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

Author / Editor
Butterfield, Ardis.

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

Published
New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Physical Description
xxx, 444 pp.; 10 b&w figs.; 3 maps.

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