling’s "public comments about trans women," suggesting pedagogical uses.

Assesses Chaucer's and Lydgate's inset lyrics for the ways that they imply "a sense of poetry as an assemblage of physical materials collected from the past, and poets as the collectors and mediators of those materials." Considers aspects of BD;…

Based on "Sara Ahmed's phenomenological theorization of 'orientation',” offers case studies of how "the orientation(s) of medieval readers might have influenced their experience of a text," discussing the experience of reading CT in Wynkyn De Worde's…

Analyzes "how English and Scottish literature and law during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries connected the figure of the tapster to sex work, transgression, public harm, and dangerous agency over men," and traces residue of this misogyny…

Assesses references to ale and wine in PardPT as they reflect the Pardoner's "submerged desire" to bond with the Host and his simultaneous attempt to compete with Harry as leader of the pilgrimage. Argues that "the metaphorical ale-stake associated…

Thirteen essays, an introduction by the editors, and an afterword by Ren Navarro "describe alcohol consumption in the Middle Ages across much of Northern Europe, engage with the various myths employed in modern craft beer advertising and beer…

Investigates Anne of Bohemia as a figure of queenship--socially, politically, and economically-- along the way questioning arguments for claims that she was Chaucer's patron (often grounded in LGWP), treating them as probabilities rather than facts.…

Clarifies the "centrality and complexities" of political and ethical law discourse in late medieval England, showing how it is used in works by Thomas Usk and how in TC and KnT Chaucer "questions the view that the natural law is an unshakeable…

Contemplates the value of studying Chaucer in light of national and international calls to decenter the poet and his works, considering the history and politics of these calls, the nature of canon-making, and several instances where "Chaucer's work…

Describes the history of digitizing the journal SAC, commenting on the future of print journals and "the overall impact of digitization on scholarly societies."

Surveys historical interest and recent theorization of emotion and affect produced by 'works, and assesses the role of books in the opening of TC (tears as ink) and in WBP (Jankyn’s book) as "affective, emotional objects that arouse a range of…

Rethinks the uses and "affordances" of paper in medieval England and on the Continent, i.e., its potentialities, manifestations, and material significations in book production and other cultural practices. Opens with an explanation of how Chaucer…

Examines the "“fissure between spoken utterances and the body's voice" in Arveragus's burst into tears (FranT 5.1479–80), engaging the theme of truth in the Tale and the "dynamic between . . . irruptions of the somatic voice and the dissociative…

Investigates free indirect discourse in GP, focusing on Chaucer's personae, the variety of his narrative positions, and their “focalisations” internal and external to the diegesis of the poem. Comments on focalization in the descriptions of the Wife…

Twelve essays by various authors on the concept of "voice" in medieval literature, with an introduction by the editors, an appreciative tribute to David Lawton by John M. Ganim, and a comprehensive index. Generally, the essays focus on the literature…

Explores emotion as a device of rhetoric from Antiquity through the fifteenth century, and describes the influence of Aristotle's "Rhetoric" on political, ethical, and literary discourse from the thirteenth century forward. Assesses a wide range of…

Argues that "the vernacular literature of late medieval England contributes importantly to the theorizing of psychological subjectivity and that this theorizing is connected fundamentally with the history of shame"; focuses on selected works by…

Uses the concept of "semyvif " (half-alive) to examine "Piers Plowman," the "Tale of Beryn," TC, SNT, and "Morte Darthur" for ways that they broaden "our historical understanding of disability and its conceptual range."

Chapter 3, "Gower and Estates Satire before Chaucer," includes brief mention of Chaucer in situating and analyzing Gower's uses of estates satire in his "Mirour de l’Omme," "Vox Clamantis," and Confessio
Amantis.