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For 700 years, Geoffrey Chaucer has spoken to scholars and amateurs alike. How does his work speak to us in the twenty-first century? This volume provides a unique vantage point for responding to this question, furnished by the pioneering scholar of medieval literary studies, Stephanie Trigg: the symptomatic long history. While Trigg's signature methodological framework acts as a springboard for the vibrant conversation that characterises this collection, each chapter offers an inspiring extension of her scholarly insights. The varied perspectives of the outstanding contributors attest to the vibrancy and the advancement of debates in Chaucer studies: thus, formerly rigid demarcations surrounding medieval literary studies, particularly those concerned with Chaucer, yield in these essays to a fluid interplay between Chaucer within his medieval context; medievalism and ‘reception’; the rigours of scholarly research and the recognition of amateur engagement with the past; the significance of the history of emotions; and the relationship of textuality with subjectivity according to their social and ecological context. Each chapter produces a distinctive and often startling interpretation of Chaucer that broadens our understanding of the dynamic relationship between the medieval past and its ongoing re-evaluation. The inventive strategies and methodologies employed in this volume by leading thinkers in medieval literary criticism will stimulate exciting and timely insights for researchers and students of Chaucer, medievalism, medieval studies, and the history of emotions, especially those interested in the relationship between medieval literature, the intervening centuries and contemporary cultural change.
The church as sacred space places the reader at the heart of medieval religious life, standing inside the church with the medieval laity in order to ask what the church meant to them and why. It examines the church as a building, idea, and community, and explores the ways in which the sanctity of the church was crucial to its place at the centre of lay devotion and parish life. At a time when the parish church was facing competition for lay attention, and dissenting movements such as Lollardy were challenging the relevance of the material church, the book examines what was at stake in discussions of sanctity and its manifestations. Exploring a range of Middle English literature alongside liturgy, architecture, and material culture, the book explores the ways in which the sanctity of the church was constructed and maintained for the edification of the laity. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary theoretical approaches, the book offers a reading of the church as continually produced and negotiated by the rituals, performances, and practices of its lay communities, who were constantly being asked to attend to its material form, visual decorations, and significance. The meaning of the church was a dominant question in late-medieval religious culture and this book provides an invaluable context for students and academics working on lay religious experience and canonical Middle English texts.
See John A. Burrow, ‘Chaucer, Geoffrey’, in The Spenser Encyclopedia , 144–8. See also Anne Higgins , ‘ Spenser Reading Chaucer: Another Look at the “Faerie Queene” Allusions ’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology , 89 ( 1990 ), 17–36; Esolen. 29 Burrow, 148. 30 On the tomb, see R.M. Cummings , ed., Spenser: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971 ), 315. See also Caroline F.E. Spurgeon , Five Hundred Years of
hostility, see, for example, Judith H. Anderson , Words That Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996 ), 37, and indexical entry ‘Homer, winged words of’; also my Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984 ), 159–69. 6 See John A. Burrow , ‘Chaucer, Geoffrey’, in The Spenser Encyclopedia , ed. A.C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto
history; but in their conceptions of life both in this world and the next, Chaucer and Spenser are not so different from each other. 1 John A. Burrow ’s article ‘Chaucer, Geoffrey’, in The Spenser Encyclopedia , ed. A.C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990 ), contains an admirable outline of Chaucer’s multifaceted influence on Spenser; and see also the survey by Anne Higgins , ‘ Spenser Reading Chaucer: Another Look at the Faerie Queene
Elizabethan Stage , 4 vols ( Oxford : Clarendon Press , 1923 ). Chaucer , Geoffrey , The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer , ed. F. N. Robinson ( Boston, MA : Houghton Mifflin , 2nd edn , 1957 ). Clare , Janet , Art Made Tongue-tied by Authority: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship ( Manchester
th Century. Science-Technology Controversy’, Advances in Historical Studies 2: 131–9. Cervantes, Miguel de 2005. Don Quixote. Trans. Edith Grossman. London: Vintage. Chambers, E. K. 1923. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Chaucer, Geoffrey 2008. The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Barry D. Benson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 3rd edn. Davis, James 2004. ‘Baking for the Common Good: A Reassessment of the Assize of Bread in Medieval England’, Economic History Review 57 (3): 465–502. Delasanta, Rodney 2002. ‘The Mill in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale