Introduction [Chaucer’s Langland]

Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, 1989

The Yearbook of Langland Studies, 2015

REVIEWS would enable the revivification of Piers Plowman does indeed 'demand cultural innovation' and might not be the sort that either scholars or students of the poem would recognize.

Contemporary Chaucer across the centuries

For 700 years, Geoffrey Chaucer has spoken to scholars and amateurs alike. How does his work speak to us in the twenty-first century? This volume provides a unique vantage point for responding to this question, furnished by the pioneering scholar of medieval literary studies, Stephanie Trigg: the symptomatic long history. While Trigg's signature methodological framework acts as a springboard for the vibrant conversation that characterises this collection, each chapter offers an inspiring extension of her scholarly insights. The varied perspectives of the outstanding contributors attest to the vibrancy and the advancement of debates in Chaucer studies: thus, formerly rigid demarcations surrounding medieval literary studies, particularly those concerned with Chaucer, yield in these essays to a fluid interplay between Chaucer within his medieval context; medievalism and 'reception'; the rigours of scholarly research and the recognition of amateur engagement with the past; the significance of the history of emotions; and the relationship of textuality with subjectivity according to their social and ecological context. Each chapter produces a distinctive and often startling interpretation of Chaucer that broadens our understanding of the dynamic relationship between the medieval past and its ongoing reevaluation. The inventive strategies and methodologies employed in this volume by leading thinkers in medieval literary criticism will stimulate exciting and timely insights for researchers and students of Chaucer, medievalism, medieval studies, and the history of emotions, especially those interested in the relationship between medieval literature, the intervening centuries and contemporary cultural change.

The Review of English Studies, 2007

Critical Insights: Geoffrey Chaucer, 2017

This chapter tackles the issue of Chaucer’s Middle English language. It traces the history of English from earlier times to Chaucer’s age to show the Middle English poet’s facility with language. For if J. R. R. Tolkien was correct in his 1934 lecture to the Philological Society, then Chaucer was not only a gifted poet but also a remarkable philologist, thinking like a linguist of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020

Studies in the Age of Chaucer is the yearbook of the New Chaucer Society. It publishes articles on the writing of Chaucer and his contemporaries, their antecedents and successors, and their intellectual and social contexts. More generally, articles explore the culture and writing of later medieval Britain (1200-1500). SAC also includes an annotated bibliography and reviews of Chau cer-related publications.

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2012

the Gawain poet's Middle English (I think I would have preferred this section to be part of the introductory matter, but that is neither here nor there). Perhaps the most welcome addition is a section with two brief Old French Gawain romances, Le Chevalier a l'Epée and La Mule sans Frein, newly translated by Borroff herself, with bracketed summaries of passages not translated verbatim. One might have wished for additional selections, such as the seduction passages in Yder, but having the complete story arc of a romance makes comparison to Sir Gawain richer. These are followed by a selection from The Alliterative Morte Arthure, the Christmas feast, which not only gives students another prime example of the alliterative tradition but provides an interesting contrast in narrative approach to the Gawain poet. The "Criticism" section is admirably broad and as up-to-date as one could reasonably expect, spanning essays from 1958 to 2001 and covering a variety of topics, from descriptive and stylistic technique to Christian themes, numerology, heroism and courtesy, and the role of the female characters. Again, one might carp that a favorite or important work was excluded (for instance, I would like to have an excerpt from Larry Benson's Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), but the selections are well chosen. They are followed by a historical chronology of Arthurian works, beginning with William of Malmesbury, mixed in with important literary and historical milestones up to 1400. The edition closes with a selected bibliography that also strives for breadth and currency, with historical and cultural, as well as literary, topics in books and articles from 1923 to 2006. Borroff's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a welcome addition to the Norton Critical Edition series. The copyediting could have been a bit more careful (e.g., "La Chevalier" and the amusing "Studies in Medieval English Romance: Same New Approaches"), but, like all in the series, it is a handsome and readable publication. It can serve as a library resource for research papers in a Norton British Literature survey or as a textbook in courses on medieval literature, Romance, or Arthurian Legend. This translation remains a valuable entry into a work, as Borroff says, "crafted by an author whose vision of the human comedy we can still share and savor" (p. xxix).

S. H. Rigby and A. J. Minnis, eds, Historians on Chaucer: The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales , 2014

This paper sets out three modern critical approaches to Chaucer's work (Chaucer as a conservative voice, Chaucer as in some sense radical or subversive, and Chaucer as open-ended) as an introduction to the studies of Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims in the rest of this edited collection.

ELH, 1996

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Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2008