The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer

by Conklin Akbari, Suzanne; Simpson, James

• ISBN13: 9780198890560
• ISBN10: 0198890567
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2023-10-30
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

As the 'father' of the English literary canon, one of a very few writers to appear in every 'great books' syllabus, Chaucer is seen as an author whose works are fundamentally timeless: an author who, like Shakespeare, exemplifies the almost magical power of poetry to appeal to each generation of readers. Every age remakes its own Chaucer, developing new understandings of how his poetry intersects with contemporary ways of seeing the world, and the place of the subject who lives in it. This Handbook comprises a series of essays by established scholars and emerging voices that address Chaucer's poetry in the context of several disciplines, including late medieval philosophy and science, Mediterranean Studies, comparative literature, vernacular theology, and popular devotion.

The volume paints the field in broad strokes and sections include Biography and Circumstances of Daily Life; Chaucer in the European Frame; Philosophy and Science in the Universities; Christian Doctrine and Religious Heterodoxy; and the Chaucerian Afterlife. Taken as a whole, The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer offers a snapshot of the current state of the field, and a bold suggestion of the trajectories along which Chaucer studies are likely to develop in the future.

Author Biography

Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Professor of English and Medieval Studies, University of Toronto,James Simpson, Douglas P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor English, Harvard University

Suzanne Conklin Akbari is Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and was educated at Johns Hopkins and Columbia. She has written books on optics and allegory (Seeing Through the Veil) and European views of Islam and the Orient (Idols in the East), and edited collections on travel literature (Marco Polo), Mediterranean Studies (A Sea of Languages), and somatic histories (The Ends of the Body).

James Simpson is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. He was formerly Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. His most recent books are Reform and Cultural Revolution, being volume 2 in the Oxford English Literary History (Oxford University Press, 2002); Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Harvard University Press, 2007), and Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Table of Contents

Introduction: Placing the Past, Suzanne Conklin Akbari
Part 1:Chaucer in the Mediterranean Frame
1. Chaucer's Travels for the Court, Peter Brown
2. Chaucer and Contemporary Courts of Law and Politics: House, Law, Game, Matthew Giancarlo
3. At Home in the 'Countour-Hous': Inhabiting Space on Chaucer's Polyglot Dwellings, Jonathan Hsy
4. Labour and Time, Kellie Robertson
5. Books and Booklessness in Chaucer's England, Alexandra Gillespie
6. The Role of the Scribe: Genius of the Book, Martha Rust
7. 'Gaufred, deere maister soverain': Chaucer and Rhetoric, James Simpson
Part 2: Chaucer in the Mediterranean Frame
8. Anti-Judaism / Anti-Semitism and the Structures of Chaucerian Thought, Steven F. Kruger
9. 'O Hebraic People!' English Jews and the Twelfth-Century Literary Scene, Ruth Nisse
10. The Hazards of Narration: Frame-Tale Technologies and the Oriental Tale, Karla Mallette
11. Fictions of Espionage: Performing Pilgrim and Crusader Identities in the Age of Chaucer, Suzanne M. Yeager
Part 3: Chaucer in the European Frame
12. Ovid: Artistic Identity and Intertextuality, Jamie C. Fumo
13. Chaucer and the Textualities of Troy, Marilynn Desmond
14. The Romance of the Rose: Allegory and Lyric Voice, David F. Hult
15. Challenging the Patronage Paradigm: Late-Medieval Francophone Writers and the Poet-Prince Relationship, Deborah McGrady
16. Dante and the Author of the Decameron: Love, Literature, and Authority in Boccaccio, Martin Eisner
17. Boccaccio's Early Romances, Warren Ginsberg
18. Chaucer's Petrarch: 'enlumnyed ben they', Ronald Martinez
19. Dante and the Medieval City: How the Dead Live, David L. Pike
20. Historiography: Nicholas Trevet's Transnational History, Suzanne Conklin Akbari
Part 4: Philosophy and Science in the Universities
21. Grammar and Rhetoric c. 1100-c. 1400, Rita Copeland
22. Philosophy, Logic, and Nominalism, Fabienne Michelet and Martin Pickavé
23. The Poetics of Trespass and Duress: Chaucer and the Fifth Inn of Court, Eleanor Johnson
24. Medicine and Science in Chaucer's Day, E. Ruth Harvey
25. Logic and Mathematics. The Oxford Calculators, Edith Dudley Sylla
Part 5: Christian Doctrine and Religious Heterodoxy
26. Wycliffism and its After-Effects, Stephen E. Lahey
27. Anticlericalism, Inter-clerical Polemic and Theological Vernaculars, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Melissa Mayus, and Katie Bugyis
28. Chaucer as Image-Maker, Denise Despres
Part 6: The Chaucerian Afterlife
29. Geographesis, or the Afterlife of Britain in Chaucer, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
30. Vernacular Authorship and Public Poetry: John Gower, T. Matthew N. McCabe
31. Lydgate's Chaucer, Anthony Bale
32. Dialogism in Hoccleve, Jonathan Newman
33. Old Books and New Beginnings North of Chaucer: Revisionary Reframings in the Kingis Quair and the Testament of Cresseid, Iain MacLeod Higgins