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(s): Suzanne Conklin Akbari, James Simpson
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 688
City: Oxford
Cover
CHAUCER
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
Note on the Text and List of Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Placing the Past
Notes
PART I: BIOGRAPHY AND CIRCUMSTANCES OF DAILY LIFE
Chapter 1 Chaucer’s Travels for the Court
Bibliography
Chapter 2 Chaucer and Contemporary Courts of Law and Politics
Dreams of court
House and law
Game
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 3 At Home and in the‘Countour-Hous’: Chaucer’s Polyglot Dwellings
Writing on the wall: Chaucerian traces
Home and abroad: aquatic Chaucer
Conclusion: inhabiting languages
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 4 Labour and Time
Reckoning labouring bodies in feudal time
Disposition and artisan labour
Regulating religious labour and producing ecclesiastical bodies
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 5 Books and Booklessness in Chaucer’s England
The matter of medieval booklessness
Chaucer’s books
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 6 The Role of the Scribe: Genius of the Book
Alan’s Genius: scribe and priest and scribe as priest
The scribe as agent and companion of a text’s birth
The scribe as go-between, guide, and author’s other self
Author, scribe, and the true object of literary study
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 7 Gaufred, deere maister soverain’: Chaucer and Rhetoric
Rhetoric and its reception in Chaucer studies
Rhetorical treatises and their parts
1. Invention: poetic conception
2. Ordering poetic material
3. Shaping poetic material (amplification and abbreviation of material)
4. Ornaments of style (tropes and schemes)
5. Memory and delivery
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
PART II: CHAUCER IN THE MEDITERRANEAN FRAME
Chapter 8 Anti-Judaism/Anti-Semitism and the Structures of Chaucerian Thought
‘The fame of the Jewerye’: Chaucer’s Jewish matter
Temporality
Metaphysics
Spatiality
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 9 ‘O Hebraic People!’: English Jews and the Twelfth-Century Literary Scene
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 10 The Hazards of Narration: Frame-Tale Technologies and the ‘Oriental Tale’
Frame’ tales
Framed narratives in motion
Stories that save lives
Framed narratives in Italy
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 11 Fictions of Espionage: Performing Pilgrim and Crusader Identities in the Age of Chaucer
Pilgrimage’s detractors and the crimes of curiositas
Comparing the fourteenth-century pilgrim sources
Simon Simeonis (1323)
Thomas Brygg (1392)
The rewards of pilgrimage and crusade
Notes
Bibliography
PART III: CHAUCER IN THE EUROPEAN FRAME
Chapter 12 Ovid: Artistic Identity and Intertextuality
Temporalities
Ovidianisms
Textualities
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 13 Chaucer and the Textualities of Troy
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 14 The Romance of the Rose: Allegory and Lyric Voice
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 15 Challenging the Patronage Paradigm: Late-Medieval Francophone Writers and the Poet-Prince Relationship
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 16 Dante and the Author of the Decameron: Love, Literature, and Authority in Boccaccio
The Lustful (Inferno 5) in the Preface and Introduction to the First Day
The terrace of lust (Purgatorio 26 to 30) in the Introduction to the Fourth Day: the montanaro and the making of a literary community
The Heaven of Venus in the Author’s Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 17 Boccaccio’s Early Romances
Il Filostrato/The Troilus
Il Teseida/The Knight’s Tale
Chaucer’s use of the Teseida
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 18 Chaucer’s Petrarch: ‘enlumyned ben they’
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 19 Dante and the Medieval City: How the Dead Live
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 20 Historiography: Nicholas Trevet’s Transnational History
The river of time
Language and nation
Notes
Bibliography
PART IV: PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE IN THE UNIVERSITIES
Chapter 21 Grammar and Rhetoric c.1100–c.1400
Grammatical study in the twelfth century
Rhetorical study in the twelfth century
Transitional developments
Grammar after the twelfth century
Rhetoric after the twelfth century
Grammar and rhetoric in fourteenth-century England
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 22 Philosophy, Logic, and Nominalism
English philosophy in the fourteenth century
Nominalism and realism
Human Freedom and Action
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 23 The Poetics of Trespass and Duress: Chaucer and the Fifth Inn of Court
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 24 Medicine and Science in Chaucer’s Day
Appendix
A Note on the Manuscripts of Henry Daniel
Bibliography
Chapter 25: Logic and Mathematics: The Oxford Calculators
The ideas and methods of the Oxford Calculators, narrowly and broadly construed
The relation of Chaucer to the Oxford Calculators
Notes
Bibliography
PART V: CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE AND RELIGIOUS HETERODOXY
Chapter 26 Wycliffism and its After-Effects
The structure and context of Wycliffism
Wycliffism as a moral theology
The Christian life
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 27 ‘Anticlericalism’, Inter-Clerical Polemic and Theological Vernaculars
The background (Kathryn Kerby-Fulton)
Chaucer and inter-clerical polemic (Melissa Mayus)
Theological translations: a case study of Chaucer, the Second Nun, and St Cecilia (Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis)
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 28 Chaucer as Image-Maker
A learned code of response
From parish to shrine: the business of pilgrimage
Image-bearing pilgrims
Relics in motion: The Pardoner’s Prologue
The hermeneutics of image veneration restored
Notes
Bibliography
PART VI: THE CHAUCERIAN AFTERLIFE
Chapter 29 Geographesis, or the Afterlife of Britainin Chaucer
Islands and remembrance
Olde dayes and fairy mounds
Rocks that do not vanish
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 30 Vernacular Authorship and Public Poetry: John Gower
Authorship, public and didactic
Gower’s vox populi: lay identity and agency
Poetry ‘in oure Englissh’: what is it?
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 31 Lydgate’s Chaucer
Chaucer as auctor: the contours of Lydgatean homage
Chaucerian occasion and non-event: Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes
Lydgate and the Chaucerian inheritance
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 32 Dialogism in Hoccleve
Career and works
Modes of dialogue: genre and situation
Poetic persona
‘Communynge’: therapeutic dialogue
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 33 Old Books and New Beginnings North of Chaucer:R evisionary Reframings in The Kingis Quair and The Testament of Cresseid
Long shadow, bright shade, and richly instructive corpus
Recycling ‘north northward’ on fortunys quhele: Chaucerian reframings in The Kingis Quair
‘The northin wind ha[s] purifyit the air’: reopening closure in The Testament of Cresseid
Notes
Bibliography
Index
