Abstract:Chaucer's place in the canon and on the syllabus has at various times during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in various places around the world, been questioned by students, academics, administrators, and professional organizations, in response to very specific and often highly localized cultural, historical, and institutional factors. The history and nature of those factors are instructive if we want to continue to make the case for the value of studying Chaucer. In this address I consider some of the national and international contexts that have put pressure on the study of Chaucer, contexts that include US and UK responses to institutional racism, and feminist literary criticism's critique of Chaucer's sexism and of the institutionalization of feminist criticism. I consider some of the historical rejections of Chaucer, from that of the black British writer David Dabydeen in the 1970s to the brief flare of the Chaucer Wars of 2021. I argue that decentering Chaucer needs an informed critique of how canons are constructed and of the specific ways in which they are ethnocentric and non-representative. I then consider some of the ways in which Chaucer's work has been reimagined in positive political ways, such as Refugee Tales. I argue that we should continue to read Chaucer because his writings and the history of their reception continue to generate new and important ways of understanding the past history of race and racism, and thus enable the envisioning of more hopeful futures for Chaucerian scholars and our students.
{"title":"On Not Being Chaucer","authors":"Ruth Evans","doi":"10.1353/sac.2022.0028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2022.0028","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Chaucer's place in the canon and on the syllabus has at various times during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in various places around the world, been questioned by students, academics, administrators, and professional organizations, in response to very specific and often highly localized cultural, historical, and institutional factors. The history and nature of those factors are instructive if we want to continue to make the case for the value of studying Chaucer. In this address I consider some of the national and international contexts that have put pressure on the study of Chaucer, contexts that include US and UK responses to institutional racism, and feminist literary criticism's critique of Chaucer's sexism and of the institutionalization of feminist criticism. I consider some of the historical rejections of Chaucer, from that of the black British writer David Dabydeen in the 1970s to the brief flare of the Chaucer Wars of 2021. I argue that decentering Chaucer needs an informed critique of how canons are constructed and of the specific ways in which they are ethnocentric and non-representative. I then consider some of the ways in which Chaucer's work has been reimagined in positive political ways, such as Refugee Tales. I argue that we should continue to read Chaucer because his writings and the history of their reception continue to generate new and important ways of understanding the past history of race and racism, and thus enable the envisioning of more hopeful futures for Chaucerian scholars and our students.","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":"44 1","pages":"2 - 26"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49480066","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay examines the ways in which an anonymous fifteenth-century preacher addressed issues of apathy among his congregations, preserved in the English sermon cycle known as Jacob's Well. Through the preacher's expositions of the sin of sloth—and the dramatic exempla that accompany such passages—I argue that the text encapsulates an anxiety over apathy among the preacher's (fictionalized or real) lay audiences. The essay complicates the idea that laypeople in late medieval England believed homogeneously in the religious teachings delivered from the pulpit. Indeed, Jacob's Well is read here as an example of a preacher grappling with the difficulties of managing a congregation made up of diverse experiences and intensities of faith, in which religious indifference had the potential to be deep-rooted. I argue that the medieval Church's conceptualization of "sloth" belies a concern over lay apathy, understood as a potentially subversive mode of unbelief, rather than lay ignorance.
{"title":"Ode to Titivillus: Apathy and the Transformative Potentialities of \"Sloth\" in Late Medieval England","authors":"N. Calder","doi":"10.1353/sac.2022.0035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2022.0035","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay examines the ways in which an anonymous fifteenth-century preacher addressed issues of apathy among his congregations, preserved in the English sermon cycle known as Jacob's Well. Through the preacher's expositions of the sin of sloth—and the dramatic exempla that accompany such passages—I argue that the text encapsulates an anxiety over apathy among the preacher's (fictionalized or real) lay audiences. The essay complicates the idea that laypeople in late medieval England believed homogeneously in the religious teachings delivered from the pulpit. Indeed, Jacob's Well is read here as an example of a preacher grappling with the difficulties of managing a congregation made up of diverse experiences and intensities of faith, in which religious indifference had the potential to be deep-rooted. I argue that the medieval Church's conceptualization of \"sloth\" belies a concern over lay apathy, understood as a potentially subversive mode of unbelief, rather than lay ignorance.","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":"44 1","pages":"233 - 266"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46515619","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"John Trevisa's Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400 by Emily Steiner (review)","authors":"M. Goldie","doi":"10.1353/sac.2022.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2022.0016","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":"44 1","pages":"425 - 429"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47084560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Global Response: Consent in the Long View","authors":"Elizabeth Fowler","doi":"10.1353/sac.2022.0049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2022.0049","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":"44 1","pages":"361 - 362"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41888272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unequal Power and Sexual Consent: The Case of Cassotte la Joye","authors":"L. Akard","doi":"10.1353/sac.2022.0038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2022.0038","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":"44 1","pages":"285 - 292"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43998458","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This article uses an aurality studies approach to the medieval concept of janglynge, whose semantic meaning ranges from idle chatter to animal noise, to sound out Chaucer's particular attentiveness to the act of listening in his dream visions. While Chaucer's first poem, The Book of the Duchess, illustrates the distinctions between hearing and listening, and highlights different relational dynamics implicit in various modes of listening, the implications of this aural preoccupation for his own poetics emerges most concretely in his two most famous dream visions, The Parliament of Fowls and The House of Fame, both of which clearly pivot from visual to aural perceptual modes over the course of their narratives. Here Chaucer's engagement with janglynge through The Parliament's bird calls and the acousmatic voices in the House of Rumor highlights his sense of the partiality of his own poetic voice, dependent as it is on the collaboration of his auditor to come into being.
摘要:本文运用听觉研究的方法，对中古时代的“嘈杂声”概念进行研究，以揭示乔叟在梦境中对倾听行为的特别关注。虽然乔叟的第一首诗《公爵夫人之书》(The Book of The Duchess)阐明了听觉和倾听之间的区别，并强调了各种倾听模式中隐含的不同关系动态，但这种对听觉的关注对他自己诗学的影响最具体地体现在他最著名的两个梦境中，《鸟群议会》和《名望之家》，这两个梦境在叙事过程中都明显地从视觉感知模式转向听觉感知模式。在这里，乔叟通过《议会》中的鸟鸣和《谣言之屋》中的声学声音与嘈杂声的接触，突出了他对自己诗歌声音的偏爱，这种偏爱依赖于他的听音者的合作才得以形成。
{"title":"\"A Familiar Vois and Stevene\": Hearing Voices in Chaucer's Dream Visions","authors":"C. Neufeld","doi":"10.1353/sac.2022.0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2022.0031","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article uses an aurality studies approach to the medieval concept of janglynge, whose semantic meaning ranges from idle chatter to animal noise, to sound out Chaucer's particular attentiveness to the act of listening in his dream visions. While Chaucer's first poem, The Book of the Duchess, illustrates the distinctions between hearing and listening, and highlights different relational dynamics implicit in various modes of listening, the implications of this aural preoccupation for his own poetics emerges most concretely in his two most famous dream visions, The Parliament of Fowls and The House of Fame, both of which clearly pivot from visual to aural perceptual modes over the course of their narratives. Here Chaucer's engagement with janglynge through The Parliament's bird calls and the acousmatic voices in the House of Rumor highlights his sense of the partiality of his own poetic voice, dependent as it is on the collaboration of his auditor to come into being.","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":"44 1","pages":"132 - 93"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46960988","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Response to Leah Schwebel and Jennifer Alberghini","authors":"Lynn Shutters","doi":"10.1353/sac.2022.0048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2022.0048","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":"44 1","pages":"359 - 360"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49056988","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Gift of Narrative in Medieval England by Nicholas Perkins (review)","authors":"R. Meyer‐Lee","doi":"10.1353/sac.2022.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2022.0013","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":"44 1","pages":"415 - 419"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48170529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Lack of research into its script has prevented scholars from fully situating the copy of Troilus and Criseyde found in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 61 in its production network, and has obscured its most likely patron. While unique in an English literary manuscript, the ornate textura employed by the scribes of the Corpus Troilus has direct peers in fine liturgical and religious manuscripts of the first half of the fifteenth century. Tracing the networks of these manuscripts across scribes, artists, and patrons, reveals that the Corpus Troilus was most likely commissioned by a high level prelate.
{"title":"Hunting the Corpus Troilus: Illuminating Textura","authors":"K. Kennedy","doi":"10.1353/sac.2022.0032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2022.0032","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Lack of research into its script has prevented scholars from fully situating the copy of Troilus and Criseyde found in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 61 in its production network, and has obscured its most likely patron. While unique in an English literary manuscript, the ornate textura employed by the scribes of the Corpus Troilus has direct peers in fine liturgical and religious manuscripts of the first half of the fifteenth century. Tracing the networks of these manuscripts across scribes, artists, and patrons, reveals that the Corpus Troilus was most likely commissioned by a high level prelate.","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":"44 1","pages":"133 - 163"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42136744","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Modern scholars, imagining the reading experience infamously evoked by Jankyn's "book of wicked wives," usually interpret medieval misogamous writing through a patristic and clerkly tradition dominated by Jerome. But surviving compilations rarely display the thematic unity of Jankyn's anthology or neatly reproduce familiar formulations of the Hieronymian tradition. Rather, in their juxtapositions of unlike texts, these manuscripts provide material indications of how medieval misogamy might have been conceived differently by the scribes who prepared such miscellanies and the readers who encountered them. In order to examine the cultural and imaginative assumptions that grounded material and textual compilation in mixed-content manuscripts, this essay attends to the "codicological unconscious" of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 851. Specifically, it examines the obsession with feminine insatiability shared by two wholly unlike poems that survive exclusively and contiguously in a single scribal hand in the earliest material fragment of Bodley 851. Where the Ave virgo mater christi (Hail Virgin Mother of Christ) imagines insatiability as a laudable aspect of the Virgin Mary's pure erotic relationship with God, the De coniuge non ducenda (On the Necessity of Avoiding Marriage) imagines insatiability as a despicable aspect of the wife's proclivity for sexual transgression. Although this topical conjunction does not generate any overarching conceptual synthesis or competing misogamous ideology, it nevertheless illuminates how the experience of reading—recuperated via attention to singular manuscript contexts—can produce harmonies and tensions otherwise obscured.
摘要:现代学者在想象扬金的《恶妻书》所引发的臭名昭著的阅读体验时，通常通过以杰罗姆为主导的教父和书记员传统来解读中世纪的厌妻写作。但幸存下来的汇编很少显示出扬金选集的主题统一性，也很少整齐地再现Hieronymian传统的熟悉公式。相反，在不同文本的并列中，这些手稿提供了实质性的迹象，表明编写这些杂记的抄写员和遇到这些杂记的读者可能对中世纪的厌妻制有不同的看法。为了研究混合内容手稿中基于材料和文本编辑的文化和想象假设，本文关注牛津大学的“法典无意识”，博德利图书馆，MS博德利851。具体地说，它考察了两首完全不同的诗对女性贪得无厌的痴迷，这两首诗在Bodley 851最早的材料片段中仅存并连续地保存在一个抄写者手中。《圣母玛利亚》(Ave virgo mater christi)将贪得无厌想象成圣母玛利亚与上帝纯洁的情爱关系中值得称赞的一面，而《论避免婚姻的必要性》(De coniuge non ducenda)则将贪得无厌想象成妻子性侵犯倾向的可鄙一面。虽然这个主题的结合并没有产生任何总体的概念综合或竞争的厌恶配偶的意识形态，但它仍然阐明了阅读的经验-通过对单一手稿上下文的关注来恢复-可以产生和谐和紧张，否则会被掩盖。
{"title":"Wicked Wives and the Insatiable Virgin: Reading the Codicological Unconscious in a Fragment of MS Bodley 851","authors":"T. C. Sawyer","doi":"10.1353/sac.2022.0034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2022.0034","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Modern scholars, imagining the reading experience infamously evoked by Jankyn's \"book of wicked wives,\" usually interpret medieval misogamous writing through a patristic and clerkly tradition dominated by Jerome. But surviving compilations rarely display the thematic unity of Jankyn's anthology or neatly reproduce familiar formulations of the Hieronymian tradition. Rather, in their juxtapositions of unlike texts, these manuscripts provide material indications of how medieval misogamy might have been conceived differently by the scribes who prepared such miscellanies and the readers who encountered them. In order to examine the cultural and imaginative assumptions that grounded material and textual compilation in mixed-content manuscripts, this essay attends to the \"codicological unconscious\" of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 851. Specifically, it examines the obsession with feminine insatiability shared by two wholly unlike poems that survive exclusively and contiguously in a single scribal hand in the earliest material fragment of Bodley 851. Where the Ave virgo mater christi (Hail Virgin Mother of Christ) imagines insatiability as a laudable aspect of the Virgin Mary's pure erotic relationship with God, the De coniuge non ducenda (On the Necessity of Avoiding Marriage) imagines insatiability as a despicable aspect of the wife's proclivity for sexual transgression. Although this topical conjunction does not generate any overarching conceptual synthesis or competing misogamous ideology, it nevertheless illuminates how the experience of reading—recuperated via attention to singular manuscript contexts—can produce harmonies and tensions otherwise obscured.","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":"44 1","pages":"193 - 232"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46189573","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：