A Short History of English Literature by Harry Blamires

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.

Over the last several decades, the "religious turn" in Chaucer studies has opened up numerous avenues for analysis of Chaucer's poetics without completely resolving questions about their specifically Christian character, or lack thereof. Approaches to answering such questions include biographical analysis, which in Chaucer's case seems least likely to yield substantial conclusions: we simply don't have enough biographical data to be confident that Chaucer held strongly to one, or another, or no version of Christian faith. Our limited sources of knowledge about Chaucer's distinctly secular professional life certainly give us no basis for confident assertions about his own personal piety. Unlike his contemporary John Lydgate, for example, Chaucer was no monk. On the other hand, given the numerous, lively and vigorous forms of lay piety in Chaucer's era, his lack of religious vocation and/or sacerdotal ordination is not per se a limiting factor on the possibility that his poetics is robustly Christian at a deep philosophical level. One important movement of lay piety, founded on protest against ecclesial corruption, was inspired in large part by the indignation and influence of another Chaucer contemporary, John Wyclif, and this movement has been the focus of a substantial body of scholarship over the last several decades. Not surprisingly, possible allusions to Wyclif's ideas found in Chaucer's poems, placed under various scholarly lenses, have led to recurrent speculation as to the possibility of a generally heterodox or, indeed, a decidedly Wycliffite bent in Chaucer's poetic oeuvre. ii In order to test the notion that Chaucer's poeisis reflects a Wycliffite bent, scholars must consider most especially the Wycliffite doctrines themselves, many of which are more negative than positive: that is, they express a piety that is characterized above all by objection to and protest against real or perceived ecclesiastical abuses of a divine calling. Many scholars have speculated that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, with their pungent, pointed satire directed at the foibles of errant clergy and vowed religious, could well share a common spirit with the Wycliffite reformist agenda. That Wyclif's ideas and the movement he sparked have long been considered a type of "premature reformation" is no surprise, and if in fact Chaucer's poetics is distinctively Wycliffiteleaning, we should be unsurprised by the manifestation of a "Protestant Chaucer" across prior generations of Chaucer scholarship. On the other hand, in spite of the pungent anticlerical satire that features so prominently in the Tales, there is much evidence to suggest that Chaucer's poetics is more genuinely Catholic than heretical, and scholars are quite right to continue to subject the "Wycliffite" Chaucer to careful, multivalent scrutiny. The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards, a late fourteenth century precursor to Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, provides a handy summary of the accusations leveled by Wyclif and his followers at the late medieval church. Among the aspects of Wycliffite thought and polemic which are represented in the Conclusions and relevant to the Canterbury Tales, the third and eleventh conclusions rail against the celibacy mandated for secular clergy, for monks, and for nuns, while the ninth conclusion rejects the sacrament of penance. Certainly Chaucer had a keen eye for manifestations of clerical corruption, but it is doubtful that his Tales, taken as a reasonably complete and unified work of art, reflect the outright heretical loathing of ecclesial foibles that characterizes iii the most savage aspects of Wycliffite polemic. Furthermore, there are some important indicators, deserving of deeper investigation, that Chaucer's poetic ecclesiology as crafted in the Tales, is consciously an orthodox ecclesiology characterized especially by the theological virtue of hope, as against the heretical ecclesiology of suspicion, fear, and contempt proffered, all too often, by Wyclif and the polemicists whom he inspired.

Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2017

1994

The Chaucer Review, 2022

In a scene near the beginning of Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale, a maid child stands as silent witness to a conversation between a wife and a monk within the garden of a wealthy French merchant. By using her as an observer to the scene in the garden, Chaucer, perhaps for the first time in English literature, employs the gaze of a child to highlight the narrative of experience. In this article I explore the maid child as a sign of Chaucer’s experiments with perspective. Since Chaucer probably first wrote the Shipman’s Tale with the Wife of Bath as narrator, the maid child looks forward to the old hag in the Wife of Bath’s Tale. In placing or keeping her in the tale, Chaucer anticipates modernist experiments with perception, looking forward to Henry James, whose What Maisie Knew describes the gaze of another child upon the unsavory bartering of an adult world.

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).

Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2002

On1 2 October 1385, Chaucer was appointed to the commission of the peace in Kent. He served as a justice of the peace (JP) for the next four years, until being appointed Clerk of the King's Works in 1389. For Chaucer's biographers these years have always posed a problem; they are the middle of his poetic career, seemingly transitional years between his courtly dream vision poetry and the later frame tales. They are some of the best-documented years in terms of official records, yet they have provoked divergent interpretations in terms of their import for Chaucer both as a poet and as a Ricardian servant. For Donald Howard, the late 1380s were ''the worst of times'' when the poet traded a relatively secure urban existence for debt-ridden rustication. For Derek Pearsall, on the other hand, the Kent years provided a well-deserved respite from the poet's ''arduous and thankless'' activities as controller of customs as well as a necessary (and presumably welcome) distance from a court about to be thrown into disarray by the Appellant crisis. 1 Both biographies imply that Chaucer, politically astute as ever, chose to ride out these turbulent years in a Kent backwater rather than brave them in a neighborhood nearer Westminster. Both biographies also describe these years as dominated by Chaucer's single documented return to London in the fall of 1386, when he sat in the so-called ''Wonderful Research for this article was made possible by a stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as by a University of Pittsburgh Faculty of Arts and Sciences Grant. I also with to thank Mike Witmore for this valuable comments on successive drafts of the essay.

Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2007

Th e battle between the Wife of Bath and her fifth husband, Jankyn, in which she ''rente out of his book a leef, / For which he smoot me so that I was deef,'' 1 enacts the spectacular failure in transmission that results when a coercive literary tradition collides with an audience whose resistance finally wells over into violence. In addition to its commentary on the effects of antifeminist writings in the Wife's autobiographical prologue-the focus of most recent criticism on the Wife of Bath-the battle also figures the very structure of literary tradition, whose motive force is the dynamic interaction of repetition (emulation, imitation) and rupture, 2 as an overt rivalry. As she tells it, the Wife It gives me great pleasure to acknowledge those whose responses to this essay (or to the papers it draws on) have shaped my thinking: