This examination of noise, and particularly shouts, in chaucer's writing focuses especially on the hue and cry, which appears strikingly often in chaucer's narratives. As responses to dangers and assaults, actual and threatened, these cries reflect both drama in chaucer's fictions and the medieval system of public alerts to accidents and crimes, their detection and punishment. chaucer's handling of the theme engages with questions about the reliability of narratives and also with problems of rape and sexual consent, misogynistic narratives and fictions of social class. It also examines how the motif of shouts as alerts to misdeeds can, in different instances, either question or confirm antifeminist and antisemitic narratives.
Abstract: Love letters and love lyrics are a staple of medieval romance literature. These unsolicited, secret declarations of desire are one method by which a would-be lover, usually male, declares his love, loyalty, and service to a recipient who may be unaware of the sender's feelings or, at worst, his very existence. Sending a love letter was a hazardous undertaking since the proffered indenture of service might be rejected outright. Despite this jeopardy, giving love letters and verses is motivated by some degree of hope, however remote, and in this the chaucerian lovers examined in this essay are no exception. Focusing on chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde , and Troilus's fellow love-letter and lyric authors, Damyan and Absolon from The Canterbury Tales , this essay explores chaucer's use of love letters and lyrics as a rhetorical strategy in the game of courtly love, and the consequences of the recipient's reaction. chaucer shows us male would-be lovers who are rejected outright and even for those who do succeed in persuading their lady of their sincerity no lasting relationship is established. This essay places chaucer's literary representation of the suffering brought about through sending and receiving love letters and love lyrics in dialogue with the impact of love missives as recorded in manuscripts that circulated in the households of the wealthy.
Abstract: Financial discourse is applicable to many aspects of lived experience, as Geoffrey chaucer demonstrates in his ventriloquizing of a female cloth merchant, the Wife of Bath. As chaucer's Alisoun boldly states in her Prologue ( c . 1437), 'wynne whoso may, for al is for to selle'. For Alisoun, and by implication for chaucer's contemporary society, the knowledge that everything and everyone has a value to be exploited, is key. commercial discourse is central to Alisoun's portrayal in her Prologue and to the exchange of knowledge and marriage in her Tale . Business practice and phrasing are crucial to Alisoun's understanding of life and unite her roles as a medieval woman: spiritual, marital, sexual, and economic. By examining Margery Kempe's Boke (1436–38) and a range of the fifteenth-century Paston women's papers alongside The Wife of Bath's Prologue , this essay demonstrates that this was not just the case for chaucer's fictional Alisoun, but for a variety of women from the medieval English mercantile élite themselves.
Abstract: Chaucer's Wife of Bath can be read in completely opposite and seemingly irresolvable ways: as a protofeminist urban guerilla or as the embodiment of the medieval antifeminist stereotype of the quarrelsome, sexually appetitive woman. Feminist psychoanalytic readings take up a third position: that the wife converts her subordinate place in the symbolic order to an affirmation of the feminine. All three positions depend on normative views of sexual difference and femininity. I draw on Jacques Lacan's radical account of sexual difference as neither biology nor cultural construction but as the articulation of an impasse in language to argue for new ways of reading both the wife's femininity and some contemporary feminist dilemmas beyond or after binary thought.
Abstract: This chapter explores a little-known pastiche of chaucerian verse by Alexander Pope, 'Women ben ful of Ragerie', which was declared when it was first printed to be 'A Tale of chaucer lately found in an old Manuscript'. It considers the place of medieval literature amidst the Battle of the Books, the bitter argument about antiquity and authenticity, as well as the anxieties about imitation and authenticity which pervaded the editing of chaucer in the eighteenth century. It argues that considering spurious or false works such as Pope's unacknowledged imitation provides us with new ways of understanding how Chaucer was read, established, and understood in the eighteenth century and beyond — not merely as adulterated works to be excised from chaucer's name, but as evidence of rich, sustained, and playful engagement with chaucer's writing.
Abstract: I argue that contemporary critical translation theories shed light on both Geoffrey chaucer's translational environment and a cluster of five translational actions: communication, transformation, transportation, hermeneutics, and liminality. Each translational cluster has its desired goals, and each leaves its traces. They infiltrate chaucer's writing practice in varying degrees, and they appear in various combinations — even in works that are not translations, do not contain translations, or do not pose as translations. I close with a case study of The Squire's Tale , a canterbury tale with no known analogues and only tangential sources. Abetted by the five translational actions, however, the tale takes the guise of a translation, one that stretches beyond the British Isles into the outer limits of the world as known and imagined in late-medieval England.
Introduction:Chaucer Sue Niebrzydowski (bio) It is a great pleasure to welcome you to this issue of the Yearbook of English Studies devoted to Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340/45–1400). This London-based poet may be familiar through encounters with his work at school or from medieval literature courses at university. Today, the New Chaucer Society, a professional academic organization dedicated to the study of Chaucer and the Middle Ages, founded in 1979, continues to provide a forum for academic discussion of Geoffrey Chaucer and his age. Chaucer's reach, however, extends far beyond encounters in an educational setting. Chaucer's life and work has been imagined in novels such as Philippa Morgan's Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women (2005) and in Michael B. Herzog's This Passing World: The Journal of Geoffrey Chaucer (2019). The Canterbury Tales exert a particular fascination, perhaps because of early encounters with certain tales in school, inspiring reworkings into novels such as Peter Ackroyd's The Clerkenwell Tales (2003). The tales were also adapted by Mike Poulton for the Royal Shakespeare Company in the Swan Theatre, Stratford (2005), and adapted into films, by Pier Paolo Pasolini, I racconti di Canterbury (1972), and by Jonathan Myerson, The Canterbury Tales (Animated) (2001). Chaucer's collection of pilgrims has also been updated for a twenty-first-century, multicultural Britain by poet Patience Agbabi in Telling Tales (2014). And as Ruth Evans observes in her contribution to this volume, the Wife of Bath is 'having a moment' as Chaucer's loquacious pilgrim in particular continues to inspire contemporary authors including Jean 'Binta' Breeze's poetic revisioning, 'The Wife of Bath in Brixton Market' (2009), Caroline Bergvall's monologue, Alisoun Sings (2019), Zadie Smith's play, The Wife of Willesden (2021), and Karen Brooks's novel, The Good Wife of Bath (2021). Marion Turner's study, Chaucer Here and Now (2023), reveals how successive centuries of readers and creatives have discovered in Chaucer's oeuvre something that speaks to the zeitgeist of their own historical moment. What is it about this medieval poet's work, written over half a millennium before our own time, that still resonates? Chaucer was a poet who was very aware of a world beyond his own immediate environs. He composed in the Middle English that he would have heard within and around London, promoting the [End Page 1] vernacular as a suitable language for poetry, but at the same time he looked across the Channel for inspiration. As such, Chaucer might best be described as European in outlook, having an eye to the literature that was trending on the continent.1 Fluent in French, Chaucer rendered into Middle English a portion of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's Le Roman de la Rose, a popular and influential allegorical dream vision of the nature of love.2 Chaucer also translated from Latin into Middle English the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, a work that was influential throughout the Middle Ages. Chaucer's translational skill is subject to new interpretation by Candace Barrington in this present volume. Doomed lovers from Ovid and Virgil inspire tales in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women while the influence of Petrarch and especially Boccaccio's Il Filostrato underpins Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde.3 Following Boccaccio in The Decameron, Chaucer composed The Canterbury Tales, an anthology in which a group of pilgrims participates in a tale-telling competition. Chaucer's European literary interests are employed by this vintner's son to put new wine into old bottles and produce his own creative cuvée. Chaucer lived through turbulent times, seeing outbreaks of the Black Death (1348 and 1361–62), war with France, in which Chaucer served in John of Gaunt's army, religious division caused by the Great Schism (1378), the death of two kings (Edward III in 1377 and his heir, Richard II, in 1399), economic upheaval that culminated in the Peasant's Revolt of 1381, and the fall of Richard II's closest advisors in 1388.4 In experiencing pandemic, war in Europe, the death of a long-serving monarch (Edward III reigned from 1327 to 1377), religious division, economic crisis, and the downfall...
Abstract: Aphra Behn's The Widow Ranter, or the History of Bacon in Virginia is her last play, first performed posthumously in 1689. The play is a highly fictionalized account of Bacon's Rebellion of 1676. It is not only one of the first 'travel plays' by a woman but also the first by a playwright known to have spent time in colonial America. I argue that Behn's character the widow Ranter is a 'reincarnation' of Chaucer's Wife of Bath in the New world. Behn's play translates the wife, who has a history of association with religious and social rebellion, to colonial Virginia to negotiate both gender and class dynamics in the construction of potentially rebellious colonial identities vis-à-vis England.
Abstract: In chaucer's Knight's Tale , Theseus is faced with four political rivals whom he defeats in battle: Ypolita, Emilye, Palamon, and Arcite. He marries Ypolita but imprisons Emilye, Palamon, and Arcite perpetually because they are more dangerous free and too problematic to kill. Giorgio Agamben's study of the homo sacer helps to show how these three imprisoned characters have only 'bare life', that they can be killed but not sacrificed. Their lives only gain value when they serve to improve or adumbrate Theseus's sovereign power. For Theseus, his military successes must be paired with rhetorical effectiveness in justifying exceptions to his previous rulings and maintaining his power in an unstable world.
Abstract:What is the relationship to the 'contemporary' — to the 'now' — in Scottish Gaelic poetry? How are the idea of the ‘present’, the minoritized status of Gaelic, and the evolving relationship between language and landscape (and language and meaningless) figured in poems? Taking these questions as a starting point, this essay explores — through the ideas of Agamben, Latour, and Christopher Whyte — a range of contemporary poems by Gaelic writers (including Meg Bateman, Ruaraidh MacThòmais, Whyte, Rody Gorman, Angus Peter Campbell, and Deborah Moffatt), and the ways in which the poets respond — in anger, with humour, with defiance — to linguistic and environmental crises, to the pressures associated with oblivion and translation, and to the pervasive surrounding fug of English.
