IV
Chaucer

Abstract

This chapter has four sections: 1. General; 2. The Canterbury Tales; 3. Other Works; 4. Reception and Reputation. Section 1 is by Rebecca Menmuir; section 2 is by Lucy Brookes and Peter Buchanan; section 3 is by Peter Buchanan; section 4 is by Rebecca Menmuir.

1. General

This year has seen a multitude of studies relating to Chaucer. In particular, there have been a number of important handbooks and edited collections which deal solely with Chaucer. A common theme throughout the scholarship detailed here is the movement to expand Chaucerian scholarship from an Anglocentric perspective to include non-English and non-Western approaches.

The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer, edited by Suzanne Conklin Akbari and James Simpson, is an important new contribution to Chaucerian studies. This authoritative compendium covers new perspectives on traditional topics as well as attending to fresh avenues of study. ‘Introduction: Placing the Past’ (Suzanne Conklin Akbari, pp. 1–7) emphasizes the interdisciplinary scope of the collection, with the aim of creating a ‘stereoscopic’ (p. 1) view of Chaucer. As well as contributions from Middle English experts, the handbook includes chapters authored by specialists in other fields which illuminate Chaucer’s contexts, a decision which foregrounds Chaucer’s heterogeneity, which ‘in turn engenders a profound heterogeneity of readerly response’ (p. 5).

The handbook is divided into six sections. Section 1 (‘Biography and Circumstances of Daily Life’, pp. 9–143) firmly contextualizes Chaucer. Chapters are: ‘Chaucer’s Travels for the Court’ (Peter Brown, pp. 11–25); ‘Chaucer and Contemporary Courts of Law and Politics: House, Law, Game’ (Matthew Giancarlo, pp. 26–42); ‘At Home and in the “Countour-Hous”: Chaucer’s Polyglot Dwellings’ (Jonathan Hsy, pp. 43–62); ‘Labour and Time’ (Kellie Robertson, pp. 63–80); ‘Books and Booklessness in Chaucer’s England’ (Alexandra Gillespie, pp. 81–97); ‘The Role of the Scribe: Genius of the Book’ (Martha Rust, pp. 98–125); and ‘“Gaufred, deere maister soverain”: Chaucer and Rhetoric’ (James Simpson, pp. 126–43).

Sections 2 and 3 situate Chaucer according to overseas influences. Section 2 (‘Chaucer in the Mediterranean Frame’, pp. 145–215) covers: ‘Anti-Judaism/Anti-Semitism and the Structures of Chaucerian Thought’ (Steven F. Kruger, pp. 147–65); ‘“O Hebraic People!”: English Jews and the Twelfth-Century Literary Scene’ (Ruth Nisse, pp. 166–83); ‘The Hazards of Narration: Frame-Tale Technologies and the “Oriental Tale”’ (Karla Mallette, pp. 184–96); and ‘Fictions of Espionage: Performing Pilgrim and Crusader Identities in the Age of Chaucer’ (Suzanne M. Yeager, pp. 197–215). The first two of these chapters, in particular, demonstrate the equal measure of context and literary analysis in the collection. The third section (‘Chaucer in the European Frame’, pp. 217–385) complements the preceding section, with chapters on classical and contemporary French and Italian influences. Chapters are: ‘Ovid: Artistic Identity and Intertextuality’ (Jamie C. Fumo, pp. 219–37); ‘Chaucer and the Textualities of Troy’ (Marilynn Desmond, pp. 238–51); ‘The Romance of the Rose: Allegory and Lyric Voice’ (David F. Hult, pp. 252–69); ‘Challenging the Patronage Paradigm: Late-Medieval Francophone Writers and the Poet–Prince Relationship’ (Deborah McGrady, pp. 270–85); ‘Dante and the Author of the Decameron: Love, Literature, and Authority in Boccaccio’ (Martin Eisner, pp. 286–302); ‘Boccaccio’s Early Romances’ (Warren Ginsberg, pp. 303–24); ‘Chaucer’s Petrarch: “enlumyned ben they”’ (Ronald L. Martinez, pp. 325–50); ‘Dante and the Medieval City: How the Dead Live’ (David L. Pike, pp. 351–67); and ‘Historiography: Nicholas Trevet’s Transnational History’ (Suzanne Conklin Akbari, pp. 368–85).

Sections 4 and 5 turn to the universities and the Church, respectively. Section 4 (‘Philosophy and Science in the Universities’, pp. 387–471) contains the chapters: ‘Grammar and Rhetoric c.1100–c.1400’ (Rita Copeland, pp. 389–406); ‘Philosophy, Logic, and Nominalism’ (Fabienne Michelet and Martin Pickavé, pp. 407–25); ‘The Poetics of Trespass and Duress: Chaucer and the Fifth Inn of Court’ (Eleanor Johnson, pp. 426–39); ‘Medicine and Science in Chaucer’s Day’ (E. Ruth Harvey, pp. 440–55); and ‘Logic and Mathematics: The Oxford Calculators’ (Edith Dudley Sylla, pp. 456–71). Chapters in Section 5 (‘Christian Doctrine and Religious Heterodoxy’, pp. 473–544) are: ‘Wycliffism and its After-Effects’ (Stephen E. Lahey, pp. 475–93); ‘“Anticlericalism”, Inter-Clerical Polemic and Theological Vernaculars’ (Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Melissa Mayus, and Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, pp. 494–526); and ‘Chaucer as Image-Maker’ (Denise Despres, pp. 527–44).

The sixth and final section (‘The Chaucerian Afterlife’, pp. 545–635) focuses on the reception of Chaucer. These range from immediate reception (some of which then received a response of their own from Chaucer, as in Gower’s case) to beyond Chaucer’s lifetime. Chapters are: ‘Geographesis, or the Afterlife of Britain in Chaucer’ (Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, pp. 547–62); ‘Vernacular Authorship and Public Poetry: John Gower’ (T. Matthew N. McCabe, pp. 563–79); ‘Lydgate’s Chaucer’ (Anthony Bale, pp. 580–600); ‘Dialogism in Hoccleve’ (Jonathan M. Newman, pp. 601–19); and ‘Old Books and New Beginnings North of Chaucer: Revisionary Reframings in The Kingis Quair and The Testament of Cresseid’ (Iain Macleod Higgins, pp. 620–35). Bale’s and Newman’s chapters are discussed in more detail in Chapter III, Section 13, above. The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer exemplifies the diversification of Chaucerian studies, and the continued emergence (to paraphrase Chaucer) of new science out of old books.

There are three entries on Chaucerian texts in Medieval Disability Sourcebook: Western Europe, edited by Cameron Hunt McNabb. Each entry of the sourcebook contains an introduction to the material and its importance to understanding disability in the medieval period, followed by one or several relevant excerpts from the given text. In the entry for the Merchant’s Tale (pp. 247–59), Moira Fitzgibbons states that the text ‘revolves around non-normative bodies and minds’ (p. 247), such as Januarie being made blind, and Damian being bound to his bed by his lovesickness. Chaucer depicts non-normativity, such as Januarie’s aged body and lewd sexual experiences, as part of human life rather than a deviation from it, which Fitzgibbons argues aligns the text with disability studies. Paul A. Broyles focuses on the importance of blindness in his entry on the Man of Law’s Tale (pp. 260–75). He notes the example of the knight who is blinded after accusing Custance of murder, prompting King Alla’s conversion to Christianity. Blindness, Broyles argues, is ‘understood exclusively in spiritual terms’ (p. 260); however, this does not mean that its signification is simple, since blindness is both a sign of sin and a vehicle for understanding God. Moreover, Custance’s body can also be read as non-normative, since her foreignness (of her sex, her race, and her religion) is often emphasized. Donegild also accuses Custance’s son of being deformed, which Broyles links to congenital disabilities. Tory V. Pearman’s entry on the Wife of Bath’s Portrait, Prologue, and Tale (pp. 276–91) highlights Alisoun’s deafness as a defining attribute, alongside her age and physical features. Since the cause of her deafness is Jankyn and the weapon is his Book of Wicked Wives, Alisoun’s ‘deafness is thus the punishment for her sexual voracity, a condition with its own disabling qualities’ (p. 276). Pearman raises the question of whether the Wife of Bath’s deafness does in fact impede her: while it is a punishment, she remains successful, and her condition provides her with a reason why she should go on pilgrimage at all.

Dark Chaucer: An Assortment, edited by Myra Seaman, Eileen A. Joy, and Nicola Masciandaro, takes an experimental approach to Chaucerian studies. The essays in the collection are linked by the idea of darkness—‘all of the dark and melancholic places in Chaucer’ (unnumbered page), as the Prefatory Note states. A poetic preface by Gary J. Shipley (‘and here we are as on a darkling plain’, pp. i–vii), interprets each essay poetically, after which sixteen articles take different aspects of ‘dark’ Chaucer. Some take a diachronic approach, such as the first essay by Candace Barrington (‘Dark Whiteness: Benjamin Brawley and Chaucer’, pp. 1–11), which examines how the nineteenth-century African American scholar Benjamin Brawley interprets Chaucerian ‘whiteness’. Gaelan Gilbert’s essay (‘Chaucerian Afterlives: Reception and Eschatology’, pp. 43–57) also discusses Chaucer in the centuries following his death, although through the lens of eschatology and theology.

These examples are typically scholarly works, with citations and clear references to Chaucer’s texts. Similarly rooted in conventional scholarship (in terms of its presentation and critical apparatus) is Thomas White’s essay (‘The Dark is Light Enough: The Layout of the Tale of Sir Thopas’, pp. 191–203, followed by an appendix on unnumbered pages). White responds to the theme of darkness by discussing the precarity of Sir Thopas’s paratextual features and the tail-rhyme stanza. However, as well as these contributions, the assortment also contains more experimental reactions to Chaucerian darkness. Lisa Schamess interpolates typical academic criticism with a modern prose interpretation of the Physician’s Tale (in ‘L’O de V: A Palimpsest’, pp. 125–37), with extensive accompanying footnotes which provide a theoretical and textual framework to the essay, focusing on consent in the tale. There is a similar mix of registers in Ruth Evans’s essay (‘A Dark Stain and a Non-Encounter’, pp. 29–41). Interspersed with descriptions of moments of darkness in The Book of the Duchess, such as the dream-encounter between Seys and Alcyone, are Evans’s reflections on the personal act of reading the text, such as using a highlighter to mark her book (p. 34). The article also depicts the process of critically engaging with a text: ‘I’m aware, because it’s Morpheus ventriloquizing Seys, that husband and wife are not meeting at all, not even in the dream’ (p. 38).

Throughout, this assortment engages with a range of Chaucerian texts, from those already discussed to others: the Franklin’s Tale, in ‘In the Event of the Franklin’s Tale’ (J. Allan Mitchell, pp. 91–102); the Manciple’s Tale, in ‘Black as the Crow’ (Travis Neel and Andrew Richmond, pp. 103–16); and Troilus and Criseyde, in ‘The Light Has Lifted: Trickster Pandare’ (Bob Valasek, pp. 173–80). Other essays not discussed, but equally important in diversifying Chaucerian studies, are: ‘Saturn’s Darkness’ (Brantley L. Bryant and eight anonymous contributors, pp. 13–27); ‘Black Gold: The Former (and Future) Age’ (Leigh Harrison, pp. 59–69); ‘Half Dead: Parsing Cecilia’ (Nicola Masciandaro, pp. 71–90); ‘Unravelling Constance’ (Hannah Priest, pp. 117–23); ‘Disconsolate Art’ (Myra Seaman, pp. 139–49); ‘Kill Me, Save Me, Let Me Go: Custance, Virginia, Emelye’ (Karl Steel, pp. 151–60); ‘The Physician’s Tale as Hagioclasm’ (Elaine Treharne, pp. 161–71); and ‘Suffer the Little Children, or, A Rumination on the Faith of Zombies’ (Lisa Weston, pp. 181–90).

Engaging with Chaucer: Practice, Authority, Reading, edited by C.W.R.D. Moseley, brings together several studies which explore the myriad of ways in which readers have engaged with Chaucer—‘engaging’ meaning both paying attention to and entering into conflict with Chaucer, as C.W.R.D. Moseley makes clear in the introduction (‘“The craft so long to lerne …”’, pp. 1–12, on p. 3). The compendium addresses topics including how Chaucer read himself, his contemporary reception and readers, and modern engagement with Chaucer. In chapter 1 (‘“And gret wel Chaucer whan ye mete”: Chaucer’s Earliest Readers, Addressees and Audiences’, pp. 13–20), Sebastian Sobecki constructs a literary environment containing Chaucer’s earliest readers: his scribes, and readers attached to his works in some ways. As well as using historical evidence (such as Thomas Spencer, who likely owned a copy of Troilus and Criseyde), Sobecki investigates addressees of Chaucer’s poetry itself (such as in Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan, and Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton), as well as John Gower, Eustache Deschamps, and Thomas Hoccleve. In the following chapter (‘Unhap, Misadventure, Infortune: Chaucer’s Vocabulary of Mischance’, pp. 21–33), Helen Cooper demonstrates the wide vocabulary Chaucer used when discussing chance and fortune, and draws attention to his use of negative prefixes, such as ‘dis-’, ‘in-’, ‘un-’, and ‘mis-’. This wide vocabulary allows Chaucer to express a number of differing stances on fortune. Barry Windeatt discusses weeping across Chaucer’s poetry (‘Chaucer’s Tears’, pp. 34–54), linking tears in Chaucer’s works to weeping as part of affective piety in the medieval period. Windeatt also notes that Chaucer’s figures taken from the Old Testament or classical sources weep more than in their original text. Ad Putter’s chapter (‘In Appreciation of Metrical Abnormality: Headless Lines and Initial Inversion in Chaucer’, pp. 55–76) moves scholarly discourse on from ‘grudging acceptance’ (p. 57) of variations in Chaucer’s metre to enthusiasm, or ‘learning to love them’ (p. 57).

In chapter 5 (‘Blanche, Two Chaucers and the Stanley Family: Rethinking the Reception of The Book of the Duchess’, pp. 77–103), Simon Meecham-Jones uses the textual history of The Book of the Duchess to shed new light on Chaucer’s working practices, therefore intervening in centuries of editorial obscurations and interventions. For instance, Meecham-Jones questions the critical assumption that the extant version of the poem is an early Chaucerian work: the lack of contemporary recognition suggests that the surviving version is a ‘late(r) version’ (p. 84). Chapter 6 (‘“Tu Numeris Elementa Ligas”: The Consolation of Nature’s Numbers in Parlement of Foulys’, pp. 104–33), by C.W.R.D. Moseley, discusses both solitary reading and reception of Chaucer, and also oral performances, two receptions which Moseley notes Chaucer often simultaneously enables in the same text. In the case of The Parliament of Fowls, Moseley argues that interpreting the text ‘seems to depend as much on what readers project onto the verbal text as on the text itself’ (p. 106). In chapter 7 (‘Troilus and Criseyde and the “Parfit Blisse of Love”’, pp. 134–58), Simone Fryer-Bovair argues that Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy does not resolve the issue of the value of romantic love. This is an issue which Chaucer seeks to settle in Troilus and Criseyde by establishing the importance of romantic love, and setting it alongside other forms of love.

John M. Fyler (‘Hateful Contraries in “The Merchant’s Tale”’, pp. 159–92) considers the use of quotations used more than once in Chaucer, particularly in the Merchant’s Tale and the Tale of Melibee. Fyler analyses quotations from Albertanus of Brescia’s thirteenth-century treatises in the encomium of marriage in the Merchant’s Tale using Isidore of Seville’s idea of alieniloquium, in which ‘one thing sounds, and another is understood’ (pp. 161–2). In chapter 9 (‘String Theory and “The Man of Law’s Tale”: Where is Constancy?’, pp. 193–210), William A. Quinn presents the difficulty of confidently reading Chaucer’s intentions in any of his texts, especially the Man of Law’s Tale. Neither the presentation of the Man of Law in the General Prologue nor the sequencing of the fragments of the Canterbury Tales ultimately helps to fix the tale: perhaps, as Quinn concludes, ‘there may be no such textual entity as THE Canterbury Tales’ (p. 207). Alex da Costa turns to the Pardoner in chapter 10 (‘The Pardoner’s Passing and How it Matters: Gender, Relics and Speech Acts’, pp. 211–32), homing in on his ‘anomalous body’ (p. 211) and the uneasiness which Chaucer and the Pardoner engender from an audience. Da Costa argues that both intra- and extradiegetic characters suppress their doubt about the Pardoner’s gender, speech, and trade in selling false relics. Finally, in chapter 11 (‘“Double Sorrow”: The Complexity of Complaint in Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite and Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid’, pp. 233–47), Jacqueline Tasioulas connects Troilus and Criseyde, Anelida and Arcite, and Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid. By reading the complaints of these poems, Tasioulas argues that the narrators and their authors are able to explore the nature of truth and uncertainty.

Chaucer is the sole focus of Jonathan Fruoco’s Chaucer’s Polyphony: The Modern in Medieval Poetry. Building on Bakhtinian theory, Fruoco traces Chaucer’s texts and influences broadly chronologically, following Chaucer’s various endeavours in intertextuality. This polyphony, alternately called dialogism, developed over the course of Chaucer’s career; ultimately, Fruoco argues, Chaucer ‘contributed to the birth of English polyphonic prose’ (p. 6). Six chapters attend to different Chaucerian texts and contexts. Chapter 1 (‘Polyphony and Multilingualism in Medieval England’, pp. 19–36) sets the stage for Chaucer’s interest in intertextuality. After defining dialogism according to Bakhtin—‘the orientation of discourse towards other discourses’ (p. 19)—Fruoco describes the multicultural, multilingual world into which Chaucer was born, which increased his interest in polyphony in the vernacular. Chaucer’s vernacular Middle English is described as both new and also profoundly influenced by the linguistic and cultural past. Chapter 2 (‘Fin’amor, stil novo: Chaucer’s Early Influences’, pp. 37–63) also contextualizes, exploring the interconnectedness of the courtly love poetry of fin’amor and dolce stil novo, as well as the works of Chrétien de Troyes and their impact on the Roman de la rose. Fruoco links these literary movements to Chaucer’s proficiency as a translator.

Having illustrated the rich multilingual and multivocal literary environment of the medieval period, chapter 3 (‘Narrative Evolution and New Discursive Strategies’, pp. 65–93) turns to Chaucerian texts in the vernacular—namely, The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, Anelida and Arcite, and The Parliament of Fowls. Across these works, Chaucer experimented with voice and influence, such as his early attempts to balance French and Italian influences in Anelida. In chapter 4 (‘Troilus and Criseyde and the Ambiguity of Double Enunciation’, pp. 95–125), Fruoco demonstrates how, in Troilus and Criseyde, the audience hears ‘the echoes of Dante’s and Boccaccio’s voices, but with a distinctive English accent’ (p. 95). Chapter 5 (‘Hybridization and the Legend of Chaucer’s Inventiveness’, pp. 127–65) focuses on The Legend of Good Women. In the Legend, Chaucer innovates by hybridizing genres, such as tantalizing the audience with the promise of a poem in the fin’amor style, only to abandon the collection amidst the violence of the narrative. Finally, chapter 6 (‘Extradiegetic Dialogue in The Canterbury Tales’, pp. 167–204) concludes the monograph with the Canterbury Tales, a monumental text exhibiting the advances of Chaucer’s polyphonic style. The extradiegetic dialogue of the Canterbury Tales provides a ‘cacophonic background’ (p. 17) for the tales, and the limits of narrative are not only pushed, but broken through. Across this monograph, Fruoco guides the reader through these various stages of Chaucer’s developing polyphony.

Megan E. Murton explores a wide range of Chaucer’s poetry in Chaucer’s Prayers: Writing Christian and Pagan Devotion. Throughout the monograph, Murton focuses on ‘porous moments of prayer’ (p. 2) in Chaucer. Prayers form a powerful space in writing, and Murton emphasizes a prayer’s use of the pronoun ‘I’ while simultaneously inviting readers to engage communally. In both explicitly religious works (such as An ABC to the Virgin) and generally pagan poems (such as Troilus and Criseyde), Chaucer often has a tendency to ‘exploit [the prayer’s] capacity to shift the terms of a reader’s engagement with a poem’ (pp. 2–3). Murton defines prayer primarily according to the Parson’s discussion of what prayer is in the Parson’s Tale. Chapter 1 (‘Praying to Mary’, pp. 27–57) begins with An ABC to the Virgin, Chaucer’s only prayer which is not embedded into a larger narrative context. While near-contemporary readers of Chaucer—Hoccleve and Lydgate—highlight Chaucer’s interest in Marian poetry, it has been less studied in modern scholarship. The ABC is not only a poem, but it is also a script to be performed, and Murton argues that while it draws attention to various literary features, and indeed its own literariness, ‘its purpose is not to explore or comment upon those dynamics but to draw readers inside them’ (p. 37). The first chapter also examines the prologue prayers of the Second Nun and Prioress in the Canterbury Tales, arguing that they transform the reader into an ‘ideal reader’ (p. 38) of the tales which follow.

In chapter 2 (‘Praying in Suffering’, pp. 59–90), Murton discusses the three tales in the Canterbury Tales in which there are prayers spoken by characters: the Man of Law’s Tale, the Knight’s Tale, and the Franklin’s Tale. These tales pose similar questions: why, for example, does suffering exist under a benevolent deity? They also answer in similar ways—God is ineffable and mysterious, and humans therefore cannot and should not understand. While the act of prayer helps Custance in the Man of Law’s Tale and the characters of the Knight’s Tale, in the Franklin’s Tale prayers only cause more uncertainty. Chapter 3 (‘God of Love and Love of God in Troilus and Criseyde’, pp. 91–126) argues that in Troilus and Criseyde prayers ultimately collapse the distinction between the characters, nominally pagan, and a medieval Christian audience. Significantly, the famous prayer at the end of Troilus is ‘a Christian response to the story that affirms and completes Troilus’ pagan piety’ (p. 126). Chapter 4 (‘Praying about Poetry’, pp. 127–59) explores prayer as a meta-poetic concern. In the dream-visions of The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, and The House of Fame, as well as Chaucer’s Retraction, prayers are invoked at transitional moments which reveal Chaucer’s focus on his identity as a vernacular poet. For example, in The Book of the Duchess, the narrator’s opening prayer is ultimately generative, leading to more poetry, and an invocational prayer in The Parliament of Fowls is placed in the moment between reading and dreaming rather than at the beginning of the poem. Finally, in the conclusion (‘Praying with Chaucer, Performing Chaucer’, pp. 161–4) Murton reframes the Retraction as a prayer inviting participation from its readers, rather than Chaucer’s individual thoughts on his own poetic and religious standing.

In Lynn Staley’s Following Chaucer: Offices of the Active Life, Chaucer is the focal point which connects a broad range of late medieval historical, literary, and cultural topics. Staley develops her theory of ‘offices of the active life’ in the medieval period, a concept derived from Cicero which emphasizes the place and responsibility of the individual within public life. Staley examines three figures across three chapters: the royal woman, the poet, and the merchant. These are all figures, elucidated in some way in Chaucer’s poetry, who acted in the public sphere, and thus held offices of the active life. Chapter 1 (‘Anne of Bohemia: Queenship and Office’, pp. 17–56) focuses on royal women and their duties in relationship to the kings they served and, crucially, advised and mediated. Staley describes royal women as regulators and moderators of themselves, households, and kings, therefore performing an essential function of public life. After discussing real royal women, especially Anne of Bohemia, and the manuals which advised them, such as Durand de Champagne’s Speculum Dominarum, Staley turns to Troilus and Criseyde’s Criseyde, who ‘commands a house and a household but cannot command herself’ (p. 52).

Chapter 2 (‘Chaucer and the Trinity: Why It Matters’, pp. 57–95) engages with Chaucerian texts more centrally. Staley explains that the Augustinian doctrine of the Trinity is both public and private, as ‘the search for God is the search for the self, and vice versa’ (p. 57). Two moments where Chaucer considers the Trinity are discussed: the final stanza of Troilus and Criseyde and the Prologue to the Second Nun’s Tale. Using the Trinity as the nexus point for a common good is surprising, Staley argues, since it displaces the power of a prince—an unusual stance given Chaucer’s monarchical connections. While Chaucer locates the poet around the Trinity, poets such as Lydgate and Spenser return to locating the poet around their monarch, Elizabeth I. Nevertheless, by using the Trinity in the two poems discussed, Chaucer refashions his poetic persona as ‘a worker whose assumption of office might serve the common good’ (p. 95). in chapter 3 (‘Chaucer and Merchant Narratives’, pp. 97–139), Staley describes Chaucer’s London as the centre of trade in which there was a mutually rewarding relationship between merchant and noble. She focuses on the commodification of Custance in the Man of Law’s Tale; Custance resists her narrator’s efforts to simplify her, which exemplifies the tendency in Chaucer’s works for characters to escape their authors. Finally, Staley argues that the pilgrims of the Man of Law, Physician, and Merchant tell ‘confused narratives that prompt the need for a narrative that reconciles the mercantile to the communal’ (p. 138).

The starting point of Olivia Robinson’s Contest, Translation, and the Chaucerian Text is the Chaucerian canon, from which she recentres several French medieval texts and their Middle English counterparts—namely, the French Roman de la rose and Alain Chartier’s La Belle dame sans mercy, and their respective Middle English counterparts The Romaunt of the Rose and Richard Roos’s Belle Dame Sans Mercy. Robinson argues that terming these texts ‘Chaucerian’ or connecting them with Chaucer has led to them being deemed uninteresting or unaccomplished. She therefore compares several works from Chaucer with French texts and their translations into English, focusing especially on the querelles, or debates, which arose from them. After a chapter on the Roman de la rose (‘Contesting the Roman de la rose’, pp. 33–53), Robinson turns to the Middle English translation Romaunt of the Rose (‘Translating the Rose’, pp. 55–112). She questions whether Chaucer is the translator, a traditional assumption primarily based on a reference to Chaucer as a translator by Eustache Deschamps and a mention of a translation in The Legend of Good Women. Only part of the text may be by Chaucer, and this section has been received with critical dissatisfaction: Robinson also questions whether the section’s adherence to its source means that it must be an early work of Chaucer’s.

Robinson then disentangles both Alain Chartier’s Belle Dame Sans Mercy and Richard Roos’s Middle English poem of the same name from their labels of ‘Chaucerian’ (‘Chartier’s Belle Dame Sans Mercy and its Querelle’, pp. 113–32; ‘Richard Roos’s Middle English Belle Dame Sans Mercy: A Contribution to the Querelle?’, pp. 133–73). Rather than separate these texts from Chaucer entirely, this disentanglement prompts readers to consider them as more than imitations of Chaucer, with their Chaucerianism placed in a wider context of French and English translation and debate. Finally, chapter 6 (‘An ABC to the Virgin’, pp. 175–98) discusses Guillaume de Deguileville’s Le Pèlerinage de la vie humaine and Chaucer’s subsequent translation, An ABC to the Virgin. The Pèlerinage itself is a contested text, not least as it exists in different authorial recensions, making its relationship with the Chaucerian translation more complex. Robinson concludes her work by focusing on this Chaucerian poem which ‘resists strict chronological or completely sequential source study’ (p. 196); this challenge to a teleological understanding of sources is key throughout her book.

Chaucer is a central element of Alex Davis’s Imagining Inheritance from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Davis examines not only the concept of inheritance within Chaucer’s texts, but also the inheritance left behind by Chaucer which was subsequently adopted and challenged by later authors. The first chapter (‘“A Very Perfect Forme of a Will”: The Fictional Testament’, pp. 21–56) considers fictional last wills and testaments in Troilus and Criseyde and the Knight’s Tale alongside a host of medieval and early modern authors. Both Troilus and Criseyde narrate testaments which attempt to prolong the lovers’ relationship. Similarly, Arcite’s testament in the Knight’s Tale tries to continue his relationship with Emelye, but is ultimately compromised by ‘intimations of nullity, cancellation, disaster’ (p. 43).

The reputation of Chaucer as a literary father-figure is mentioned in chapter 2 (‘Out of Bounds: Testamentary Fiction from The Tale of Gamelyn to As You Like It’, pp. 57–94) and fully developed in chapter 3 (‘Petrified Unrest: Succession and Descent in Lancastrian Verse’, pp. 95–132). In the latter chapter, Davis argues that Hoccleve and Lydgate were crucial in establishing Chaucer as a literary forefather in the fifteenth century. These two poets are Chaucer’s successors and inheritors: Lydgate, for instance, inverts the opening of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the Prologue of his Troy Book. Davis also challenges the scholarly narrative that the appropriation of Chaucer as a father-figure was smooth in the fifteenth century, arguing instead that for Hoccleve especially, ‘Father Chaucer bequeaths only an interrupted pattern of descent’ (p. 132).

Davis’ final chapter (‘The System of the World: Inheritance, Money, Modernity’, pp. 224–65) analyses Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, particularly tracing the changing face of inheritance in a world transformed by the emergence of an economic world-system. Despite the Man of Law’s Tale centring around narratives of both personal and national inheritance, Davis notes that it begins with a group of Syrian traders, therefore framing Custance’s story in mercantile terms. ‘The Tale’s imperial theme’, Davis argues, ‘is abetted by international commerce’ (p. 229). However, Davis nuances this moment in the text by discussing the growing sense of incompatibility between inheritance and mercantilism: Chaucer’s merchants, after all, are not converted.

Two chapters focus on Chaucerian texts in D. Vance Smith’s Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England. Chapter 5 (‘“Alway deynge and be not ded”: The Book of the Duchess and “The Pardoner’s Tale”’, pp. 85–106) argues that the event of the Black Death influences the presentation of death in The Book of the Duchess and the Pardoner’s Tale, linking two Chaucerian texts not often considered together. Memory, love, and death are entangled in The Book of the Duchess in the poem’s one direct reference to the plague. The Man in Black’s mention of the ‘ten wounds of Egypt’ comes at a point at which he is remembering his initial love for Blanche, creating a language ‘shot through with mortality’ (p. 92). The second section of the chapter argues that the Revelers of the Pardoner’s Tale neither recognize nor understand warnings from and about death. Smith further articulates a central concept of his monograph: ‘dying is the closest we can ever come to “being dead”, precisely because it is not death’ (pp. 100–1). In chapter 6 (‘Dying and the Tragedy of Occupation: “The Knight’s Tale”’, pp. 107–30), Smith examines the death of Arcite at the end of the Knight’s Tale, which is notable for its physiological accuracy. While Boccaccio (Chaucer’s source for Arcite’s death) details Arcita’s soul ascending to the eighth sphere and beyond, in Chaucer’s telling the Knight insists that he does not know where Arcite’s soul is going, since the body cannot follow. The Knight’s use of occupatio or praeteritio—the act of going into detail about what is supposedly not going to be said—allows the Knight’s Tale to circle around ideas of death and finitude without disrupting death’s interminability. Other chapters of this book are discussed above in Chapter III, Sections 2, 7, and 13.

In Alfred Thomas’s The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture: Literature and Art in the Age of Chaucer and the ‘Gawain’ Poet, Thomas examines several texts which shaped, and were shaped by, the court of Richard II. Moreover, he considers the influence of Anne of Bohemia’s presence in England, arguing that it is only by understanding this international influence that we can understand the literature of the late fourteenth century and Richard’s court. Chaucer is a central element in chapter 2 (‘The Familiar Patron: Collaboration and Conflict in Chaucer and Late Medieval European Courtly Writing’, pp. 43–84), which discusses ‘forms of imagined collaboration between European court poets and their Luxembourg patrons’ (p. 43). After arguing that both Chaucer and Gower demonstrated familiarity with Queen Anne, Thomas discusses Dante and Petrarch, as well as Jean Froissart, Guillaume de Machaut, and their respective Luxembourgish patrons. In The Parliament of Fowls, which was written to celebrate the engagement of Richard and Anne, Chaucer adopts the poeticized relationship which Machaut creates with his patron Bonne of Luxembourg. Troilus and Criseyde is deeply connected with Anne since its palinode, The Legend of Good Women, was purportedly composed to repent for sinning against women in Troilus; Thomas points out that Chaucer compares Criseyde with Anne in Troilus (p. 61). Thomas also focuses on the presentation of women in Troilus and the Legend. Finally, in the Clerk’s Tale and the Man of Law’s Tale, there are references—characterized by Thomas as ‘oblique compliments’ (p. 76)—to Queen Anne, described as a Marian figure. Sections dealing with the Gawain-poet are reviewed in Chapter III, Section 11, of this volume of YWES.

Two chapters focus specifically on Chaucer in Eric Weiskott’s Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650. Weiskott seeks to replace the traditional chronological boundaries of literature and to chart a different narrative according to the histories of three metrical forms: alliterative metre, tetrameter, and pentameter. This intersects with modernity as medieval poets articulate their own sense of the modern through their use of metre. Chaucer is a primary focus of the study, and is compared particularly with Langland: while Langland is ‘metrically precocious’ (p. 5), Chaucer is ‘metrically nostalgic’ (p. 5). Chapter 9 (‘Chaucer and the Problem of Modernity’, pp. 153–60) begins with Chaucer’s invention of iambic pentameter, which Weiskott argues was not as immense a break with fourteenth-century literature as has been perceived. He discusses the continuous reading of Chaucer after his death which culminated in his canonical, dominant position in studies of medieval literature, distorting Chaucer in the process. As Weiskott summarizes, ‘in his lifetime, Chaucer was as exceptional within the English literary field as he was unremarkable in the context of French and Italian literary production’ (p. 159).

Directly following this is chapter 10 (‘Chaucer’s English Metrical Phonology: Tetrameter to Pentameter’, pp. 161–77), which examines Chaucer’s changing use of metre, paying close attention to Troilus and Criseyde’s worries that the narrator might ‘miswrite’ and ‘mismeter’ (p. 161) his poetry—explicit concerns about metre in a poetic environment. Both Troilus and Criseyde and The House of Fame contain performed narratorial anxieties about metre, scansion, and editorial practices. The Book of the Duchess is written in tetrameter because it was the most readily available form, and Weiskott highlights Chaucer’s preference for tetrameter in his earlier long poems (such as in his translation of Roman de la rose). Moreover, Chaucer’s invention of what is now termed iambic pentameter in the 1380s grew from the tetrameter as a ‘prosodic renovation’ (p. 166), and there are several similarities between the two. Weiskott also argues that metrical evidence suggests that Chaucer did not compose Adam Scriveyn, or if he did, that it is an anomaly in Chaucer’s corpus. Finally, he discusses the French and Italian metrical influences on Anelida and Arcite. Ultimately, ‘Chaucer founded the metrical future by haunting the metrical past’ (p. 177).

Several articles situate Chaucer in his literary, linguistic, and historical contexts. Wendy A. Matlock and Betsy McCormick introduce The Chaucer Review’s special issue exploring ‘The Woman Question: Chaucer in his European Context’ (ChauR 55[2020] 345–56). Why does Chaucer continuously focus on women in his poetry, and to what extent does he follow his sources in the matter? Matlock and McCormick also seek to make feminist theory interdisciplinary. After outlining various facets of the ‘Woman Question’, such as the querelle des femmes and its conventions, they move to discussing Chaucer’s European context as it intersects with feminist theory. Chaucer’s relationship with his sources is at the heart of this discussion, and the authors suggest that Chaucer need not always be seen as changing or transforming his sources. Rather, they introduce a special issue which overall examines how Chaucer’s exploration of women ‘leans into conventional definitions’ (p. 347).

Chaucer is invoked in a broader context in Andrew Galloway’s ‘Langland and the Reinvention of Array in Late-Medieval England’ (RES 71[2020] 607–29). While the focus of this study is Langland (see also the review in Chapter III, Section 7), Galloway continually returns to Chaucer as a gauge by which to compare Langland’s approach to cloth production in Piers Plowman. Galloway argues that while Piers Plowman’s poet does not use the ‘rhetoric of “array”’ (p. 608) as much as Chaucer, the poem does attend to the production of cloth and clothing. Chaucer’s authorial presence in manuscripts of Middle English moral poetry is briefly discussed in Christina M. Fitzgerald’s ‘Copying Couplets: Performing Masculinity in Middle English Moral Poetry’ (Exemplaria 32[2020] 107–29). For instance, a poem in a Carthusian miscellany incorporates parts of Chaucer’s Lak of Stedfastnesse towards its end; Fitzgerald notes, following A.S.G. Edwards, that the manuscript rearranges Chaucer’s poem into couplets. She further argues that by assimilating Chaucer’s words without ascription, as proverbs of common sense, ‘the poem and its “anthologistic impulse” perform a generalized idea of masculinity’ (p. 124).

Finally, Della Hooke includes Chaucer in the second of her articles on literary references to sound, in ‘Sound in the Landscape, A Study of the Historical Literature. Part 2: The Medieval Period—the Eleventh to Fifteenth Century (and Beyond)’ (LandHist 41[2020] 29–49). The tournament in the Knight’s Tale is full of sounds, including horses and their armour, and a variety of instruments. Hooke also draws attention to the frame narrative of the Canterbury Tales, in which the pilgrims often make notable sounds: for instance, the Miller plays the bagpipes (satirized by the Reeve’s character of the Miller also doing so), the Prioress sings, and the Friar sings and plays the harp (pp. 41–2). Later, Hooke notes that, in Chaucer’s Court of Love, Emelye observes Maytime traditions (pp. 44–5). Ultimately, she argues that in medieval literary texts sounds in the landscape were prominent, conveying different emotions and ‘bringing the period to life for the present-day reader’ (p. 47).

2. The Canterbury Tales

The Cambridge Companion to the Canterbury Tales, edited by Frank Grady, is a significant addition to scholarship on the text. This accessible volume ‘brings together a group of scholars charged with both explaining and inviting’ (p. xi), who are both scholarly and pedagogical in approach. The reader is encouraged to treat the book as a companion, rather than a guide, in this way iconically reproducing the experience of the Canterbury pilgrims: it seeks our ‘engagement’, not just our ‘admiration’ (p. xi). Half the tales are represented by stand-alone chapters; these are followed by a Postscript. The decision not to include traditional sections on biography or language is justified in the editor’s preface (pp. ix–xii), and readers are invited to turn to The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, second edition, for such information.

In chapter 1 (‘The Form of the Canterbury Tales’, pp. 1–20), Marion Turner considers the importance of form, broadly situating the text in the context of other medieval tale-collections, and providing a micro-level analysis of Chaucer’s particular rhyme royal form. Simon Horobin takes a similarly wide-ranging approach in chapter 2 (‘Manuscripts, Scribes, Circulation’, pp. 21–44), where the textual challenges posed by surviving manuscript copies and fragments—and what these challenges can tell us about scribal practice, and readership—are explored.

Chapters 3 to 13 then narrow in focus, and mostly consider individual tales: ‘The General Prologue’ (Steven Justice, pp. 45–58); ‘The Knight’s Tale and the Estrangements of Form’ (Mark Miller, pp. 59–72); ‘The Miller’s Tale and the Art of Solaas’ (Maura Nolan, pp. 73–88); ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’ (Catherine Sanok, pp. 89–104); ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale’ (Elizabeth Scala, pp. 105–20); ‘The Friar’s Tale and The Summoner’s Tale in Word and Deed’ (David K. Coley, pp. 121–35); ‘Griselda and the Problem of the Human in The Clerk’s Tale’ (Holly A. Crocker, pp. 136–50); ‘The Franklin’s Symptomatic Sursanure’ (Peter W. Travis, pp. 151–65); ‘The Pardoner and His Tale’ (Kathy Lavezzo, pp. 166–77); ‘The Prioress’s Tale’ (Steven F. Kruger, pp. 178–90); and ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ (Mishtooni Bose, pp. 191–204).

The remaining chapters mark a return to the discursive, ‘companionable’ quality outlined in the preface. In chapter 14 (‘Moral Chaucer’, pp. 205–17), Frank Grady explores the many moral genres encompassed by the Tales (from saints’ lives to Marian miracle): ‘in the search for a “moral Chaucer,” we may always have to address the “medieval” in ourselves, but that doesn’t mean we are always obliged to embrace it’, he argues (pp. 214–15). Patricia Clare Ingham and Anthony Bale turn to the Tales’ multiple endings in chapter 15 (‘Chaucer’s Sense of an Ending’, pp. 218–31), following Rosemarie McGerr in their sense of Chaucer’s poetic of ‘irresolution’ (p. 221).

Four essays make up the ‘Postscript: How to Talk about Chaucer with Your Friends and Colleagues’ (pp. 232–54): ‘Reading Chaucer: Easier than You Think?’ (David Matthews, pp. 233–7); ‘Scholarship or Distraction? New Forums for Talking about Chaucer’ (Ruth Evans, pp. 238–43); ‘Talking about Chaucer with School Teachers’ (David Raybin, pp. 244–9); and ‘Who Will Pay?’ (Stephanie Trigg, pp. 250–4). Taken together, the chapters in this concluding section argue that ‘Chaucer studies exists in a dynamic and dialectical relation to present concerns of many sorts, and acknowledging this fact does not inevitably or irrevocably deracinate our medieval poet’ (p. 232). This new Companion to Chaucer’s most widely taught and read poem seeks to open up new interpretative opportunities for its audiences—indeed, its companions, present and future.

This year another important new resource for students of Chaucer became available: The Norton Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, edited by David Lawton. This new edition of the Canterbury Tales prioritizes accessibility and readerly ease of use, streamlining various aspects of the Tales’ presentation compared with previous editions. In contrast with the Riverside Chaucer—arguably the pre-eminent student text—Lawton’s edition attempts to provide a more usable experience for new students of Middle English literature. Lawton (with Jennifer Arch, who edits the prose texts) modernizes and standardizes some Middle English terms, opting for a single-column layout with line-by-line marginal glosses of difficult or unusual words. They also provide relatively lean scholarly paratexts, with short explanatory notes rather than the longer, discursive ones found in other mainstream editions.

Particularly relevant for undergraduates are the interactive and audio-based learning tools bundled with this edition (digitally integrated with the e-book). These include a ‘Reading Chaucer Workshop’, meant to help beginners to hear and understand Middle English, and a suite of twenty-one recordings of extracts from various Canterbury tales, read aloud by Lawton, Jennifer Brown, Ruth Evans, and Beth Robertson. There is no equivalent to the Riverside’s textual notes, and codicological issues are similarly left aside; instead there is an introductory section on ‘Manuscripts of Chaucer’s Work’ (Sarah Noonan and David Lawton, pp. 17–22), which presupposes no prior knowledge of late medieval manuscript culture, explaining the contexts informing the circulation of Chaucer’s works before Caxton, and the editorial problems caused by (for example) the differing tale orders of the early manuscripts. Only the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts are introduced in detail, the latter’s decorative presentation displayed via photographic aid (p. 20). There is also no comprehensive overview of Chaucer scholarship as found in the Riverside Chaucer—instead there is a ‘Bibliographical Note’ (pp. 32–4) containing a select survey of scholarship on major topics. In lieu of explanatory notes by a range of invited scholars, there are two introductory sections written solely by Lawton (except for the subsection on manuscripts, as mentioned).

The first of these, ‘General Introduction’ (pp. 1–34), includes a brief history of post-Conquest England (‘Language, Nation, and Kingship’, pp. 2–4), a biography of Chaucer (‘Chaucer’s Life’, pp. 5–9), an account of ‘Chaucer’s London’ (pp. 9–13), contexts for Chaucer’s literary practices (‘Chaucer as Reader and Writer’, pp. 14–17), ‘Manuscripts of Chaucer’s Work’ (pp. 17–22), an overview of Chaucer’s afterlives in reception, from the fifteenth century to the present day (‘The Reception of The Canterbury Tales’, pp. 22–31), and the short list of suggested reading (‘Bibliographical Note’, pp. 32–4).

The second section, ‘Chaucer’s Language and Meter’ (pp. 35–45) provides readers new to Chaucer with preliminary orientation in Chaucer’s Middle English. First, in ‘History’ (pp. 35–6), we are introduced to the linguistic changes in English that came about after the Norman Conquest, with brief discussion of Chaucer’s London dialect and the issue of final -e pronunciation. Then, readers are given direction on ‘Reading Chaucer Aloud’ (pp. 36–7), with a table of major rules of thumb for pronouncing Chaucer’s English. This is covered by short guidelines on ‘Meter’ (pp. 38–9), ‘Vocabulary’ (p. 39), and a survey of some features of Chaucer’s English that may trip up modern readers (‘Confusables’, pp. 40–2). Finally, in ‘Spelling and Reading in The Norton Chaucer’ (pp. 42–5), Lawton discusses this edition’s approach to preserving, standardizing, and modernizing the orthography of the Chaucerian corpus. Arguing that ‘new readers of Chaucer can only benefit from some simplification and standardization of forms’ (p. 43), Lawton compares his choices with those of the edition from which The Norton Chaucer developed (having originated as a revised edition), E. Talbot Donaldson’s Chaucer’s Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader [1958]. While The Norton Chaucer rationalizes spellings where this can be done unobtrusively, it revises some of Donaldson’s changes that may affect metrical stress or diverge from the majority of manuscripts (Donaldson’s ‘certain’ becomes ‘certayn’, and his ‘flowr’ becomes ‘flour’, p. 44).

Next come the Canterbury Tales themselves. A brief preface (pp. 47–51), introduces the pilgrimage frame and the insoluble issue of the stories’ intended reading order (if any). The Norton Chaucer adheres to the Robinson/Manly-Rickert tale order and line numbering, derived from the Ellesmere Chaucer, but changes the appellation for each group of tales from the conventional ‘Fragments’ to the more neutral ‘Parts’. Scholarly introductions for each Canterbury tale are grouped according to part, rather than as a single unit. Thus, ‘Part I’ (pp. 52–150) begins with an introduction of the General Prologue, the Knight’s Tale, the Miller’s Prologue and Tale, the Reeve’s Prologue and Tale, and the Cook’s Prologue and Tale, before commencing these tales; then, ‘Part II’ (pp. 151–80) gives an introduction to the Man of Law’s Introduction, Prologue, and Tale, before moving on to the text, and so on. Each part and its constituent tales are navigated in this way, with the texts themselves supplemented with line-by-line notes covering contexts and references, and glossing now obscure language.

The Canterbury Tales (pp. 47–570) are succeeded by a detailed timeline of Chaucer’s life, contemporary historical events, and noteworthy events in his literary career (pp. 571–4). This, in turn, is followed by ‘Chaucerian Afterlives’ (p. 575), a timeline of major editions and adaptations spanning 1412 to 2016 ce, a ‘Selected Bibliography’ (pp. 577–600), and an extensive glossary of Middle English terms (pp. 601–26). In line with its stated goal ‘to offer the most user-friendly edition possible’ (p. vii), The Norton Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales provides a highly accessible source of mirth and doctrine for teachers and students of Chaucer worldwide.

The Canterbury Tales are the sole concern of Becky Renee McLaughlin’s Hysteria, Perversion, and Paranoia in ‘The Canterbury Tales’: ‘Wild’ Analysis and the Symptomatic Storyteller. The book explores issues of gender, power, and the body. In her introduction (‘Introduction, or A Long Preamble to a Tale’, pp. 1–27), McLaughlin explores her personal relationship with Chaucer (‘Did Chaucer seek me out (“cruise” me) without knowing where or who I am?’, she asks on p. 7), and makes heavy use of Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text in the methodological framework she establishes. This will be a ‘wild’ reading of the Canterbury Tales, bringing together ‘a number of what are sometimes thought to be incompatible modes of thinking and writing: the autobiographical, the clinical, the pedagogical, and the scholarly’ (p. 10). These impulses are expressed through McLaughlin’s use of ‘central’ (more traditionally literary-critical) and ‘shadow’ (personal) chapters; as she explains in a footnote, this structure is ‘meant to suggest (or even mimic) the disconnection that often exists between scholarship and pedagogy, a disconnection that I dislike and wish to repair’ (p. 11 n. 19).

The book comprises nine chapters. The first (‘The Prick of the Prioress, or Hysteria and Its Humors’, pp. 28–69) reads the Prioress’s Tale alongside the Wife of Bath’s Tale, and considers the differences in these two female characters’ approaches to femininity, authority, and expectation. Chapter 2 (‘Portrait of the Hysteric as a Young Girl’, pp. 70–83), the first ‘shadow’ chapter, discusses the author’s experience of aphasia in relation to the figure of the Prioress. Chapter 3 (‘Masochist as Miscreant Minister: The Parable of the Pardoner’s Perverse Performance’, pp. 84–125) argues that Chaucer makes use of the ambiguous figure of the Pardoner to ‘agitate for religious and sexual tolerance during a time of political crisis’ (p. 84); its ‘shadow’, chapter 4 (‘Confessing Animals’, pp. 126–40), examines audience responses to the confessions of the Pardoner and Wife of Bath. In chapter 5 (‘Before There Was Sade, There Was Chaucer: Sadistic Sensibility in the Tales of the Man of Law, the Clerk, and the Physician’, pp. 141–96), McLaughlin argues that a sadistic sensibility informs the Man of Law’s Tale, the Clerk’s Tale, and the Physician’s Tale—chapter 6 (‘Sadomasochism for (Neurotic) Dummies’, pp. 197–210) offers a complementary anecdote from the author’s own life. The Reeve’s Tale and the Miller’s Tale are considered in chapter 7 (‘The Reeve’s Paranoid Eye, or The Dramatics of “Bleared” Sight’, pp. 211–46), and the argument that the Miller may be reworking aspects of the Reeve’s ‘primal scene’ (p. 230) advanced; its ‘shadow’, chapter 8 (‘Farting and Its (Dis)contents, or Call Me Absolon’, pp. 247–60), is a reflection on the social and personal implications of flatulence. Finally, chapter 9 (‘Retractor’, pp. 261–7) concludes the study with discussion of Chaucer’s Retraction which functions, in McLaughlin’s reading, like the surgical tool—holding open space for endless interpretation.

Sarah Breckenridge Wright’s Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ explores movement of various kinds in the Canterbury Tales, treating the collection of tales as ‘a register of and commentary on real and ideological mobilities in the fourteenth century’ (p. 20). The mobilities considered in this book include the physical journeying of pilgrims, the restless motivity of the desiring mind in Augustinian theology, the interplay of motion and stasis represented by medieval roads and bridges, the move of readers and narrators between the tales themselves, and the dynamics of fluidity and steadfastness in the symbolic structures of medieval patriarchy, exemplified by Griselda in the Clerk’s Tale.

In ‘Introduction: Moving Across, In, and As the World’ (pp. 1–20), Wright outlines a tension in medieval Christian culture between the contemplative rejection of curiosity about the temporal world—the Augustinian vana et curiosa cupiditas (‘vain and curious desire’, p. 1) that distracts from contemplation of the divine eternal good—and the urge to journey, and so to experience the sensory wonders of creation. This ideological contrast between stasis and motivity was keenly felt in the period leading to Chaucer’s time, motivated by the spread of war, large-scale disease, trade, and religious pilgrimages. In the Canterbury Tales, Wright argues, concepts of mobility conjoin economic, gender, class, and ecological contexts, and these links reveal how identity was understood, navigated, and performed in Chaucer’s time. Chapter 1, ‘Economic Mobilities in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales’ (pp. 21–57), considers the progress of bodies and of capital in and around London, arguing that the Cook and the Canon’s Yeoman reveal the restless motivity and disorienting potential represented by the city. The alchemist canon and dubious entrepreneur Perkyn challenge ideals of stability along several frames of reference—stability of economics, of space, of identity. It is suggested that Chaucer creates imaginary resistance and alternatives to traditional relations and modes of identification, relocating authority in the pilgrims’ ‘mobile bodies and the economies, geographies, and discourses they generate’ (p. 57).

Chapter 2, ‘Building Bridges to Canterbury’ (pp. 59–88) considers bridges, roads, and the material media of movement in literal, conceptual, and symbolic terms: such edifices express a basic hybridity of stasis and mobility that is mirrored by the bodies which move across them. Following analyses of Rochester and London bridges, Wright concludes that the pilgrimage frame reflects this hybridity: both ‘emplaced and between places’ (p. 88), the pilgrims produce networks and dialogues that never resolve into a wholly stable or wholly mobile form. Chapter 3, ‘Rocking the Cradle and Quiting the Knight’ (pp. 89–130), analyses the Reeve’s Tale and the Miller’s Tale, suggesting that movement in these tales creates a pattern of quiting parodic of the Knight’s celebration of idealized stasis. Ultimately, their repudiation of the Knight’s static values asserts a pattern which spans the Canterbury Tales at large: ‘tale(s) about chaos, mutability, and superfluity’ (p. 130). The last full chapter, ‘“Translating” Female Bodies and (En)Gendering Mobility’ (pp. 131–82), subjects the Clerk’s Tale’s Griselda to sustained analysis, which foregrounds the lexical and symbolic dynamics of stone-like stability and saint-like fluidity at work around her, arguing that, despite her reputation for immovability, she is profoundly fluid, and ‘empowered by her geographical, religious, textual, and ecological mobilities’ (p. 181). Wright’s ‘Conclusion: Mobilizing Medieval and Modern Identities’ (pp. 183–6) asserts that Chaucer experimented with mobilities that destabilize traditional values and determinate categories, that his Canterbury Tales has an identity that ‘is always and ever on the move’ (p. 186).

Fluid identities and queered bodies are likewise considered in two chapters of the essay collection Medieval Futurity: Essays for the Future of a Queer Medieval Studies, edited by Will Rogers and Christopher Michael Roman. The first of these, Micah Goodrich’s ‘“Ycrammed ful of cloutes and of bones”: Chaucer’s Queer Cavities’ (pp. 153–79), argues for containers, receptacles, and orifices in the Canterbury Tales as ‘queer cavities’, symbolic openings that variously swallow, contain, withhold, and reconfigure the values and relations that end up within them. Particular attention is paid to the Pardoner and Summoner, linked by the multivalent ‘purs’ (p. 153), which is suggested to combine and to alternate senses related to the phallus and the cavity. Queer cavities such as these ‘highlight the possibilities and limits of the erotic economic exchange between bodies’ (p. 176).

The collection’s other chapter on Chaucer is ‘Resisting Sex and Species in the Squire’s Tale’ (pp. 181–95) by Haylie Swenson. It is argued that the marvellous animal figures of the Squire’s Tale—the brass steed and talking falcon—far from asserting binary masculine and feminine identities, are queer figures which inscribe transformative possibilities, serving as sites of potential for sexuality and embodiment beyond normative bounds (p. 183). Canacee’s ‘queynte ring’ (p. 184) signals the sexual significance of her relation to the falcon, a being with liminal status as human and bird. Together, their sexualized yet non-sexual, similar yet different, intimacy dissolves determinate boundaries which would divide species and sexes. The brass horse, meanwhile, performs an analogous manoeuvre with Camyuskan and the knight, pulling both into an ‘intimate, even erotic, exchange of masculine knowledge’ (p. 190). Swenson concludes that a queer medieval studies must engage with nonhuman entities such as these animals, to reckon with their power to potentiate non-normative relations, sexualities, and concepts of identity.

Ethical and legal issues have been of particular interest in studies of the Canterbury Tales this year. in her article ‘Chaucer’s Treatment of Outlawry in Wife of Bath’s Tale and Knight’s Tale’ (AngSax 18[2020] 1–9), Carolyn Gonzalez outlines existing scholarship on medieval outlawry (Maurice Keen, Eric Hobsbawm, and more recently Timothy S. Jones), reminding us of the ethical and legal challenges the errant knight would have faced (and that the figure of the medieval outlaw can be found beyond Robin Hood narratives). The article suggests that the enterprise of chivalry, as explored in Chaucer’s romance narratives (particularly the Wife of Bath’s Tale and the Knight’s Tale), is fundamentally concerned with issues of displacement—of being outside society—and ‘connection’ (p. 6), meaning what matters to that society. Hannah Johnson reads the anonymous fifteenth-century poem The Childe of Bristowe alongside the Prioress’s Tale in ‘The Childe of Bristowe, The Prioress’s Tale, and the Possibility of Neighbor Love’ (Exemplaria 32[2020] 187–205) to explore usury and the concept of neighbour love in the later Middle Ages. Christian attitudes to the economic realities of moneylending and trade evolved between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, Johnson argues; the exploitation of Jewish lenders was key to this, as they ‘could conveniently be cast as people who weren’t neighbors’ (p. 188). The poems discussed offer new ways to think ‘about how the domain of neighbor love intersects with the politics of community as well as the marketplace’ (p. 189). Jews and Christians in the Prioress’s Tale may be physical neighbours, but are represented as morally and spiritually distinct and separate, articulating the ‘confessional limit of religious identity’ (p. 200).

The Knight’s Tale was the subject of several articles. Anne McKendry’s ‘The Economics of Waste in the Knight’s Tale and Late Medieval England’ (Exemplaria 32[2020] 32–50) uses Georges Bataille’s ‘economics of waste’ to demonstrate how Chaucer utilizes the romance genre’s tendency towards excess to more complex ends. Chaucer responds to the economic preoccupations of his late fourteenth-century London—most particularly the extravagances of Richard II’s court, and the economic turmoil of 1381, culminating in the Uprising. McKendry argues that the procession into Athens, and the ensuing feasts, tournaments, and displays of wealth, are performances of sovereign power that also hint at the atmosphere of instability, and destruction which permeated Chaucer’s own political climate. In Matthew W. Irvin’s ‘Chaucer’s Fantasy of Pity’ (ChauR 55[2020] 379–96), the Knight’s Tale is used to examine Chaucer’s use of pitee. Drawing on Seneca’s De clementia and Statius’s Thebaid, Chaucer positions pitee ‘as a natural rather than rational attribute of the proper ruler’ (p. 382). The article goes on to explore the intersection between Chaucer’s construction of pitee and male fantasies of female subjectivity (particularly through the figure of Emelye), offering a sobering reading of the limits of resistance to the overwhelming patriarchy available to the female characters in the Knight’s Tale.

Chelsea Skalak’s ‘The Unwilling Wife: Marital Rape in the Canterbury Tales’ (ChauR 55[2020] 119–46) is also concerned with the fate of Chaucer’s female characters; here, the Shipman’s Tale serves as the central text. After a thorough overview of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century attitudes towards conjugal debt (and a clarification of the legal and ecclesiastical positions on the possibility of rape within marriage), Skalak turns to the figure of the ‘unwilling spouse’ (p. 127) in the Canterbury Tales. In the Shipman’s Tale, the merchant’s wife enthusiastically expresses desire and actively pursues sexual relationships; Skalak reads her machinations as part of the complex systems of exchange and debt that interest the text. Wendy A. Matlock’s article, ‘Ventriloquizing Mothers: Chaucer’s Poetic Authority in the Tale of Melibee and the Manciple’s Tale’ (ChauR 55[2020] 462–83), develops recent work on Chaucer’s ‘ventriloquism’, and reads the Tale of Melibee and the Manciple’s Tale as ‘vivid examples of Chaucer’s polyphonic authority that highlight the rich network of gendered speech constituting his mature voice’ (p. 466). The women in these tales are, in Matlock’s reading, ventriloquized to transform Chaucer’s Continental Latin and French sources into a distinctly English discourse: one that ultimately prioritizes and generates authority for the male voice.

In his article, ‘Meaning, Metaphor, and Chaucer’s “thikke knarre”’ (ChauR 55[2020] 317–26), Tim William Machan considers the semantic and phonological history of ‘thikke knarre’, which appears in the General Prologue: Machan glosses this description of the Miller as meaning ‘beefy’ (p. 318). Machan outlines the many and varied glosses offered since Thomas Speght’s 1598 edition of the Workes, and emphasizes that a distinction is made, in this description, between the Miller’s body and his head. He goes on to propose a new possible derivation from the Norse word for ‘freighter’ (knǫrr), drawing upon the metaphoric potential demonstrated by Eirik the Red’s mother-in-law’s designation as knarrarbringa.

Working at the intersection of material and literary studies, Matthew Johnson reads Bodiam Castle and the Canterbury Tales as ‘contemporary cultural productions’ (p. 309) of the 1380s; his article ‘Bodiam Castle and The Canterbury Tales: Some Intersections’ (MedArch 64[2020] 302–29) suggests that each is illuminated by interdisciplinary analysis of the other. The article begins with an evaluation of the biographies of Chaucer and the castle’s ‘builder’ (p. 306), Sir Edward Dallingridge; Johnson argues that the two men would have been ‘familiar with each other as they went about their business in and around London’ (p. 307). This is followed by a series of intersections between his two subjects: the castle as overt expression of power and status is considered in relation to the chivalric values espoused and critiqued in the Knight’s Tale, and the questions of taste and class raised by the Miller’s Tale and the Reeve’s Tale are also inherent to the topographical and geographical reality of the castle structure—its ‘taskscape’, to use anthropologist Tim Ingold’s term. The material object is also central to Aaron K. Hostetter’s chapter, ‘Medieval Feasts’ (in Michelle J. Coghlan, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food, pp. 15–28). Food is found throughout the Tales—from the Franklin’s ‘edible register’ (p. 16) in the General Prologue, to the dining practices and roles of squires in the Merchant’s Tale, and the often unsavoury aftermath of eating, and digestion, in the Summoner’s, Prioress’s, and Miller’s Tales. Hostetter reminds us that ‘to read food images culturally is to acknowledge written production in the lived experience of humans, their ideologies enmeshed within economic production’ (p. 26); medieval authors utilized this fundamental enmeshment to add richness and texture to their narratives.

In Michelle Karnes’s ‘The Possibilities of Medieval Fiction’ (NLH 51[2020] 209–28), the Franklin’s Tale is used in support of the central argument: that ‘the marvels of travel literature act as unlikely possibilities that are not meant to be judged either true or false and that excite the imagination precisely because they are indeterminate’ (p. 224). The article begins by engaging productively with the considerable scholarship on the subject of truth and fiction in the Middle Ages (the issue of the ‘credulous’ (p. 212) medieval reader), in particular work by Catherine Gallagher, and, more recently, by Julie Orlemanski. Karnes considers the ‘resolute indeterminacy’ (p. 210) of the marvels in Mandeville’s Travels, Sir Orfeo, and the Franklin’s Tale, where Dorigen’s fears about the rocks ‘threaten to be made real’ (p. 219). Medieval audiences are also discussed by Krista A. Murchison in her article ‘Is the Audience Dead Too? Textually Constructed Audiences and Differentiated Learning in Medieval England’ (MLR 115[2020] 497–517), where the Tales are read in conjunction with the Ancrene Wisse and Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Murchison draws attention to the radically multivalent nature of medieval audiences, using the medieval theory of rhetoric as well as modern literary-critical perspectives (including, of course, Roland Barthes’s pronouncement on the unreachable author). In the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, the Yeoman differentiates between his audiences (virtuous canons and corrupt canons), recognizing that ‘his tale may not be suitable for all audiences equally’ (p. 515). As they engage in the practice of storytelling, Chaucer’s pilgrims negotiate the relationship between ‘social status and literary taste’ (p. 515); Murchison concludes that the text is a celebration of its ‘diverse inscribed’ audiences (p. 514).

A number of studies of individual tales reprised the theme of identity, with several considering issues of selfhood and ethics in marriage. Glenn D. Burger’s ‘Who Could Tell the Joy That Is Between a Husband and His Wife? Feeling with the Good Wife in the Franklin’s Tale’ (ChauR 55[2020] 422–40) explores the overlapping discourses of medieval womanhood invoked by, and involved with, Chaucer’s Dorigen. Synthesizing the formulaic emotionality of Breton lais with an affective mode of exemplary reading derived, Burger argues, from contemporary manuals on women’s conduct in marriage, the Franklin’s Tale encourages all readers (irrespective of gender) to ‘feel alongside Dorigen, and as a result to feel the emotional costs women must bear’ in sustaining companionate marriage (p. 426). Comparing the Franklin’s Tale with the conduct manuals Le Livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry [1371] and Le Mesnagier de Paris [1394], Burger shows how readers are drawn into embodied and affective sympathy with Dorigen, with the result that she ceases to function as an exemplary cipher of good and bad wifeliness, instead acting as a ‘virtual location’ (p. 439) where open-ended questions about the situations of women and men in late medieval patriarchy all coincide.

Meanwhile, Will Rogers’s ‘Scabs and Sovereignty in the Franklin’s Tale’ (ChauR 55[2020] 441–61) applies trauma studies to the Franklin’s Tale, arguing that the marriage of Arveragus and Dorigen, despite its apparent harmony and equality, is in fact a sursanure, a narrative scab over the ‘unhealed wound of female marital subjugation in the Canterbury Tales itself’ (p. 442). The Franklin’s Tale has a soft source—an indirect and memorial influence—in the anonymous twelfth-century poem Pamphilus de Amore, which provides the image of Aurelius’s desire as a secret arrow in his heart, along with the wider themes of manipulative appeals to women’s pity by courting men, and the latent ‘violence in Chaucer’s depictions of heterosexual love’ (p. 454). Dorigen, echoing the Pamphilus’s violently abused Galathea, is part of Chaucer’s multi-textual discourse about women suffering male violence in silence despite the gentil surfaces of aristocratic courtship and marriage.

In ‘The Host, the Man of Law’s Tale, and the Fantasy of the Foreign Wife’ (ChauR 55[2020] 397–421), Lynn Shutters explores Chaucer’s linking of wifehood with geography, in view of the instability of these concepts in late medieval English culture. Shutters posits that the Canterbury Tales forms significant associations between people, places, and things: different types of Chaucerian wives are grouped by their association with England, on the one hand, and the Continent on the other. Putatively, English wives like the Wife of Bath and the Host’s wife Goodelief are ‘unruly’ (p. 399), while Continental wives (such as Griselda and Dorigen) are ‘virtuous’ (p. 399), but these place- and thing-associations are not static, changing according to perspective and, in the Man of Law’s Tale, being partially inverted: the associations of ‘Roman femininity’ are ‘determined by Custance herself’ (p. 413), imparting to Rome the excellence connoted by her own beauty and virtue. Shutters concludes that the mutability of the Continental and English wife distinction across the Canterbury Tales reflects the ‘productive contingency or “messiness” of Chaucerian poetics’ (p. 421).

Jonathan Stavsky’s ‘Translating the Near East in the Man of Law’s Tale and Its Analogues’ (ChauR 55[2020] 32–54) considers falsely maligned women and geographical meanings from a different perspective, assessing the evolving image of the Near East between the Man of Law’s Tale and its English analogues and their Continental or Anglo-French sources. Stavsky analyses a range of Middle English texts—the Man of Law’s Tale, Gower’s ‘Tale of Custance’, the Northern and Southern Octavian, and Le Bone Florence of Rome—arguing that while they retain dimensions of East-versus-West conflict, compared with their sources they attest to ‘a decline of interest in global conflict […] and to the gradual withdrawal of their audience into a private sphere built around the nuclear family and the cultivation of personal ethics’ (p. 36). In Chaucer’s case, the Man of Law’s Tale actually heightens the East-versus-West tensions from its source, Nicholas Trevet’s Les Cronicles, but also diminishes its aspect of moralization, such that the Man of Law’s ‘overwrought’ (p. 54) chauvinism may be as intentional and ironic as the Squire’s naive copiousness or Chaucer the pilgrim’s crude rhymes in the Tale of Sir Thopas.

Danielle Sottosanti, in ‘“We shul first feyne us cristendom to take”: Conversion and Deceit in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale’ (SP 117[2020] 240–60), proposes a critical re-evaluation of the Sowdanesse, the Muslim antagonist of the Man of Law’s Tale. While many scholars have read the Sowdanesse as the crux of the poem’s anti-Muslim and misogynistic themes, Sottosanti suggests that despite her undeniable villainy, her example invites readers to consider the issues of forced and feigned religious conversion. Chaucer departs from his source by inventing the Sowdanesse’s instruction that her people should feign conversion to Christianity, suggesting a limited and conditional sympathy towards non-Christians in the face of compelled conversion. Sottosanti concludes that in a religious culture where the likes of Robert Holcot and Raymond of Peñafort advocated many kinds of forced conversion, feigned conversion could prove a useful tactic: the Sowdanesse may be read in this light as exemplifying ‘the secular ramifications of religious deception’ (p. 260).

In ‘Winking at the Nun’s Priest’ (ChauR 55[2020] 298–316), Joseph Turner adds to the substantial body of work which interprets the Nun’s Priest’s Tale as a self-reflexive mirror of medieval literary forms, models, and tropes. Winking in this poem refers to a specific way of looking, a mode of partial, imperfect visual response related to the rhetorical practice of descriptio, in which ‘to “wink” is to see incompletely’ (p. 299). Thus, Chaunticleer winks at, rather than sees, Russell the fox, his myopic and inattentive focus leading to the brink of disaster; this ‘winking’ takes place at several narrative levels, with the Nun’s Priest ‘seeing’ the figure of the widow only through the narrow prism of her poverty. This mode of winking derives, for Turner, from traditional rhetorical approaches such as the descriptio feminae, and its usage here reveals how perception and description are always perspectival and fallible: ‘no descriptio functions outside of ideology … Description is conditioned by tradition … and by individual belief’ (p. 315).

John Scattergood’s ‘Trinity College Dublin MS 347 and a Possible Source for Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale, VII 11–19’ (ChauR 55[2020] 236–43) suggests a passage from Gilbertus Minorita’s Distinctiones, as compiled in TCD MS 347, as a putative source for lines 11–19 of the Shipman’s Tale. These lines, in the voice of an archetypal unsatisfied wife demanding her husband gift her expensive clothing (or else she will find another man), have no parallels in the tale’s closest analogues, Boccaccio’s Decameron VIII.1 and VIII.2 and Sercambi’s Novella 32. At fol. 199^v, TCD MS 347 contains a passage of Distinctiones titled ‘Contra matrimonium’, a Latin discourse moralizing on marital infidelity. It is interspersed with fragments of English verse which ‘express in forthright terms the woman’s view that marital infidelity could be justified if a “husband” is unsatisfactory in terms of his lack of generosity towards her’ (p. 240). There are suggestive substantial and lexical parallels with the Shipman’s lines, although given the unlikelihood of Chaucer accessing this Ireland-based manuscript, Scattergood speculates that Chaucer may have known Minorita’s Distinctiones from elsewhere, or that the fragmentary English verse was available to him by some other means.

Kenneth J. Thompson’s ‘The Yeoman’s “Pecok Arwes”’ (ChauR 55[2020] 55–69) considers the vividly described attire of the otherwise peripheral and tale-less Canterbury pilgrim, the Knight’s Yeoman, introduced after the Squire in the General Prologue. Thompson focuses on one detail—his peacock-fletched arrows—arguing that since the peacock feathers most often used in medieval fletching were their red-brown primary pinions, the view of some scholars that the Yeoman’s clothes are gaudy and lurid is likely erroneous. The detail in the General Prologue that his arrows ‘drouped noght’ (p. 55) suggests they are for military, not hunting, purposes, as they are trimmed to achieve maximum distance; as such, the Yeoman is no Robin Hood analogue or forester but a militaristic ‘companion to the campaigning Knight’ (p. 69).

Kathy Cawsey’s ‘Whan that May? Chaucer’s breaking with convention in the opening lines of the Canterbury Tales’ (Expl 78[2020] 75–9) begins with an observation: the General Prologue’s first words, ‘Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote’ (p. 75) deviates from the literary convention that is enacted in the Canterbury Tales’ opening lines—the traditional springtime setting of love poems and dream visions. To adhere to the conventions reinforced by, among other works, the Roman de la rose and Jean Froissart’s Paradys d’Amour, Chaucer should have set his poem in May. The reason for the change, Cawsey argues, is that April most often contains Easter, as well as the feast of St George and possibly Ascension Tuesday: the April timing would have alerted convention-savvy medieval readers that this would not be a typical romance, but a ‘mix of secular and sacred’ (p. 78) that would play with received generic expectations.

Proceeding from May to hay, some welcome attention was paid to the Friar in Robert Costomiris’s ‘“A Cart that Charged was with hey”: The Symbolism of Hay in Chaucer’s “Friar’s Tale”’ (Neophil 104[2020] 585–99). For Costomiris, the choice of hay as the contents of the centrally important cart is no coincidence; rather, it reflects the tradition of hay symbolism in Christian Scripture and later writings. In this tradition, hay represents the transient and ephemeral goods of the temporal world, with an implicit suggestion of the impermanence of mortal life and the weakness of the human soul in its concupiscence (pp. 590–3). Here, the Summoner’s mindless coveting of the cart of hay reinforces the Christian motif of avarice as a route to greater and greater depths of personal instability and ‘spiritual emptiness’ (p. 598).

3. Other Works

This year saw a number of studies which shared central interests in reading, experience, and epistemology. Troilus and Criseyde attracted by far the greatest portion of scholarly attention. Kara Gaston’s Reading Chaucer in Time: Literary Formation in England and Italy takes a theoretical approach to Chaucer’s interactions with Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The introduction (‘Reading for Formation’, pp. 1–14) challenges a binary distinction between ‘form’ and ‘formation’. Since reading is always a determinate event in time, the process of literary formation never reaches a definitive end, and so ‘it might not achieve all of its goals in the same moment’ (p. 13). The first chapter (‘Form and Formation in the Vita nuova, Filostrato, and Troilus and Criseyde’, pp. 15–47) emphasizes literary formation as a process constantly taking place within history, without necessary teleology. It argues that Dante’s Vita nuova, which influenced Boccaccio’s Filostrato but not (directly) Troilus and Criseyde, still serves to ‘help determine what Troilus is able to achieve’ (p. 17). The second chapter (‘Writing Readers in the Thebaid, Teseida, and Knight’s Tale’, pp. 48–83) charts the evolution of the Statian image of the lady gazing into a funeral pyre throughout Boccaccio and Chaucer, arguing that this figure is a prototypical model of diversified readership. Chapter 3 (‘Learning in Time: Intellectual Formation in the Griselda Story’, pp. 84–115) analyses the tradition of Griselda narratives—paying close attention to Boccaccio’s Decameron X.10, Petrarch’s Historia Griseldis, and Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale. These narratives, for Gaston, combine to suggest that texts may depend upon the external world and its readers in order to articulate meanings or achieve closure, however provisional. The fourth chapter (‘Assembling the Times in the Metamorphoses, Filocolo, and Franklin’s Tale’, pp. 116–43) argues that Chaucer’s tale, exploiting the multivalence of key terms, foregrounds the situation of language and thought as temporal and gradually unfolding, and reveals how this temporality leads to a multiplicity of dynamic perspectives. The final chapter (‘How Much Is Enough in the Monk’s Tale? Setting Boundaries in Humanist Biography’, pp. 144–74) considers the Boccaccian and Petrarchan influences on the Monk’s Tale, arguing that Chaucer’s changes reveal how texts and readers are ‘intertwined in one another’s histories’ (p. 165) and ‘mutually constitutive’ (p. 174). The book’s Afterword (‘When Is the House of Fame?’, pp. 175–8) concludes that Chaucer represents reading as fundamental and foundational to experience itself, and that texts and readers are mutually constitutive processes which never terminate in static completeness.

Peter Mack’s Reading Old Books: Writing with Traditions devotes its second chapter (‘Chaucer and Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato’, pp. 56–96) to Troilus and Criseyde, examining the diverse strategies used by Chaucer in adapting Il Filostrato. Mack calls attention to various moments in Troilus where seemingly Chaucerian elements were in fact directly translated from Boccaccio, such as Book IV’s image of a man scratching his heel to relieve a headache. Chaucer’s choices in adapting Il Filostrato are divided into three categories—‘straightforward imitation’, ‘amplification’, and ‘corrective reaction’ (p. 60)—as Mack charts Boccaccio’s influence in considerable detail. Mack notes that while Chaucer reuses a number of Boccaccian images and similes such as the swaying bull, he also redeploys the underlying strategy of using simile to trigger a change in narrative mood. Mack cites the example of Criseyde quaking like an aspen leaf before reaffirming her own agency in the face of Troilus’s imploring advances. Mack makes the case that Troilus and Criseyde, and Chaucer’s poetics, are more dependent on Boccaccio’s example than is often acknowledged, concluding that ‘Chaucer became a great writer because of what he learned from Boccaccio’ (p. 96).

Clare Davidson takes up the theme of readership in the article ‘Reading in Bed with Troilus and Criseyde’ (ChauR 55[2020] 147–70). Davidson discusses the way in which Chaucer ‘directs readers to interpret emotional experiences in accordance with their individual yet culturally informed beliefs’ (p. 149)—as readers in time, critics have brought their own historically conditioned concepts of love and sex to the poem’s central affair. Challenging a common tendency to ‘overread’ (p. 151) the bed scene as euphemistically concealing acts of penetrative sex, this essay applies a more ‘context- and participant-specific’ (p. 153) concept of sex to Troilus and Criseyde’s intimate encounter. Noting several instances where Chaucer actually de-emphasizes sexual explicitness, Davidson argues that Criseyde’s actions and feelings (such as her trembling like an aspen leaf) are more ambiguous than is often noted, reflecting the conditioned biases of Chaucer’s readers in an often problematically gendered way, and that Troilus and Criseyde upholds conceptions of sex and desire that resist traditional, normative notions about what constitutes sexuality.

Laura Ashe’s essay, ‘How to Read Both: The Logic of True Contradictions in Chaucer’s World’ (SAC 42[2020] 111–46), provides a philosophical context for the juxtaposition of mutually exclusive, contingent truths, and the centrality of perspective, in works by Chaucer and other medieval poets. Turning to Troilus and Criseyde, Ashe links the poem’s contingent truths to the variety of different readerly perspectives within the poem’s large-scale contrast between ‘human experience’ and ‘divine truth’ (p. 115). This suspension of contradictory truths is, for Ashe, evident in other late medieval poems—including Pearl, Piers Plowman, and Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale. While this indeterminacy resonates with postmodern approaches, Ashe argues that it has specifically medieval roots in scholastic philosophy. Late medieval epistemology was shaped ‘by mutually exclusive truths that cannot be reconciled and must simply be held fast, simultaneously’ (p. 117). Using examples from Peter Abelard, Hugh of St Victor, Alexander Neckham, and John Wyclif, it is shown that medieval thinkers put pressure on the ‘law of non-contradiction’ (p. 123) and that a belief in the possibility of true contradiction prevailed across medieval religious and literary cultures—not least throughout Chaucer’s oeuvre.

Adopting a more historicist approach, Daniel Davies’s essay, ‘“Wereyed on every side”: Chaucer’s Troilus and Crisyede and the Logic of Siege Warfare’ (NML 20[2020] 74–106), begins with the assertion that while the poem’s focus is love, not war, the ‘gap between […] the amorous quest of love and the military quest of war’ (p. 75) is surprisingly narrow. Noting London’s origin myth as the new Troy, Davies argues that, in Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer draws on the language and imagery of medieval siege literature and siege practices that were used throughout the Hundred Years War. Framing love’s travails as siege-like, and pointedly contrasting the besieged Troy with the besieging Greek camp, Chaucer throws the structural and symbolic similarities of love and war into relief, revealing the sometimes ambiguous boundaries between them.

While Troilus and Criseyde attracted the most scholarly attention, this year saw several studies of Chaucer’s other long poems, as well as less researched works including the Treatise on the Astrolabe and the ballades. Lucy M. Allen-Goss, Female Desire in Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Good Women’ and Middle English Romance explores concepts of female desire in late medieval writings, with three chapters on The Legend of Good Women. The introduction (‘The Origins of Female Desire’, pp. 1–34) contextualizes medieval ideas of the female body as bounded by and directed at the masculine body. Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women presents a novel ‘feminine rhetoric’ in the face of ‘undesirable masculine truths’ (p. 23). Beyond this, the Legend asserts a poetics of female desire, albeit in a self-conscious, ambivalent fashion. The first chapter (‘The Silencing of Female Desire in the “Legend of Philomela”’, pp. 35–60) argues that Chaucer invites reflection on ‘that traditional conflation of female body with feminised text’ (p. 36). Chaucer’s Philomela raises the potential for a ‘feminine hermeneutic’ defined by tension between the ‘desire to be a closed, self-authoring female body [and] the imagery of feminine desirousness’ (p. 60). The third chapter (‘“As Matter Appetiteth Form”: Desire and Reciprocation in the “Legend of Hipsiphyle [sic] and Medea”’, pp. 83–109) likewise links textual interpretation and subjugated female desire. Chaucer shows the ways in which women’s desires ‘mobilise or unfix, reflect or reveal, the gendered orientation of their bodies’ (p. 83). Hypsipyle and Medea are coded as ‘capouns’ (p. 102), their bodies primarily defined by the lack of a phallus. In the fifth chapter (‘Veiled Interpretations and Architectures of Desire in the “Legend of Thisbe” and the “Legend of Ariadne”’, pp. 141–64), Allen-Goss argues that Chaucer’s adaptations undermine a traditional Latin hermeneutic which draws parallels between gender hierarchies and structures of grammar. The retelling of Thisbe’s story subverts its traditional treatment as a tale of ‘overwhelming sexual desire and excitingly taboo lust’ (p. 144). Conversely, Chaucer locates Pyramus and Thisbe within indeterminately deviant categories. The ‘Legend of Ariadne’ upholds a similar dynamic. While Chaucer departs from his sources to give Phaedra pseudo-masculine authority, Ariadne is symbolically subjugated: since unwound spool is seemingly useless, Ariadne’s thread represents her deprivation of a ‘feminine means of making meaning’ (p. 162). The book’s conclusion (‘The Ends of Desire’, pp. 187–96) posits that the Legend explores a ‘feminine hermeneutic’, framing female desires as ‘irrevocably deviant in their articulation’ while ‘afford[ing] them visibility and substance’ (p. 187).

Additionally, The Legend of Good Women was addressed in two articles. Aparna Chaudhuri’s ‘Poetry and Power in Ovid’s Tristia and Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women’ (ELH 87[2020] 881–909) argues that Chaucer responds to an Ovidian model of literary authority in which ‘to be an auctor is still to be the subject of powers outside one’s (conscious) self: cultural and linguistic systems, imperial rule, and one’s own libidinal unconscious’ (p. 882). In the F-Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, Chaucer draws on ‘the exiled Ovid’s literary autobiography as given in the Tristia’ (p. 883) to evoke the generative tensions between artistic creators and the monarchs, patrons, and wider societies to which they stand in relation. Betsy McCormick’s article ‘Too Good To Be True: Debating Constancy in Chaucer’s Legend and Christine’s Cité’ (ChauR 55[2020] 357–78) considers Chaucer’s contributions to the late medieval ‘Debate about Women’ (p. 358), arguing that (like Christine de Pizan) Chaucer interrogates the conventional parameters of this debate, especially its narrow conceptions of what constitutes a ‘good woman’ (p. 366). For McCormick, Chaucer exposes the unrealistic and impracticable nature of cultural ‘strictures of good behavior’ (p. 361), with The Legend of Good Women showing that mindless adherence to this simplistic and impractical model of goodness leads to catastrophe. Focusing on the ‘excess of unreason’ (p. 361) in both authors’ narratives of good women, McCormick argues that the ‘super-profeminine constancy’ (p. 370) of, for example, Ariadne and Hypermnestra, puts them at a disadvantage in the face of ‘masculine inconstancy’ (p. 376). Chaucer deconstructs a gendered ethic of idealized constancy to show that conventional categories limit the understanding of both texts and reality, and their possibilities.

Two studies considered The House of Fame and its philosophical contexts. Adin E. Lears, World of Echo: Noise and Knowing in Late Medieval England, devotes chapter 4 (‘“Litel Sercles” of Sound: Resonance and the Noise of Language in Chaucer’s House of Fame’, pp. 128–62) to language, experience, and knowledge in The House of Fame, with a central focus on the embodied experience of sound. Assessing the poem’s sensory dimensions, Lears argues that The House of Fame’s Ovidian elements emphasize visuality, citing as an example Chaucer’s translation of Ovid’s ‘resounding brass’ into a ‘brass table […] an object of static visual interest’ (p. 132). The Virgilian influence, meanwhile, is mainly aural. From the translated declaration, ‘Y wol now synge, yif I kan’ (p. 132), to Dido’s vocal lament, Chaucer’s use of Virgil suggests an abiding interest in sound. Drawing on medieval semiotics and music theory, Lears situates this interest in relation to established traditions which organized the sounds of the human voice into hierarchies of sense-making and truth-telling potential. These ‘hierarchies of vox’ (p. 145) are applied to The House of Fame in turn—for example, the eagle’s interjections are taken as the ‘expression of the vox inarticulata literata’, Priscian’s notion of ‘irrational utterance without mental sense’ (p. 146). Lears’s chapter recasts the poem’s indeterminacies in aural terms, noting the importance of inarticulacy and incomprehension throughout. It concludes that Fame’s famously unfinished last line reveals ‘how Chaucer’s authority […] lies in a gap in articulate knowledge’ (p. 161).

Neil Cartlidge continues his work on Chaucer and Holcot with ‘“Scientia vera”? Holcot and Chaucer on Astrological Determinism, Magic, Talismans, and Omens’ (ChauR 55[2020] 279–97), which posits Holcot’s commentary on the Book of Wisdom as the immediate source of passages in The House of Fame and the Parson’s Tale. Cartlidge argues that Chaucer was influenced by Holcot’s sceptical epistemology, in which ‘it is simply not possible for human beings to earn […] “true knowledge” for themselves’ (p. 284). More precisely, Cartlidge posits Holcot’s inventory of charlatans (including ‘alchemists […] enchanters, and magicians’, p. 288) at Lection 98 as the model for The House of Fame’s list of ‘jugelours, / Magiciens, and tregetours […] Olde wicches, sorceresses [etc.]’ (p. 289). Cartlidge suggests that the Parson’s admonition against magic owes a similar debt, in this case drawing on St Augustine’s condemnation of charms and icons in On Christian Doctrine, as explicated by Holcot in Lection 159 of his commentary.

Ken R. Hanssen’s essay ‘“Kek kek! kokkow! quek quek!”: The Glorious Cacophony of Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls’ (ChauR 55[2020] 70–87) probes the relations between knowledge, truth, and experience in another poem teeming with noise: The Parliament of Fowls. For Hanssen, Parliament’s debates of love, nature, and agency noticeably do not resolve into a definitive truth in the dreamer’s mind, and this irresolution is the point: the dreamer realizes the debate’s ‘contingency […] how it constitutes only one of a number of possible truths’ (p. 72). For Hanssen, the poem’s medley of topics and topoi is unified by a central concern with embodied sense-experience: abstract ideals of moral and political philosophy and universalized truth-claims ‘must ultimately yield to Nature’s projection of the world of living, breathing beings’ (p. 82). The birds’ move from early harmony to chaotic cacophony, for Hanssen, indicates the ‘precariousness of any principle of order abstracted from the cacophony of the natural world’ (p. 80).

Two articles on less frequently studied works deviate from the philosophical bent that characterizes much of this year’s work on Chaucer’s long poems. A.S.G. Edwards’s ‘Another Manuscript of Chaucer’s Astrolabe?’ (ChauR 55[2020] 113–16) notes that the Victorian bookseller Thomas Thorpe’s 1843 sales catalogue describes a ‘fine manuscript of the early part of the fifteenth century’ (p. 114) containing Chaucer’s A Treatise on The Astrolabe, alongside scientific works by Robert Grosseteste. Addressing each of the extant manuscripts in turn, Edwards argues that none correspond to Thorpe’s description, suggesting that somewhere there may be an unrecorded manuscript which includes Astrolabe. Matthew Ward’s article, ‘True Blue: The Connection between Colour and Loyalty in the Later Middle Ages’ (JMH 46[2020] 133–55), briefly discusses Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, as well as the ballade Against Women Unconstant, sometimes ascribed to Chaucer on the basis of internal lexical evidence. Both poems, Ward argues, reveal a prevalent association of blue with loyalty in late medieval English poetry—a colour symbolism derived from French examples such as Guillaume de Machaut’s Ballade 248 and Jean Froissart’s Dit dou bleu chevalier. The connection between blue and loyalty was a late medieval development, which ‘was conceived on the Continent, then found its way on to English shores’ (p. 154).

4. Reception and Reputation

This section traces Chaucerian reception broadly chronologically, beginning with studies on contemporary responses to Chaucer through to articles focusing on present-day examinations of Chaucer in today’s culture and pedagogy. This year, Chaucerian reception works were particularly prevalent in studies of the nineteenth century.

Andrew Galloway discusses Chaucerian reception in the chapter ‘Fathering Chaucer: Thoreau, Hoccleve, Lydgate, and the Invention of the First English Author’ (in Andrew J. Power, ed., The Birth and Death of the Author: A Multi-Authored History of Authorship in Print, pp. 32–53). In an edited collection on authorship, the development of Chaucer as the canonical ‘Father of English Literature’ must be addressed, and Galloway explores this in three ways. Firstly, Galloway tackles the modern perspective of the authorial Chaucer using an example from nineteenth-century America. In 1843, Henry D. Thoreau listed Chaucer alongside Homer and Ossian as a fundamental poet. For Thoreau, Chaucer exhibited a femininity not found in Ossian, and was also important as a nameable English poet. Galloway then discusses Hoccleve and Lydgate, two fifteenth-century poets essential to the creation of the concept of ‘Father Chaucer’. While Hoccleve follows Chaucer as an ironic disciple, Lydgate treats Chaucer as a classical authority. These instances are compared with the ways in which Chaucer himself complicated ideas of authority and authorship.

In ‘The Paston Women and Chaucer: Reading Women and Canon Formation in the Fifteenth Century’ (SAC 42[2020] 337–50), Diane Watt examines the Paston women as readers, and especially readers of Chaucer, Lydgate, and other popular works such as the Prick of Conscience. For instance, John Paston II’s inventory of books included Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women, and The Parliament of Fowls; the women of the Paston family therefore had access to these works as well as other influential texts. A letter written by Agnes Paston includes a maxim on pilgrimage which echoes Egeus in the Knight’s Tale, although Watt questions whether Agnes was quoting a Chaucerian proverb or her late husband (p. 347). Knowledge of The Parliament of Fowls is also suggested by the wording of a letter by Dame Elizabeth Brews. By focusing on the literary culture of these women, Watt challenges typical scholarly attention to the Paston women’s literacy (or lack thereof).

Chaucer is the focus of a chapter in Jeremy J. Smith’s Transforming Early English: The Reinvention of Early English and Older Scots. In this monograph, Smith examines the reception of medieval English and Scots texts across a broad chronological scope, from early medieval England through to Romanticism. The key texts discussed are similarly wide-ranging, including Beowulf, the Canterbury Tales, Gavin Douglas’s Aeneid and the Bannatyne miscellany. As well as tracing literary reworkings and reinterpretations, Smith includes analysis of the physical text itself, such as script and punctuation, arguing throughout that ‘every aspect of a given physical manifestation of a text is a vector of meaning’ (p. 9). Chaucer features in chapter 4 (‘The Great Tradition: Langland, Gower, Chaucer’, pp. 127–73). This tripartite chapter tackles the reinvention of Langland’s Piers Plowman and linguistic changes across copies of Gower’s Confessio Amantis, before turning to ‘Chaucerian Receptions’ (p. 150). Unlike Langland’s and Gower’s works, Chaucer’s were printed fairly continuously; Smith moves through various editions of Chaucer, including those by William Caxton, William Thynne, John Stow, and Thomas Speght in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The recent Riverside Chaucer’s version of the opening of the Canterbury Tales is compared with the form taken in the Ellesmere manuscript and various other fifteenth-century manuscripts, such as the Ellesmere scribe’s use of suspension marks. Printed editions, such as Speght’s of 1598 and 1602, saw increased punctuation being inserted, and modernized spellings. These editions reflected their contexts and uses, such as Tyrwhitt’s eighteenth-century edition, which is punctuated in order to help social reading and ‘oral declamation’ (p. 172).

In ‘Bannatyne’s Chaucer: A Triptych of Influence’ (ChauR 55[2020] 484–99), Lucy R. Hinnie considers the ways in which Chaucer was used in the 1568 Bannatyne Manuscript. Both Chaucer’s poetry and works ascribed to Chaucer’s name are particularly important in the manuscript’s attention to the medieval querelle des femmes, disputations on the status of women. Hinnie draws attention to the fact that while Chaucer’s name is invoked throughout in the manuscript’s original hand, only one of these attributions is a genuinely Chaucerian work, a continued mistake traced back to Thynne’s 1532 edition of Chaucer. She further argues that the multitude of Chaucerian attributions, whether genuine or not, points towards Bannatyne manoeuvring Chaucer into an authority with multiple viewpoints in the querelle des femmes. The article then discusses three texts assigned to Chaucer in the manuscript: the ‘song of troyelus’, an excerpt from the ‘Canticus Troili’ in Troilus and Criseyde; Hoccleve’s Letter of Cupid; and Gavin Douglas’s Eneados. Finally, the Scottish response to Chaucer is carefully considered throughout the study.

Ayesha Ramachandran considers Chaucer’s influence on Edmund Spenser, and theories of influence more generally, in ‘Allegories of Influence: Spenser, Chaucer and Italian Romance’ (MLN 135[2020] 1094–1107). Ramachandran begins with Spenser’s invocation to Chaucer in Book IV of The Faerie Queene, comparing the moment of evident influence with other references to Ariosto and Boiardo, Spenser’s Italian sources. In The Faerie Queene, Spenser references and reworks Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale and Knight’s Tale. Even as the narrator displaces these narratives and seizes narrative control, Ramachandran argues, Spenser still follows Chaucer, since usurping a source is an inherently Chaucerian action. The essay charts a ‘complex, four-way social grouping’ (p. 1100) of Spenser–Chaucer–Ariosto–Boiardo. Tania Demetriou’s ‘Tendre Cropps and Flourishing Metricians: Gabriel Harvey’s Chaucer’ (RES 71[2020] 19–43) examines Gabriel Harvey’s reading of Thomas Speght’s 1598 edition of Chaucer. Harvey’s copy has primarily been analysed for a long marginalium in which Harvey refers to Shakespeare; the note has been used to attempt to date Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with limited success. Demetriou focuses instead on the myriad ways in which Harvey engages with Chaucer. For instance, Harvey compiles a list of moments where Chaucer mentions ‘astrologers, alchemists, and related remarkable objects’ (p. 29), as in the Franklin’s Tale. Through a series of detailed analyses, Demetriou demonstrates that Harvey was a close and attentive annotator with a ‘distinctly scientific attitude to literature’ (p. 39), as shown by his praise of Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe.

Several works considered the influence of Chaucer on the literature and culture of the nineteenth century. Chaucer is referenced throughout The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism, edited by Joanne Parker and Corinna Wagner, and is the central focus of Richard Utz’s ‘Chaucer among the Victorians’ (pp. 189–201). This chapter spans the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century, opening with the publication of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim in 1901—Kipling’s attempt to emulate Chaucer’s unifying impact on fourteenth-century England. From this endpoint of the Victorian era, Utz returns to the rediscovery of Chaucer in the later eighteenth century. While Chaucer’s medieval English had become difficult to understand by 1700, texts such as Thomas Tyrwhitt’s 1775–8 editions of Chaucer made him more accessible. Various Victorian figures aimed to disseminate Chaucer’s works widely, particularly F.J. Furnivall and W.W. Skeat. Both were key figures of the nineteenth century who contributed to the popularity of Chaucer, providing greater access to manuscripts of medieval texts (in Furnivall’s case) and penning new editions (in Skeat’s case). Utz concludes on the Victorian programme of making Chaucer a ‘national character’ (p. 199), the ‘founding father not only of English poetry, but of the entire nation’ (p. 200).

In ‘The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer in the Nineteenth Century: Social Influences on Editorial Practices’ (RomText 23[2020] 218–36), Simone Celine Marshall analyses the version of The Book of the Duchess found in the 1807 edition of The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Prior to the 1807 edition, the text was known as Chaucer’s Dream or The Dream of Chaucer, causing some confusion amongst earlier editors. Marshall demonstrates that this version of The Book of the Duchess was intended to be ‘an improvement on all previous texts’ (p. 230), but does not commit to suggesting that the text was in fact an improvement. There is a ‘clear and logical editorial process’ (p. 231), but there is not as close attention to the medieval manuscripts as in previous editions. Christine Cooper-Rompato focuses on Chaucer’s Romaunt of the Rose in ‘The Persistence of Chaucer’s Verses on Footwear in the Nineteenth Century’ (ChauR 55[2020] 327–42). In the nineteenth century, a six-line passage from the Romaunt was used in both British and American newspapers to sell shoes. The passage involves the figure of Love giving fashion advice to the narrator, and Rompato notes that it became one of the most popular Chaucerian quotations of the nineteenth century. She underscores several aspects of the importance of this passage: not only is it humorous, and made for good advertising for shoes, but the use of Chaucer also presents him as ‘a supporter of Victorian interests and pursuits’ (p. 330).

In ‘Why Chaucer’s Prioress?’ (WC 51[2020] 92–103), Bruce Grayer analyses William Wordsworth’s modernization of the Prioress’s Tale, which was published in The River Duddon. Grayer questions why Wordsworth would have chosen to publish his translation in this volume, since he had completed it two decades earlier, and indeed why he would have published it at all, since he did not usually publish his translations. When composing the translation in 1801–2, Wordsworth also read and translated the Manciple’s Tale and The Cuckoo and the Nightingale. Grayer suggests that, in 1819, Wordsworth may have been inspired to publish his Prioress’s Tale by William Hazlitt’s 1818 praise of the original Chaucerian text as ‘simple and heroic’ (p. 96). Moreover, in 1819 Wordsworth was engaging more broadly with Chaucer, in various revisions and new compositions. Finally, Grayer argues that Wordsworth’s choice of The River Duddon as the volume for the Prioress’s Tale translation makes sense given the inclusion of other medievally inspired poems by Wordsworth, such as Artegal and Elidure.

In ‘Chaucer in China: A History of Reception and Translation’ (ChauR 55[2020] 1–31), Lian Zhang charts the reception of Chaucer and his works in China from the early twentieth century to the present day. Chaucer’s translated name, ‘qiáo sǒu’, dates back to 1924, and from early on he was framed as the father of English poetry (p. 3). Zhang’s first section begins with the introduction of Chaucerian texts in Chinese universities, with Chaucer being mentioned as early as 1903 in the Imperial University of Peking’s new English Department. The increasing popularity of Chaucer paralleled an influx of Chinese translations of Western literary texts. In stark contrast to this flourishing of Chaucerian interest, Zhang then turns to the period between 1949 and 1979. Following the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Chaucer’s poetry had little to offer the construction of socialism in the country, although texts such as the Pardoner’s Tale were useful in illuminating Marxist aspects, including ‘the representation of class conflicts and social oppression’ (p. 10). Zhang emphasizes the immense societal and cultural changes in China since 1979, and Chaucerian studies have developed in tandem. Throughout the century-long period Zhang discusses, the Canterbury Tales was the central text of interest. Moreover, scholarship has diversified, attending to Chaucerian features such as his Christianity and interaction with the poetry of courtly love, as well as feminist and Bakhtinian theory. Finally, Chaucer’s presence in Hong Kong and Taiwan is examined: in Hong Kong, short poems such as To Rosemounde were translated as early as 1934, but few Chaucerian studies have emerged since then; and Chaucer was not read in Taiwan until the 1980s, but enjoys a lively scholarly environment in Taiwan in the present day.

Two articles took a comparative approach to Chaucerian reception, comparing Chaucer’s texts with more recent literature. Joseph Taylor examines the ‘absent presence’ (p. 251) of the refugee in the Canterbury Tales through the lens of the recent Refugee Tales, in ‘“When a Stranger Sojourns With You in Your Land”: Loving the Refugee as Neighbor in the Canterbury Tales and Refugee Tales’ (Exemplaria 32[2020] 248–68). The Bible’s command to love one’s neighbour, Taylor establishes, is built on an inherent sense of difference between oneself and one’s neighbour, a paradigm which applies to the figure of the refugee. The Refugee Tales’ use of Chaucerian Middle English has an uncanny effect which makes readers ‘foreign unto themselves’ (p. 253). Taylor then focuses on Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, in which he argues is a hidden refugee story—the spectral presence of Boccaccio’s Teseida and its narrative of the fall of Thebes by Theseus, whom Chaucer fashions as the hero of his tale. Chaucer elides and abbreviates Boccaccio’s depictions of refugees, a fact Taylor also links to Chaucer’s own experiences in war and as a prisoner. By reading the Refugee Tales and the Canterbury Tales alongside one another, Taylor concludes that ‘the voices of the oppressed remain troublingly present’ (p. 265) in Chaucer’s work. In ‘“[A]n Exterior Air of Pilgrimage”: The Resilience of Pilgrimage Ecopoetics and Slow Travel from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road’ (Hum 9[2020] 1–11), Susan Signe Morrison draws parallels between Chaucer’s and Kerouac’s Christian drive to go on pilgrimage, as well as each author’s use of his respective vernacular language. The study then turns to ‘slow travel’ (p. 8); the Canterbury Tales is built on characters wandering and dallying; while On the Road has been described as a fast text, Morrison argues instead for its occasional slowness.

Finally, two articles in the new journal New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession explore the place and purpose of Chaucer in culture and pedagogy today. Anthony Bale’s ‘Reflections on Chaucer, Pedagogy, and the Profession of Medieval Studies’ (NewChaucerSt 1[2020] 6–17) cautions against approaching the Middle Ages from a transhistorical perspective. The antisemitism of Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, as well as the fundamental difference in culture between the medieval and modern periods, raise ‘provocative challenges to our present’ (p. 9) rather than confirming inherent similarities between the past and the present. Bale provides a wealth of evidence for educational inequality in the UK, with particular diversity issues identified in English and history academic departments. Finally, Bale addresses the appropriation of medieval figures and narratives, particularly the use of St George by Brexiteers in recent years. In the following article, Andrew James Johnston examines the teaching of medieval English literature in Germany, in ‘Chaucer and Beowulf in Germany and the Survival of International Medieval Studies’ (NewChaucerSt 1[2020] 18–25). Johnston notes the ‘complete lack of exchange’ (p. 19) between the disciplines of medieval English and medieval German literature across German and anglophone institutions. Several differences between fields are demonstrated—Johnston claims that anglophone critics do not tend to distinguish between Beowulf’s poet and narrator, for instance, an approach which would ‘horrify the average German critic’ (p. 21). The study concludes by arguing for the development of a globally focused medieval studies which decentres Western, Eurocentric perspectives, and involves an understanding of the scholarly traditions which have shaped our particular fields.

Books Reviewed