The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War

Description: Explores the political, linguistic, and cultural relations between "France" and "England" before the stabilization of the areas' geographical boundaries. Interdependence between the two areas challenges modern notions of nationality, linguistic priority, and cultural identity, especially as reflected and refracted in diplomacy, invective, and literary exchange. Butterfield focuses on Chaucer as a central case in these reciprocal exchanges and comments on a wide variety of Chaucer's contemporaries on either side of the Channel, especially Deschamps, Froissart, and Gower.; Includes sustained commentary on KnT and TC (diplomatic language), ShT and MerT (mercantile language), BD and TC (vernacular self-consciousness), and the Deschamps ballade to Chaucer. The discussion extends forward to Pisan, Caxton, and Shakespeare.

Chaucer Subjects: Language and Word Studies; Book of the Duchess; Troilus and Criseyde; Knight and His Tale; Merchant and His Tale; Shipman and His Tale; Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations