A wide range of new scholarship on Chaucer's poetry. This collection of essays makes available a wide range of new scholarship on Chaucer's poetry. Opening essays address the issues of "Chaucerian representation" and "Chaucerian poetics", arguing for the multiplicity and complexityof what Chaucer "represents" and for the importance of his dual Anglo-French background in enabling him to articulate that complexity. Chaucer's use of Ovidian and Ciceronian sources and ideas is examined, and his pursuit of simplicity and suspicion of "delicacy"; the potent issues of sexuality and spirituality, and money and death (with Chaucer's own ending and his thoughts on last things) complete the collection. Contributors: DEREK BREWER, HELEN COOPER, PAUL DOWER, JOHN V. FLEMING, JOHN HILL, TRAUGOTT LAWLER, CELIA LEWIS, R. BARTON PALMER, WILLIAM PROVOST, JOHN PLUMMER, WILLIAM ROGERS.

The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism. Reading for form can mean reading for formation. Understanding processes through which a text was created can help us in characterizing its form. But what is involved in bringing a diachronic process to bear upon a synchronic work? When does literary formation begin and end? When does form happen? These questions emerge with urgency in the interactions between English poet Geoffrey Chaucer and Italian trecento authors Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Francis Petrarch. In fourteenth-century Italy, new ways were emerging of configuring the relation between author and reader. Previously, medieval reading was often oriented around the significance of the text to the individual reader. In Italy, however, reading was beginning to be understood as a way of getting back to a work's initial formation. This book tracks how concepts of reading developed within Italian texts, including Dante's Vita nova, Boccaccio's Filostrato and Teseida, and Petrarch's Seniles, impress themselves upon Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Canterbury Tales. It argues that Chaucer's poetry reveals the implications of reading for formation: above all, that it both depends upon and effaces the historical perspective and temporal experience of the individual reader. Problems raised within Chaucer's poetry thus inform this book's broader methodological argument: that there is no one moment at which the formation of Chaucer's poetry ends; rather its form emerges in and through process of reading within time.

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.

This book explores the rich, complex, literary tradition of the medieval go-between. Idealized going between usually leads to marriage and it develops a new dimension of the much debated question of courtly love and woman's part in it. Chaucer's Pandarus's place in this go-between tradition is a tour de force.

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the most celebrated literary work of medieval England, portrays the culture of the late Middle Ages as a deeply commercial environment, replete with commodities and dominated by market relationships. However, the market is not the only mode of exchange in Chaucer’s world or in his poem. Chaucer’s Gifts reveals the gift economy at work in the tales. Applying important recent advances in anthropological gift theory, it illuminates and explains this network of exchanges and obligations. Chaucer’s Gifts argues that the world of the Canterbury Tales harbours deep commitments to reciprocity and obligation which are at odds with a purely commercial culture, and demonstrates how the market and commercial relations are not natural, eternal, or inevitable – an essential lesson if we are to understand Chaucer’s world or our own.

III: Subjectivity and the Self -- 6. Re-reading Troilus in Response to Tony Spearing -- 7. The English Charles: Subjectivity, Texts and Culture -- IV: Reading for Form -- 8. The Inescapability of Form -- 9. Destroyer of Forms: Chaucer's Philomela -- 10. Gower's Confessio Amantis and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as Dits -- 11. Poems without Form? Maiden in the mor lay Revisited -- 12. "I" and "We" in Chaucer's Complaint unto Pity -- V: Epilogue -- 13. Two Appreciations of A.C. Spearing -- 14. Announcing a Literary Find Apparently Related to the Gawain-poet -- Works Cited -- Index

This book explores the Chain of Love, a Platonic metaphor for the invisible bond between Creator and Creation, for the space between beginnings and ends of temporal succession, and for the heard, or unheard, word between thought and deed, or between contrition and satisfaction in the process of penitence.

This volume is the second of the thirteen in preparation that will offer the first complete scholarly edition of the poetry and music of Guillaume de Machaut, the foremost practitioner of these related arts at the end of the Middle Ages in France. It provides a freshly prepared edition based on the most reliable manuscript of two of Machaut's best known dits, the Remede de Fortune (Remedy for Fortune) and the Confort d'ami (Consolation from a Friend), both of which adapt the central ideas of Boethian philosophy to the love poetry tradition. The French texts are accompanied by facing English translations, and the musical passages are presented in situ in a performance-accessible form.

This is a collection of essays by diverse hands engaging, interrogating, and honoring the medieval scholarship of Terry Jones. Jones' life-long engagement with the Middle Ages in general, and with the work of Chaucer in particular, has significantly influenced contemporary understanding of the period generally, and Middle English letters in particular. Both in film of all types - full-feature comedy (Monty Python and the Holy Grail) as well as educational television series for BBC, the History Channel, etc. (e.g., Medieval Lives) - and in his published scholarship (e.g., Chaucer's Knight, in original and revised editions, Who Murdered Chaucer?), Jones has applied his unique combination of carefully researched scholarship, keen intelligence, fearless skepticism of establishment thinking, and his broad good humor to challenge, enlighten and reform. No one working today in either Middle English studies or in period-related film and/or documentary can proceed untouched by Jones' purposive, provocative views. Jones, perhaps more than any other medievalist, can be said to be an integral part of what Palgrave deems the "common dialogue."