Books and Co-edited Volumes by Candace Barrington
New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession, 2023
The topic for this issue’s primary cluster was inspired by The Teaching Archive: A New History fo... more The topic for this issue’s primary cluster was inspired by The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (2021) by Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan. Our Teaching Archive cluster presents four essays documenting the long-term influence of four medievalists: Aranye Fradenburg Joy, Clifford Flanigan, Joaquin Martínez Pizarro, and Derek Pearsall. This issue also includes of a recap of the longstanding undergraduate conference at Moravian University and short histories of three scholarly societies: the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, the John Gower Society, and the International Piers Plowman Society. We continue our two standard features with “How I teach…” contributions on Christina Fitzgerald’s edition of The York Corpus Christi Play (2018) and David Lawton’s edition of The Norton Chaucer (2019), and a “Conversations” response to the Medieval Studies and Secondary Education cluster in New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession’s Fall 2022 issue.
New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profersion, 2021
This issue explores best practices for confronting issues of sexual violence in medieval literary... more This issue explores best practices for confronting issues of sexual violence in medieval literary texts with a generation of students attuned to identifying and condemning sexual harassment and assault. Because many of our students—whatever their gender identification—have histories with many kinds of sexual harm, articles by Carissa M. Harris, Sarah Powrie, and Sara Torres and Rebecca McNamara offer thoughtful, trauma-informed pedagogical approaches to aid us as we approach these difficult texts. Our fourth article, by Holly A. Crocker, illuminates the deep-rooted systems that feed women’s vulnerability and work to silence even the strongest among us.
The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature, 2019
Despite an unprecedented level of interest in the interaction between law and literature over the... more Despite an unprecedented level of interest in the interaction between law and literature over the past two decades, readers have had no accessible introduction to this rich engagement in medieval and early Tudor England. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature addresses this need by combining an authoritative guide through the bewildering maze of medieval law with concise examples illustrating how the law infiltrated literary texts during this period. Foundational chapters written by leading specialists in legal history prepare readers to be guided by noted literary scholars through unexpected conversations with the law found in numerous medieval texts, including major works by Chaucer, Langland, Gower, and Malory. Part I contains detailed introductions to legal concepts, practices and institutions in medieval England, and Part II covers medieval texts and authors whose verse and prose can be understood as engaging with the law.
The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales (OACCT) is a volume of introductory chapters fo... more The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales (OACCT) is a volume of introductory chapters for first-time, university-level readers of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. The chapters have been created and edited by professional scholars of Chaucer, and all material is released open access and free of charge for classroom, scholarly, and personal use. https://opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu/
Special issue of Chaucer Review, edited with Emily Steiner
_American Chaucers_ examines Chaucer’s popular reception in the United States—with a brief glance... more _American Chaucers_ examines Chaucer’s popular reception in the United States—with a brief glance at his earliest colonial readers. As is well known, “popular” Chaucer bears little resemblance to “academic” Chaucer. The works are invariably modernized, usually bowdlerized, and often rendered into prose. In America, acquaintance with Chaucer and his poetry becomes another commodity, a distinguishing social marker, distributed among the burgeoning middle class. And as a commodity, its status as a literary text becomes less important. Not only do Americans read Chaucer’s works through extra-linguistic media, such as illustrations, enactments, plays, operas, and film, but they freely transform his name and works into vessels for conveying peculiarly modern American values.
_American Chaucers_ is the first study to examine exclusively American appropriate of Chaucer for non-academic audiences.
Introduces materials not published on before: Katharine Gordon Brinley's one-woman performances, MacKaye’s “The Canterbury Pilgrims” (as play, pageant, and opera), Wheaton College pageants, and James Norman Hall's _Flying with Chaucer." The book is not just a medievalism survey, but a careful examination of the cultural and social influences in Americans’ uses of Chaucer.
Scholars have long been aware of the looming presence of law in medieval English literature, from... more Scholars have long been aware of the looming presence of law in medieval English literature, from Christ as a litigious redemptor to Chaucer's deal-making Host in _The Canterbury Tales_. Most scholarly work on the subject has been confined either to tracking down representations of legal practices in texts or to examining formal questions relating to legal discourse. In a groundbreaking departure, _The Letter of the Law_ suggests that law and literature should be understood as parallel forms of discourse-at times complementary, at times antagonistic, but always mutually illuminating.
Emily Steiner and I maintain that medievalists are uniquely placed to make valuable new contributions to the subject of law and literature, in part because of the inherently interdisciplinary nature of the study of medieval law, inseparable as it was from political theory and theology. The editors bring together medievalists from all over North America to explore the development of vernacular English literature within the context of legal discourse, practice, and conflict.
Treating texts as varied as Chaucer's _Knight's Tale_, the fifteenth-century Robin Hood ballads, and William Thorpe's account of his own heresy trial, the nine never-before-published essays in this volume reveal the intersections of legal and documentary culture with vernacular literary production. They establish that law and English literature were intimately bound up in processes of institutional, linguistic, and social change, and they explain how the specific conditions of medieval law and literature offer useful models in studying later periods. An appendix contains a translation by Andrew Galloway of _History or Narration Concerning the Manner and Form of the Miraculous Parliament at Westminster in the Year 1386_.
Global Chaucers by Candace Barrington
Literature Compass's Special Issue of Global Circulation Project: Chaucer's Global Compaignye, 2018
Encompassing perspectives beyond what Braj B. Kachru terms the “Inner Circle” of Anglophone hegem... more Encompassing perspectives beyond what Braj B. Kachru terms the “Inner Circle” of Anglophone hegemony, this collection of essays presents a vivid and distinct opportunity to appreciate how Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales adapts to life across disparate languages (Persian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Danish, Spanish, Turkish, American Sign Language, and internal varieties of London English) while also moving across cultures (Shiite Iran, Brazilian Gauchoria, Tokyo academia, rural Denmark, Mexican universities, Ottoman Turkey, US Deaf culture, and London's multiethnic East End communities). The term compaignye, a quintessentially Chaucerian keyword absorbed into Middle English through Anglo‐French, suggests an intimate multitude of people sharing a common interest or purpose. To this end, our textual compaignye incorporates contributors who are academics in the traditional sense as well as authors and artists who operate alongside normative structures of the academy. Many of the compaignye's so‐called “nonacademics” have garnered prestigious awards for their creative work, and “amateur” cultural artifacts reveal that a deep love of Chaucerian material characterizes both academic and nonacademic endeavors. Such a compaignye, with its many forms of expertise, can expand our knowledge by creating “a vibrant resonance,” as Carolyn Dinshaw explains, between “amateur [popular] medievalism and professional [academic] medievalism.” As the fields of comparative literary analysis, translation theory, and medievalism studies increasingly move away from models of textual “fidelity” that reinforce static distinctions between an “original” and a “derivative,” we offer this cluster of essays as an example of the benefits gained by pluralizing the modes through which we understand processes of linguistic transfer and cultural adaptation.
Through the comparative study of non-Anglophone translations of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The
Canterbur... more Through the comparative study of non-Anglophone translations of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The
Canterbury Tales,we can achieve the progressive goals of Emily Apter’s “translational transnationalism”
and Edward Said’s “cosmopolitan humanism.” Both translation and humanism were intrinsic to
Chaucer’s initial composition of the Tales, and in turn, both shaped Chaucer’s later reception, often in
ways that did a disservice to his reputation and his verse. In this essay, Candace Barrington argues that
comparative translation provides a means whereby new modes of translation, like Apter’s, can promote
a different version of humanism, like Said’s; she demonstrates this process in a brief philological study of
Nazmi A˘gıl’s Turkish translation of The Squire’s Tale. While we can see the infusion of Turkish values
and perspectives in the new text, we can also see that the Turkish reveals new insights into Chaucer’s
subtle and nuanced use of language.
Global Chaucers, our multi-national, multi-lingual, multi-year project, intends to locate, catalo... more Global Chaucers, our multi-national, multi-lingual, multi-year project, intends to locate, catalog, translate, archive, and analyze non-Anglophone appropriations and translations of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Since its founding in 2012, this project has rapidly changed in response to scholars’ diverse interests and our expanding discoveries. Almost all these changes were prompted and made possible by our online presence (including a blog and Facebook group), and digital media comprises our primary means for gathering information, disseminating our findings, advertising conferences and events, and promoting the resource to other scholars. Because digital media can help disparate people traverse geographical and linguistic barriers, Global Chaucers has been able to exceed its initial intent to create an archive by developing a network of scholars, translators, and students seeking to engage in manifold ways with non-Anglophone reworkings of Chaucerian material from around the world. Reflecting on our project undertakings to date, this discussion presents some of the practical challenges we face and future directions our efforts might take, and we hope this discussion will help serve others who seek to launch group endeavors that traverse academic and nonacademic communities.
Articles by Candace Barrington
Caroline Bergvall’s Medievalist Poetics: Migratory Texts and Transhistoric Methods, 2023
To see how Bergvall’s Meddle English explores our complex engagement with seemingly abandoned rem... more To see how Bergvall’s Meddle English explores our complex engagement with seemingly abandoned remnants of the past, this essay focuses on “The Franker Tale (Deus Hic, 2),” the third of five “Shorter Chaucer Tales.” Within this tale, I focus on three levels of one specific organizing device, parataxis, which I understand as the juxtaposition of narratological and semantic units. This juxtaposition does not overtly specify either a causative or hierarchical connection between the two adjacent units. Instead, parataxis urgently trains and persistently trusts the reader to discover and understand the unstated connections. Bergvall’s parataxis unsettles fixed relationships and questions how we allow the past to shape the present.
Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies (China) , 2022
This essay examines a combination of fivw translational modalities that give Chaucer's The Physi... more This essay examines a combination of fivw translational modalities that give Chaucer's The Physician's Tale the appearance of a translation when, in fact, it is not. The five modalities shaping Chaucer’s translational practices are appropriation, transformation, transportation, hermeneutics, and liminality. Chaucer learned and experimented with this mode of pretending to translate early in his writing career. Because it gave him enormous creative range, he never abandoned the mode, scattering bits of faux translation throughout his oeuvre.
Time Mechanics: Postmodern Poetry and Queer Medievalisms, 2022
This essay explores Patience Agbabi’s queer medievalism in three poems from Telling Tales: "Unfin... more This essay explores Patience Agbabi’s queer medievalism in three poems from Telling Tales: "Unfinished Business," "I Go Back to 1967," and "Joined-Up Writing." Each discussion is neither linear nor progressive but rather a constellationof close readings and meditations on the queer formal qualities of Agbabi’s poetry, the sociopolitical implications of the poet’s medievalism, and the layered understandings that arise through acts of reading and re-reading Chaucer’s three tales. In this essay, we attend to how Agbabi queers Chaucer and his texts, which have long been used to support, justify, and legitimize centuries of racism, homophobia,and sexism. Agbabi’s poetry does not present Telling Tales as a modern corrective to a fourteenth-century “original” text, but rather as part of a mirroring, a circling back to rethink the medieval past and its presence in the present.
Time Mechanics: Postmodern Poetry and Queer Medievalisms, 2022
Jos Charles’s “anteseedynts” invoke a linguistic medievalism that defamiliarizes the familiar (ou... more Jos Charles’s “anteseedynts” invoke a linguistic medievalism that defamiliarizes the familiar (our written language) and draws the reader into a most intimate process (the transition from one embodied gender to another). Across its 60 lyrics, we are taken from the room where “the grl beguines” (2) and led to the point where she “a woake 1 mornynge / 2 see the hole whorld off thynges befor me (61). We might be initially surprised by this invocation of fourteenth-century English for exploring “transitioning” because we erroneously limit our concept of “moving from one gender to another” with gender-confirming surgery, a medical procedure available only in past 60 years. Our misperceptions are corrected when we realize that feeld is concerned with a wide array of transitioning’s social, physical, emotional, and medical aspects. In this light, Jos Charles’s deft handling of Chaucerian English makes the juxtaposition seem inevitable. The resulting verse becomes, without pushing the analogy too hard, akin to medieval hocket (so brilliantly modernized by Meredith Monk in Facing North [1990/1992])– wherein two voices of different timbres share the melody line sequentially (not simultaneously). Like hocket, feeld allows two timbres– Middle English and Present-Day English– to occupy the same line. Because it encourages us to engage playfully (and attentively) with language and meaning-making, the verse teaches Charles’s readers to recognize and abandon engrained sensibilities that frequently govern literary interpretation. This defamiliarization and destabilization through playful readings also exposes the raw, uncertain realities of a trans experience to her readers, who are confronted with the uncomfortable question: “how manie | holes wuld blede / befor | u believ / imma grl” (55). Her use of Middle English recreates the felt experience of reading a text in a language simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. At the same time she addresses the lack of linguistic options for describing a trans experience, she also challenges readers to explore new reading experiences. She explains in an interview that the “perceived difficulty” of the orthography reminds her of “trying to learn to read” and the “insecurity of not being sure how to pronounce things or what something means.” This difficulty, she continues, lends itself to recreate that experience of “figuring out where one’s place already is in language, where one fits– horribly, surprisingly, pleasantly– and doesn’t fit.” The resulting transpoetics nudges readers away from a hermeneutic that defines either gender or semantics as predetermined, fixed, or hidden.
Le Livre de la Duchesse et autres textes , 2021
This short introduction accompanies Jonathan Fruoco's translation of Chaucer's _Anelida and Arcit... more This short introduction accompanies Jonathan Fruoco's translation of Chaucer's _Anelida and Arcite__, part of his project to translate Chaucer's entire ouevre into French.
The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and LIterature, 2019
This essay considers five of Chaucer's Canterbury tales--The Physician's Tale, The Second Nun's T... more This essay considers five of Chaucer's Canterbury tales--The Physician's Tale, The Second Nun's Tale, The Man of Law's Tale, The Tale of Melibee, and The Wife of Bath's Tale--in light of the documents associated with Cecily Chaumpaigne and "de raptu meo."
Medieval and Rennaissance Studies (China), 2022
This article considers one way that translational practices infiltrated and shaped Chaucer’s work... more This article considers one way that translational practices infiltrated and shaped Chaucer’s work (even those works not generally identified as translations): faux translation. To see this manifestation at work in a specific tale, I examine “The Physician’s Tale” through five translational modalities borrowed from Chaucer’s translational practices: appropriation, transformation, transportation, hermeneutics, and liminality. By bringing them together, even in a text that was clearly not a translation, Chaucer gave a non-translation (such as “The Physician’s Tale”) the appearance of a translation, thereby availing himself of the enormous creative range it permitted.
The United States of Medievalism, 2021
My account of Medieval New York City traces a series of three walks, pilgrimages one might say, I... more My account of Medieval New York City traces a series of three walks, pilgrimages one might say, I made to better understand this modern American city’s engagement with the Middle Ages, a historical period that might seem unrelated to a city not founded until 1624. Previously, study of New York’s urban engagement with the medieval past—that is, its “medievalism”—has often been structured around buildings designed and built during the Gothic and Romanesque revival (and re-revival) between 1830 and 1930. Because limiting my study to these buildings seemed to ignore the breadth and depth of New York City’s multiple medievalisms, I made two decisions. One, I would experience New York’s medievalisms by walking, the most purposeful way for listening to the conversations among the city’s varied medievalisms and the people who lived within them. Two, I would structure my walks as a pilgrimage following The Stations of the Cross: Art. Passion. Justice, a 2018 public art installation inviting “people of all faiths and spiritualities . . . on a creative and contemplative journey through Manhattan to consider injustice across the human experience.” Part of a project co-founded by Dr. Aaron Rosen and The Rev. Dr. Catriona Laing, The Stations of the Cross re-creates itself every year with different artwork in a different global city. In its 2018 Manhattan iteration, the pilgrimage’s fourteen stops included nine installations housed in examples of architectural medievalism and another two installations invoking medievalism in other ways. Podcasts associated with each stop placed the artwork in purposeful dialogue with the installation’s larger themes—art, passion, justice. Although The Stations of the Cross does not require following the pilgrimage route on foot, I found—as does the narrator in Teju Cole’s medievalizing novel of New York City, Open City—walking from one station to the next opened my eyes to the city’s medievalism riches. Consequently, my walking pilgrimage revealed medievalism’s role in furthering (or hindering) the installation’s dialogue with the themes of art, passion, and justice.
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Books and Co-edited Volumes by Candace Barrington
_American Chaucers_ is the first study to examine exclusively American appropriate of Chaucer for non-academic audiences.
Introduces materials not published on before: Katharine Gordon Brinley's one-woman performances, MacKaye’s “The Canterbury Pilgrims” (as play, pageant, and opera), Wheaton College pageants, and James Norman Hall's _Flying with Chaucer." The book is not just a medievalism survey, but a careful examination of the cultural and social influences in Americans’ uses of Chaucer.
Emily Steiner and I maintain that medievalists are uniquely placed to make valuable new contributions to the subject of law and literature, in part because of the inherently interdisciplinary nature of the study of medieval law, inseparable as it was from political theory and theology. The editors bring together medievalists from all over North America to explore the development of vernacular English literature within the context of legal discourse, practice, and conflict.
Treating texts as varied as Chaucer's _Knight's Tale_, the fifteenth-century Robin Hood ballads, and William Thorpe's account of his own heresy trial, the nine never-before-published essays in this volume reveal the intersections of legal and documentary culture with vernacular literary production. They establish that law and English literature were intimately bound up in processes of institutional, linguistic, and social change, and they explain how the specific conditions of medieval law and literature offer useful models in studying later periods. An appendix contains a translation by Andrew Galloway of _History or Narration Concerning the Manner and Form of the Miraculous Parliament at Westminster in the Year 1386_.
Global Chaucers by Candace Barrington
Canterbury Tales,we can achieve the progressive goals of Emily Apter’s “translational transnationalism”
and Edward Said’s “cosmopolitan humanism.” Both translation and humanism were intrinsic to
Chaucer’s initial composition of the Tales, and in turn, both shaped Chaucer’s later reception, often in
ways that did a disservice to his reputation and his verse. In this essay, Candace Barrington argues that
comparative translation provides a means whereby new modes of translation, like Apter’s, can promote
a different version of humanism, like Said’s; she demonstrates this process in a brief philological study of
Nazmi A˘gıl’s Turkish translation of The Squire’s Tale. While we can see the infusion of Turkish values
and perspectives in the new text, we can also see that the Turkish reveals new insights into Chaucer’s
subtle and nuanced use of language.
Articles by Candace Barrington
_American Chaucers_ is the first study to examine exclusively American appropriate of Chaucer for non-academic audiences.
Introduces materials not published on before: Katharine Gordon Brinley's one-woman performances, MacKaye’s “The Canterbury Pilgrims” (as play, pageant, and opera), Wheaton College pageants, and James Norman Hall's _Flying with Chaucer." The book is not just a medievalism survey, but a careful examination of the cultural and social influences in Americans’ uses of Chaucer.
Emily Steiner and I maintain that medievalists are uniquely placed to make valuable new contributions to the subject of law and literature, in part because of the inherently interdisciplinary nature of the study of medieval law, inseparable as it was from political theory and theology. The editors bring together medievalists from all over North America to explore the development of vernacular English literature within the context of legal discourse, practice, and conflict.
Treating texts as varied as Chaucer's _Knight's Tale_, the fifteenth-century Robin Hood ballads, and William Thorpe's account of his own heresy trial, the nine never-before-published essays in this volume reveal the intersections of legal and documentary culture with vernacular literary production. They establish that law and English literature were intimately bound up in processes of institutional, linguistic, and social change, and they explain how the specific conditions of medieval law and literature offer useful models in studying later periods. An appendix contains a translation by Andrew Galloway of _History or Narration Concerning the Manner and Form of the Miraculous Parliament at Westminster in the Year 1386_.
Canterbury Tales,we can achieve the progressive goals of Emily Apter’s “translational transnationalism”
and Edward Said’s “cosmopolitan humanism.” Both translation and humanism were intrinsic to
Chaucer’s initial composition of the Tales, and in turn, both shaped Chaucer’s later reception, often in
ways that did a disservice to his reputation and his verse. In this essay, Candace Barrington argues that
comparative translation provides a means whereby new modes of translation, like Apter’s, can promote
a different version of humanism, like Said’s; she demonstrates this process in a brief philological study of
Nazmi A˘gıl’s Turkish translation of The Squire’s Tale. While we can see the infusion of Turkish values
and perspectives in the new text, we can also see that the Turkish reveals new insights into Chaucer’s
subtle and nuanced use of language.
This essay obliquely recalls the mirroring structure of ‘Unfinished Business,’ Patience Agbabi’s engagement with Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee in her one-round poetry slam, Telling Tales (Cannongate 2014). Our essay is organized by keywords common to both poems. Each section devotes a paragraph or two to Chaucer’s Melibee and then turns to Agbabi’s ‘Unfinished Business.’ By repeating essential keywords at the beginning and ending of each section (or linking a keyword at the end of one section to the beginning of another) our analysis suggests the recursive chain inherent in the poem’s mirroring structure, as well as in the poem’s reformulation of Chaucer’s prose tale.
In his first monograph since the acclaimed Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (1994), Steven Justice forces readers to grapple with two of literary criticism's most fundamental questions: (1) Where does literary criticism find its most legitimate evidence? and (2) How can that evidence lead to a better understanding of the text at hand? He issues his challenge through a multi-layered reading of Adam Usk's Chronicle, choosing the text because he finds Usk performing those same interpretive moves that literary critics now take pride in flaunting. Adam Usk's Secret transforms a search for one ostensible secret into a personal challenge—for both the author and his audience—as he explores and dismisses many of literary criticism's answer to those fundamental questions. In doing so, Justice challenges answers that, not incidentally, he and his colleagues in Medieval Studies have relied on for the past half century.
Justice and Usk seem a ripe combination for such a challenge. Readers, primed by Justice's reputation and the book's tantalizing title, will likely approach Adam Usk's Secret expecting insightful, even revolutionary, readings of the Chronicle's secrets.
This expectation is thwarted.