TY - JOUR
AU1 - Ben, Parsons,
AU2 - Natalie, Jones,
AB - Abstract This chapter has five sections: 1. General; 2. The Canterbury Tales; 3. Troilus and Criseyde; 4. Other Works; 5. Reception and Reputation. Sections 1, 3, and 5 are by Ben Parsons; sections 2 and 4 are by Natalie Jones. 1. General A key theme in scholarship this year has been the way in which Chaucer can be placed in dialogue with his female contemporaries. Corinne Saunders, ‘Affective Reading: Chaucer, Women, and Romance’ (ChauR 51[2016] 11–30), focuses on the relationship between emotional affect and cognition in Chaucer’s work, and finds the two processes tightly fused together: prominent instances include the Book of the Duchess, with its interest in reading and feeling as mutually dependent practices, the Knight’s Tale, in which emotions are given transformative physical power, and the Legend of Good Women, which shows a marked preoccupation with affectivity and agency. Saunders discusses the ways in which these factors might address a peculiarly female reading experience, and enable us to reconstruct such a reading experience in turn. Similar possibilities inform Madeleine L. Saraceni’s ‘Chaucer’s Feminine Pretexts: Gendered Genres in Three Frame Moments’ (ChauR 51[2016] 403–35). Saraceni detects a pronounced interest in genres conventionally associated with female readers, especially vernacular romance, exemplary saints’ lives, and conduct books. By examining the Legend of Good Women, Melibee, and the Man of Law’s Tale, she demonstrates that Chaucer aligned himself with these ‘female’ genres to explore the needs of emerging readerships, both bourgeoise and female. A comparable approach can be seen in Christopher Cannon’s ‘ “Wyth her owen handys”: What Women’s Literacy Can Teach Us about Langland and Chaucer’ (EIC 66[2016] 277–300). Cannon considers how the type of textual production described by Margery Kempe, in which texts are dictated verbally to the copyist, might parallel Chaucer’s own practices. He notes that the famous Troilus frontispiece from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 61, showing a bookless recital, suggests a poet who could, like Kempe, give voice to an entire work prepared and stored in his memory; further evidence is found in the variability of the terminal -e in copies of the Book the Duchess, which might signal where scribes ‘were writing down what Chaucer said, not what he wrote, using whatever spelling they were accustomed to use’ rather than following Chaucer’s more systematic orthography (p. 294). In one of a number of essays on the links between literary and visual culture, Ashby Kinch considers what manuscript illuminations can teach us about Chaucer’s policies as a writer. In ‘Intervisual Texts, Intertextual Chaucer and the Luttrell Psalter’ (in Fein and Raybin, eds., Chaucer: Visual Approaches, pp. 3–22), he suggests that Chaucer’s testimony in the Scrope–Grosvenor trial shows an interest in images as vehicles of meaning not unlike that encountered in contemporary manuscripts: both posit a complex interplay between writing and image, and between different types of frame and their effects. This point explains how Chaucer could work so readily with various layers of mediation, and expect his readership to ‘engage with his navigation of the boundaries between source and retelling, text and voice, and narrative and social agents’ (p. 12). Similar thinking informs the work of Robert Boenig, who also looks to the image of Chaucer reading Troilus from the Corpus Christi MS in ‘Chaucer and the Art of Not Eating a Book’ (in Kaufman, Hughes, and Armstrong, eds., Telling Tales and Crafting Books: Essays in Honor of Thomas H. Ohlgren, pp. 323–44). Boenig sees this image, with its multi-layered depiction of the author, as a direct response to Chaucer’s fluid posture throughout his work. Further connections between Chaucer and manuscript culture are drawn out by Helen Phillips in ‘Auchinleck and Chaucer’ (in Fein, ed., The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives, pp. 139–55). Philips approaches this famous manuscript less in terms of its influence over Chaucer and more as an index of the writing and reading habits that might have informed his work. In bringing together disparate elements, she argues, manuscripts provide an obvious model for Chaucer’s atomized sense of culture, since both assume a ‘familiarity with chance, incompleteness, and unlooked-for juxtaposition’ (p. 143); his privileging of ‘gentry romances’, and sense of interplay between spoken performance and written text, also mark out membership of a common culture. Chaucer’s authorial persona is studied elsewhere. It emerges as an important precursor to formal life-writing in Barry Windeatt’s survey of medieval representations of the self, ‘Medieval Writing: Types, Encomia, Exemplars, Pattern’ (in Smyth, ed., A History of English Autobiography, pp. 13–26). Chaucer receives notice here as a crucial model for his younger contemporaries, his ‘self-fictionalisations’ providing an exemplar for Osbern Bokenham, Thomas Usk, and Charles d’Orléans to project stylized versions of themselves into their work (pp. 16–17). In the same volume, these manoeuvres are given fuller consideration by David Matthews, ‘Autobiographical Selves in the Poetry of Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve and Lydgate’ (pp. 27–40). While noting the distance between medieval depictions of the self and modern ideas of autobiography, Matthews examines Chaucer’s ‘performance of the self’ from the Book of the Duchess through to the Canterbury Tales; he suggests that the playfulness evident in this self-presentation, which sees Chaucer ‘ironising himself at every level’, is perhaps a reflection of the status of English poetry at this point in its history (p. 32). Overall, he demonstrates a view of the self as an artistic resource where truth and invention merge, rather than a repository of facts that need to be laid bare. Marion Turner considers themes of sickness and injury in ‘Illness Narratives in the Late Middle Ages: Arderne, Chaucer, and Hoccleve’ (JMEMS 46[2016] 61–87). Turner finds multiple traces of wounds and disease across Chaucer’s work, from the pilgrimage as restitution for those ‘that … were seeke’ in the General Prologue, to the death of Arcite in the Knight’s Tale, to the symptoms of lovesickness in the Book of the Duchess and Troilus and Criseyde. She finds Chaucer treating these experiences as points at which language and narrative falter, either dropping into silence or generating dense verbiage that cannot penetrate its object. At other points such allusions confuse the textual and physical body, causing the narrators of Troilus and the Legend of Good Women to become infected by their own narratives in a display of vulnerability that might further indicate lack of authority. A different sense of self appears in Alastair Minnis’s ‘Other Worlds: Chaucer’s Classicism’ (in Copeland, ed., The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. 1: 800–1558, pp. 413–34). Minnis claims that Chaucer’s clearest debt to classical culture is his interest in ‘other worlds’, ‘whether within the present earth or beyond, whether within the prevailing belief system or beyond’ (p. 413). He traces the ways in which antiquity steers Chaucer in a broadly relativistic direction, driving him to equate the foreignness of the past and the foreignness of contemporary non-Christian cultures; hence in the Knight’s Tale, for instance, he sets up equivalences between the noble pagans of Athens and the warriors of ‘hethenesse’ his narrator has encountered. Beatrice Fannon, ed., Medieval English Literature, offers an introduction to major approaches in medieval studies for university students; it also offers a series of new essays intended to showcase recent developments in the field. Chaucer has his own section, in five chapters. Helen Phillips’s ‘Chaucer and Politics’ (pp. 79–94) examines his intermittent references to kingship, social mobility, and tyranny, noting concerns about the proper limits of royal authority, the ‘political order … as an extension of celestial order’, and the humiliations inflicted on courtiers (p. 85). Narrower in its focus is Rob Gossedge’s ‘The Consolations and Conflicts of History’ (pp. 95–127), which offers a reading of the Monk’s Tale in relation to writing and interpreting history. Gossedge detects a tension between providential and secular modes of historiography, one which comes to a head in the sequence on Bernabò Visconti; the Monk’s final admission of ignorance here signals the inadequacy of Fortune as a framework for understanding human history. Literariness and reception draw the attention of Lewis Beer’s ‘Authors and Readers in Chaucer’s House of Fame’ (pp. 112–27). Beer sees this poem as a meditation on the social forces that prevent texts from speaking in their own terms, a process that culminates with the unknowable ‘man of gret auctorite’. In ‘Tie Knots and Slip Knots: Sexual Difference and Memory in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde’ (pp. 128–43), Ruth Evans traces the thread of recollection running through the text. Evans detects a peculiar gendering of memory at work in the romance, manifesting itself in Criseyde’s inability to remember and Troilus’s inability to forget, a contrast that shows suggestive links to the humoral theories of Boncampagno da Signa and Albertus Magnus. Valerie Allen’s ‘Chaucer and the Poetics of Gold’ (pp. 144–59) shows that gold and jewellery feature strongly in the bank of images by which medieval poets understood their own compositions. The ‘Complaint to his Purse’ can be read as a meditation on poetics as well as money, one that is not merely balancing the obligations of metrical and verbal ornament but allowing each to enliven the other. Beyond formal academic analysis, Richard Stokes' The Penguin Book of English Song provides an unusual survey of the links between written text and song for general readers. It brings together a series of poems by a hundred authors that have inspired musical settings, ranging in date from Chaucer to Auden. Stokes' selection opens with texts of ‘Merciles Beaute’ and the first forty-two lines of the General Prologue, referring the reader to the settings of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Sir George Dyson in either case. Finally, the Annotated Chaucer Bibliography for 2014 (SAC 38[2016] 387–450) provides detailed coverage of 234 individual articles and books, and lists forty book reviews. 2. The Canterbury Tales This year a number of studies have concentrated on the tales which make up the first fragment of the Canterbury Tales. The ordering of Fragment One is considered by Nicole Nolan Sidhu in the second chapter of her monograph, Indecent Exposure: Gender Politics and Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature. Sidhu explores how the ‘obscene comedy’ (p. 78) of the Reeve’s Tale is shaped by its relation to the stories told by the Knight and the Miller. She argues that both the Knight’s Tale and the Miller’s Tale offer a world-view that not only prioritizes male authority and power, but suggests that women and their sexuality are a source of social disruption. The Reeve’s Tale is intentionally designed to challenge this shared perspective: by violating fabliau convention it demonstrates the chaos that ensues when men ruthlessly seek power and control. In contrast to its analogues, the tale draws attention to the fact that John and Aleyn are motivated not by erotic desire but a search for power, something that is echoed in Symkyn’s concern with social status and ambition. The women of the tale, Malyne and Symkyn’s wife, are characterized ‘not as the perpetrators of social disruption’, as we commonly find in other fabliaux, but ‘as the victims of a destructive culture of male competition and aggression’ (p. 92). As a result, the emphasis placed on the brutality of the tale’s two rape scenes, subtly hinted at by Chaucer, distinguishes the Reeve’s Tale from other fabliaux and aligns it more closely with the treatment of women and sexual violence in classical legend. Jennifer Bryan, ‘ “A berd! A berd!”: Chaucer’s Miller and the Poetics of the Pun’ (SAC 38[2016] 1–37), examines the importance of punning in the Miller’s Tale. Rather than serving as a device that intensifies the tale’s humour, Bryan argues, puns ‘give a particular charge to persistent Chaucerian questions of intentionality and reception’ (p. 4). She suggests that Chaucer’s use of punning raises questions of intent, as we are made to consider ‘whether Chaucer intended the pun, or whether it is all in the mind of the reader’ (p. 8). Through a consideration of the relationship between the speakers and auditors of puns in the Miller’s Tale, Bryan observes that while Nicholas appears to pun intentionally, characters such as Absolon have no control over their use of language; he ‘becomes the victim of his own unintentionally punning utterances’ (p. 14). By situating Chaucer’s use of puns in the context of English poetics more broadly, Bryan concludes that puns in the Miller’s Tale not only affirm ‘language’s surprising flexibility and fullness’ (p. 33) but instil the tale with a subtle sense of order: ‘under the chaos there is a strange kind of harmony, a system of polyphonic connections and unexpected significance that the characters cannot hear’ (p. 35). The Miller’s Tale and the Reeve’s Tale are discussed as a pair by Michael W. Twomey and Scott D. Stull in ‘Architectural Satire in the Tales of the Miller and Reeve’ (ChauR 51[2016] 310–37). This study combines archaeological and literary approaches to highlight how the descriptions of the houses in the two tales contribute to their satire. They suggest that the lodging of John the Carpenter in a two-part house, made up of a hall and chamber block, and that its shot-window is an intentional economic marker which affirms the capitalist interests and status of its owner. Although the house in the Reeve’s Tale is also a two-part house, the Reeve seeks to satirize Symkyn the Miller by drawing attention to the fact that it is smaller, and thus of lower status, than the house in the Miller’s Tale. The Reeve’s depiction of Symkyn’s lodging as a single-storey, two-part house is ‘an important point of satire’, which not only demonstrates the ‘falseness of Symkyn’s public presentation as an elite’ (p. 35) but subtly intensifies the rivalry between the Reeve and the Miller. The subject of space and architecture is also central to Sarah Stanbury’s essay, ‘ “Quy la?”: The Counting-House, the Shipman’s Tale, and Architectural Interiors’ (in Fein and Raybin, eds., pp. 39–58). Stanbury examines the spatial significance of the counting-house in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale, particularly in relation to contemporary building practices. She notes that, in the late fourteenth century, houses increasingly prioritized private space or rooms with specialized functions. The merchant’s counting-house reflects this trend and demonstrates the sorts of activities which might take place in domestic, private spaces. In the tale, the counting-house operates as a symbolic realm, reflecting ‘marital and bourgeois ideology, and, especially, territorial claims of male mercantile work’ (p. 44). It is an exclusively male domain, as is evidenced by the attention drawn to its door and the fact that the merchant’s wife typically remains outside the space. Stanbury concludes that the merchant’s counting-house highlights the links between the domestic and the mercantile realms. Jeanne Provost, in ‘Vital Property in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale’ (SAC 38[2016] 39–74), approaches the Wife through ecomaterialism in order to examine the language and imagery of property. Although the Wife frequently compares ‘the property relation to a spousal and familial one’ (p. 44), she also appropriates the language of medieval property law to emphasize the agency of property, highlighting the ‘vital role’ (p. 40) of owned things or beings. She observes that the Wife not only compares herself to various types of property but also evokes legal language in her discussion of the marriage debt and the relation between spouses. The Wife invokes the legal principle of caveat emptor, which addresses ‘situations where property frustrates [the] new owner’s expectations’ (p. 56), to refer to the relationship between a husband and his unruly wife: ‘The Wife maps caveat emptor onto marriage when she accuses her husbands of complaining about the pain men suffer because they cannot test potential wives before marriage’ (p. 57). Provost’s investigation of the language of property reveals that, for the Wife, property law depends ‘on myriad emotional and material connections between owners and property—not only dominance and suffering but also affection, attraction, understanding, good use, desire, consent, intimacy, and love’ (p. 74). Joe Stadolnik’s ‘The Stuff of Metaphor: “fyr and tow” in the Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale’ (ES 97[2016] 15–21) is also concerned with the language of the Wife of Bath. His essay sheds new light on the background to the proverbial reference to ‘fyr and tow’ in lines 89–90 of the Wife’s Prologue. Although these lines have been understood as a reference to the sexual desire that may ignite between a man and woman, Stadolnik asserts that they ‘might in fact allude to the spectacular courtly disaster of the bal des ardents’ (p. 17), an incident in which a group of men, one of whom was Charles VI of France, dressed in costumes of flax for courtly entertainment but were accidentally set alight by a torch. If the Wife’s reference to ‘fyr and tow’ is intended as an allusion to this historical incident, it not only serves to demonstrate her ‘wider social and political awareness’ but, by hinting at her desire to advertise her ‘well-connected cosmopolitanism’, also draws attention to her ‘provincial pretences’ (p. 19). Other studies approach the Canterbury Tales through a detailed examination of language. Natalie Hanna, ‘ “To take a wyf”: Marriage, Status and Moral Conduct in The Merchant’s Tale’ (Historical Reflections 42[2016] 61–74), offers a comparative analysis of the frequency of the terms ‘wyf’ and ‘housbonde’ in the Merchant’s Tale and argues that their occurrence reveals the social concerns and marital dynamics that underpin the tale itself. Noting that the term ‘wyf’ occurs sixty-one times, Hanna observes that it is typically associated with the model of January’s ideal, hypothetical wife and is often used with words that relate to the economic and social value ascribed to wives in the medieval period. The phrase ‘to take a wyf’ is also common, confirming January’s objectification of May and his desire to govern her. In contrast, the term ‘housbonde’ appears only four times, suggesting the lack of partnership between May and January, something which is further underlined by Chaucer’s decision to refer to January as a ‘wedded man’. Hanna argues that Chaucer deploys this term in order to reveal January’s ‘belief that his wife should serve him with little concern for his role in the partnership’ (p. 69). Patterns of language are also examined in Luke Mueller’s article, ‘Contesting Individuality: Pryvetee and Self-Profession in The Canterbury Tales’ (Comitatus 47[2016] 189–208). The use of the term ‘pryvetee’ throughout the Canterbury Tales suggests that it was typically valued as an expression of individuality and self-assertion. This is particularly evident in Fragment One, where each tale ‘displays a dominant type of pryvetee that reveals the degeneration of pryvetee’s properties: from God’s pryvetee in the Knight’s Tale to the prostitute’s pryvetee for sale in the Cook’s Tale’ (p. 197). The prologues assigned to the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner are also discussed, as Mueller considers how acts of confession may operate as an assertion of individuality, due to the speaker's self-exposure of their own ‘pryvetee’. Mueller concludes that the treatment of ‘pryvetee’ throughout the Canterbury Tales reveals ‘the difficulty of having a private life and an individual voice in a communal, hierarchical society’ (p. 208). The Monk’s Tale has attracted some critical attention. Emily Houlik-Ritchey, ‘Reading the Neighbor in Geoffrey Chaucer and Pero López de Ayala’ (Exemplaria 28[2016] 118–36), examines the Monk’s account of King Pedro I of Castile and León alongside the depiction of the king as a cruel tyrant in the Castilian chronicle Cronica del rey don Pedro by Pero López de Ayala. She suggests that the Monk’s Tale and the Coronica can be viewed as geographical and generic neighbours, the sense that they overlap in subject matter and draw attention to the gaps in each other’s narratives. In spite of their apparent differences in approach, both works omit certain historical details or recount facts in an intentionally vague manner in order to hint at the wider political tensions which led to Pedro’s demise. Thus, we are encouraged to ‘recognize England’s own dubious, even tyrannical dealings with Castile, Pedro, and Enrique de Trastamara (Pedro’s half-brother, usurper, and successor)’ (p. 121). The Monk’s Tale is also discussed by Shawn Normandin in ‘Reading Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale’ (Viator 47[2016] 183–204). Normandin challenges the common critical reception of the Monk’s Tale as dull or flawed, by arguing that to appreciate the tale we must view it in the context of monastic reading practices and poetics. Some of the features of the Monk’s Tale, particularly those which have attracted criticism, are found elsewhere in Chaucer’s An ABC and in Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine. Like the Monk’s Tale, these works have a ‘monastic sensibility’ (p. 188), which is evinced through their subject matter and form. Notable features of the Monk’s Tale, such as its repetitive structure, reduction of mimesis, and use of ring composition, can be understood as ‘monastic poetics’ (p. 188) which are designed to invoke the reading practice of rumination. The account of Nabugodonosor, whose chewing of the cud when transformed into an ox evokes the practice of monastic rumination, is purposefully followed by a lesson in the dangers of misreading through the tragedy of Balthasar. A number of studies this year have considered the treatment of religion in the Canterbury Tales. Takami Matsuda, ‘Performance, Memory and Oblivion in the Parson’s Tale’ (ChauR 51[2016] 436–52), argues that the Parson’s Tale functions as a penitential manual which allows the reader to achieve contrition and confession by prompting them to undertake a process of self-examination while reading. This act of self-examination is achieved through a repeated emphasis on memory, something which is particularly evident in the tale’s discussion of the six causes for contrition, where attention is drawn to the ‘remembraunce’ of one’s sins and of Christ’s Passion. Although the Parson’s Tale provides a guide for the reader, in the Retraction we also see Chaucer the author, through the tool of his memory, enact the process of contrition and confession as set out by the Parson. The spiritual and didactic potentiality of the Parson’s Tale also informs Kathryn Vulić’s ‘The Vernon Paternoster Diagram, Medieval Graphic Design, and the Parson’s Tale’ (in Fein and Raybin, eds., pp. 59–85). Vulić seeks to contextualize the Parson’s reference to the paternoster prayer (ll. 1039–44) by analysing its relation to the paternoster diagram preserved in the Vernon manuscript (Bodleian, MS Eng poet. a.1). Vulić offers a detailed account of the features of the diagram, noting its arrangement, layout, and use of colour, concluding that ‘it renders graphically the ongoing intellectual and spiritual journey that the Parson suggests in his text’ (p. 79). Jennifer L. Sisk, ‘Chaucer and Hagiographic Authority’ (in Contzen and Bernau, eds., Sanctity as Literature in Late Medieval Britain, pp. 116–33), reflects on the ways in which Chaucer responds to some of the conventions of hagiography. Chaucer’s complex relationship with the genre is particularly evident in the ‘pseudo-hagiographies’ of the Canterbury Tales, the Man of Law’s Tale, the Clerk’s Tale, and the Physician’s Tale. In contrast to conventional hagiographies, these three tales question the distinction between secular and hagiographic virtue and deploy a range of authorizing techniques not commonly found in the genre. Although Chaucer was attracted to hagiography due to its eschewal of conventional voices of authority, he also sought to challenge the genre’s single, univocal style of authorship by presenting conflicting values and voices in his texts. In The Fellowship of the Beatific Vision: Chaucer on Overcoming Tyranny and Becoming Ourselves, Norm Klassen argues that Chaucer should be understood as a theological poet and that the Canterbury Tales is underpinned by a strong Christian message. Klassen asserts that the poem embodies the idea of participatory theology, which is the belief ‘that all of reality participates in the greater reality of God, with which it is suffused’ (p. 5). To demonstrate this, the first part of Klassen’s study, ‘Pilgrimage and the Beatific Vision’, offers an examination of the symbolism of pilgrimage and considers, through a close reading of the opening lines of the General Prologue, how the poem establishes the importance of the beatific vision. The pilgrimage motif ‘applies to the fellowship conceived as the church, the people of God, or redeemed humanity’ (p. 22) and thus invokes ideas of community, as well as the conception of man’s life on earth as a pilgrimage from birth to death. In Part II, ‘Past and Present’, Klassen argues that the problems of tyranny played out in the ancient world of the Knight’s Tale find their solution in the Miller’s Prologue: the Miller’s words, which contain several references to Christ’s life and Passion, remind us that the solution to tyranny is found in God, but is also aided by the bonds between men, as signified by the fellowship of pilgrims ‘that somehow stays intact, moving together towards the beatific vision’ (p. 63). Tyranny in the Second Nun’s Tale, the Physician’s Tale, and the Clerk’s Tale is then explored. In all these tales the threat of tyranny is opposed by a female character who, due to such virtues as obedience and submissiveness, is purposefully aligned with the Virgin Mary. The final part, ‘Becoming Ourselves as Artists’, considers Chaucer’s role as author in relation to his pilgrim persona. Klassen suggests that, by situating himself alongside his pilgrim creations, Chaucer implies that to achieve the beatific vision we must adopt the role of artist and ‘exercise interpretative skill and good judgment in the act of living’ (p. 144). Religious iconography is discussed by Susanna Fein in her essay, ‘Standing under the Cross in the Pardoner’s and Shipman’s Tales’ (in Fein and Raybin, eds., pp. 89–114). Fein argues that both the Pardoner’s Tale and the Shipman’s Tale work to recall the image of the crucified Christ, as they position ‘the general human incapacity to “see” spiritually against glimmering signs of God’s real presence’ (p. 90). The focus on oath-swearing in the Pardoner’s Tale, and the allusion to the Eucharist serves to align the three rioters with Christ’s tormentors. Their inability to see spiritual truths is suggested through their reaction to the oak tree and its treasure. The image of the crucified Christ is also evoked in the Shipman’s Tale when, seeking to win the wife’s favour, the monk denies his ties to the merchant (ll. 148–56). His reference to a ‘leef that hangeth on the tree’ (l. 150) recalls the image of Christ on the Cross and points to the spiritual blindness of the monk and the wife, who become perversions of John and Mary standing at the foot of the cross. Other studies have examined the Pardoner’s Tale. Daniel F. Pigg’s ‘Imagining the Mass of Death in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale: A Critique of Medieval Eucharistic Practices’ (in Classen, ed., Death in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Times: The Material and Spiritual Conditions of the Culture of Death, pp. 263–76) considers the tale’s parody of the Mass in light of contemporary superstitions surrounding the Eucharist and the popular tradition of Masses for the dead, particularly following the Black Death. Lisa Lampert-Weissig, ‘Chaucer’s Pardoner and the Jews’ (Exemplaria 28[2016] 337–60), examines references to the Jews in the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, focusing particularly on the figure of the Old Man as a type of the Wandering Jew. It is argued that the Wandering Jew can be understood as a type of relic because of his direct contact with Christ: the Jew, blighted by spiritual blindness, failed to recognize the true saviour. This inability to see spiritual truth in an idea that is central to the Pardoner's Tale, for the rioters also exhibit the spiritual blindness and literal mindedness that is typically ascribed to the Jews in the Christian tradition. Kathy Lavezzo’s discussion of the Prioress’s Tale in The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton, considers the way in which the tale is informed by ideas of medieval commerce and urban spaces. She notes a distinction between the church as a place of sanctity and the depiction of the Jewish ghetto, which is marked by the site of the privy in which the body of the ‘litel clergeon’ is cast. This link to the privy is fundamental to the tale’s anti-Semitic depiction of the Jews. However, Lavezzo notes that the distinction between the church and the Jewish ghetto is not absolute throughout the tale, as the two locations come to be seen as ‘contingent, fluid spaces joined through the usurious infrastructures of the tale’ (p. 108). The fact that the clergeon’s body moves from the privy to the church at the tale’s end may serve to hint at a connection between churches and Jewish lenders who, contemporary evidence suggests, often lent money to Christian churches throughout the period. A political reading of Chaucer is adopted by William McClellan in his monograph Reading Chaucer After Auschwitz: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. This study asserts that in the Canterbury Tales Chaucer draws attention to the negative consequences of sovereign power. The opening chapter reviews existing political approaches to Chaucer’s poetry and notes the general failure of critics to engage with modern political theory. Influenced by the work of the Holocaust writer Primo Levi and the political philosopher Giorgio Agamben, McClellan adapts the interpretative paradigms of Walter Benjamin in order to argue that our engagement with the literature of the past, particularly writing that comments on sovereign power, is inescapably shaped by our knowledge of the Holocaust. He offers a detailed reading of the Man of Law's Tale, arguing that it highlights the negative effects of power by focusing on the sovereign's abandonment of his subject. McClellan examines Custance’s abandonment by her father, and reflects on the trials and emotional distress that she suffers as a result. The final chapter explores the reconciliation scene at the tale’s close and argues that Chaucer purposefully draws attention to Custance’s obligatory submission to sovereign power at this point. McClellan concludes that in the Man of Law’s Tale Chaucer offers a critique of sovereign power. Issues of political power inform Shannon Godlove’s discussion of the Franklin’s Tale, ‘ “Engelond” and “Armorik Briteyne”: Reading Brittany in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale’ (ChauR 51[2016] 269–94). She argues that Chaucer’s decision to set the Franklin’s Tale in Brittany, a notable deviation from the tale’s source, can be read as part of an attempt to comment on Brittany’s complex relationship with England and France during the Hundred Years War. She argues Chaucer links each of the main characters to one of the three polities: Arveragus with England and ‘Anglo-Breton interests’ (p. 288), Aurelius with France, and Dorigen with Brittany. The Franklin’s Tale is also discussed by Jessica Brantley, in ‘The Franklin’s Tale and the Sister Arts’ (in Fein and Raybin, eds., pp. 139–53), who suggests that the tale repeatedly examines the relation of words and images, particularly created artefacts, to ‘heighten a sense of the artificial, the conventional, and the arbitrary in each system of representation’ (p. 144). The juxtaposition of Dorigen’s promise and the clerk’s illusion encourages us to question the extent to which reality or truth may be found in art, and suggests that image and words can only ever be ‘artificially and conventionally connected to their subjects’ (p. 151). Laura Kindrick, in her essay ‘Disfigured Drunkenness in Chaucer, Deschamps, and Medieval Visual Culture’ (in Fein and Raybin, eds., pp. 115–38), examines the ways in which Chaucer and Deschamp comically depict drunkenness as a form of physical disfigurement: while Chaucer ridicules his drunken pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales, Deschamps satirizes the drunkenness of real noble knights and squires known to him. Drunkenness, in a metaphorical sense, is also considered by Wesley Chihyung Yu in ‘Arcite’s Consolation: Boethian Argumentation and the Phenomenology of Drunkenness’ (Exemplaria 28[2016] 1–20). He examines Arcite’s metaphor of the ‘dronke man’ (Knight’s Tale, ll. 1260–7) considering how the motif is shaped by the history of medieval argumentation and the concept of validity. Yu suggests that, in the context of the Knight’s Tale, Arcite’s metaphor ‘insightfully asks whether patterns of validity agree with reason itself’ (p. 13). Shawn Normandin, in ‘ “Non Intellegant”: The Enigmas of the Clerk’s Tale’ (TSLL 58[2016] 189–223), argues that the enigmatic quality of the Clerk’s Tale is intended to test the Wife of Bath’s assertion that experience triumphs over authority. Elizabeth Dearnley’s brief comments on the Second Nun, in Translators and their Prologues in Medieval England, also touch on issues surrounding authority and the relationship between teller and tale. Dearnley argues that the Nun's decision to describe her account of the life of St Cecilia as a ‘translacioun’ raises interesting questions regarding not only the source-text, but also the extent to which we should view her as a translator. Fragment Seven of the Canterbury Tales is explored by Steele Nowlin in the fifth chapter of his monograph, Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention. Nowlin argues that this fragment is the most self-reflexive section of the Canterbury Tales, as Chaucer puts forward a ‘satire and self-critique’ of his own ‘explorations of the relationship between affect and invention’ (p. 151). A number of studies have commented on manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales. Timothy Stinson, ‘(In)Completeness in Middle English Literature: The Case of the Cook’s Tale and the Tale of Gamelyn’ (ManStud 1[2016] 115–34), examines the manuscript context of the Cook’s Tale in order to reflect on the often fragmentary state in which Middle English texts survive. Stinson surveys the different ways in which scribes have responded to the unfinished Cook’s Tale, noting that while some manuscripts omit the tale entirely, others, such as the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts, leave blank spaces in the hope that the tale might be completed. He devotes particular attention to those manuscripts which follow the Cook’s Tale with the Tale of Gamelyn, as is the case in twenty-five manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales. The Ellesemere manuscript is discussed in detail by Maidie Hilmo, in her essay, ‘The Visual Semantics of Ellesmere: Gold, Artifice and Audience’ (in Fein and Raybin, eds., pp. 218–43). Hilmo considers the manuscript's layout, decoration, and use of illustration in order to reflect on how such features interact with the text and lead to a meaningful reading experience for the manuscript's high-status audience. David Raybin, ‘Miracle Windows and the Pilgrimage to Canterbury’ (in Fein and Raybin, eds., pp. 154–74), considers why Chaucer may have chosen Canterbury as the final destination for his pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales. Raybin reflects on Canterbury Cathedral’s prominence as an important religious shrine in the later Middle Ages, and examines Chaucer’s own connections to Kent, as well as references to Thomas à Becket or to Canterbury found in Chaucer’s works. Raybin’s most important assertion is the suggestion that the stained-glass windows in Canterbury Cathedral, which depict the miracles of Thomas à Becket, might have served as a source of inspiration for the Canterbury Tales and encouraged Chaucer to align Canterbury with the art of storytelling. 3. Troilus and Criseyde Jeff Espie and Sarah Star’s ‘Reading Chaucer’s Calkas: Prophecy and Authority in Troilus and Criseyde’ (ChauR 51[2016] 382–401), examines the figure of Calkas, whose entry into the narrative, they find, draws together two ways of thinking about history, presenting it as both deterministic and the product of human agencies. This duality is made especially apparent by Chaucer’s departures from Benoit and Boccaccio. Sarah Rees Jones’s discussion of urban space, ‘The Word on the Street: Chaucer and the Regulation of Nuisance in Post-Plague London’ (in Allen and Evans, eds., Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads, pp. 97–126), reads Troilus and Criseyde in terms of what it can reveal about the regulation of medieval streets. She notes that both Boccaccio’s text and the Troy in which its action takes place are reconfigured to reflect a ‘contemporary London landscape’ (p. 102). The poem’s treatment of the window as an interstitial structure that brings the private and public spheres into contact is particularly significant. Rees Jones looks at the scene in Book II, in which Pandarus coaxes Criseyde to the window to see Troilus, a moment which combines the same intimate and public energies as medieval marriage itself. The history of the text of the poem concerns Sarah Baechle, in ‘Multi-Dimensional Reading in Two Manuscripts of Troilus and Criseyde’ (ChauR 51[2016] 248–68). Baechle examines the marginal quotations from Latin sources that appear in several copies of Troilus. Unlike the similar apparatus found in around thirty Canterbury Tales manuscripts, and the more expansive counterpart in Gower’s Confessio Amantis, only a relatively small number of the Troilus marginalia seem to be authorial in origin. Baechle considers the glosses in Cambridge, St John’s College MS L.i and Cambridge, University Library MS Gg.4.27 in terms of their contents, and what they can say about Chaucer’s developing interest in these intertexualizing frameworks. ‘While most of the essays in Andrew James Johnston, Russell West Pavlov, and Elisabeth Kempf, eds., Love, History and Emotion in Chaucer and Shakespeare concern Chaucer's relationship with Shakespeare (see below, Section 5), a number deal with Troilus in its own terms. The editors' introduction, for instance, explicitly calls for a more diachronic approach in reading the poem, one that moves beyond New Historicism to acknowledge the ways in which ‘texts themselves interrogate their own moment in history’, taking part in dialogues across conventional period boundaries (pp. 1–16). Andrew James Johnston's essay, ‘Gendered Books: Reading, Space and Intimacy’ (pp. 172–88), puts these principles into practice, examining Troilus' treatment of its sources, especially Statius. Johnston notes that allusions to the Thebaid produce a dark undertow in the poem, gesturing back to the violent substratum of Troy's history, and opening out multiple conflicting modes of reading’. 4. Other Works Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls has attracted significant scholarly attention this year. Sarah Powrie, ‘A Moral Garden “Out of Olde Feldes”: Deallegorized Virtue in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls’ (MP 114[2016] 170–94), examines the significance of landscape, particularly the garden setting. She argues that, in contrast to the conventional locus amoenus, the garden in Chaucer’s poem is an ‘ethically charged terrain’ (pp. 170–1) where virtue and vice come into conflict. The binary opposition of virtue and vice is explored most fully through the characterization of the dreamer-narrator, whose ‘attempts to be virtuous lapse and deviate’ (p. 172); over the course of the poem, he shifts from temperance to intemperance, and from fortitude to cowardice. Michael J. Warren’s article, ‘ “Kek kek”: Translating Birds in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls’ (SAC 38[2016] 109–32), explores the importance of ‘birdspeak’ (p. 115) in the poem. Line 499, which articulates the call of the birds: ‘ “Kek kek! kokkow! quek quek!” ’, reveals Chaucer’s interest in issues of translation and interpretation. Although the ‘birds signify people’, by giving space to their real voices in line 499 the poem reminds us of the ‘force and capabilities of nonhuman creatures who debate some quite specifically avian agendas’ (p. 132). Charles Wuest’s ‘Chaucer’s Enigmatic Thing in The Parliament of Fowls’ (SP 113[2016] 485–500) examines the use of the word ‘thing’ in the poem. Martha Rust’s ‘ “Qui bien aime a tarde oblie”: Lemmata and Lists in the Parliament of Fowls’ (in Fein and Raybin, eds., pp. 195–217) analyses the use of underlining in the versions of the Parliament of Fowls in Bodleian MSS Bodley 638 and Fairfax 16. In these manuscripts underlining is in red ink and occurs in those parts of the poem which include a list of names. Rust seeks to contextualize this feature. Jamie C. Fumo’s ‘The “alderbeste yifte”: Objects and the Poetics of Munificence in Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess’ (Exemplaria 28[2016] 277–96) considers the poem’s depiction of Lady White and her role as gift-giver to the Man in Black. Fumo reflects on the strategic marriage between John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster and Blanche’s own role as a gift in marriage. The language of gift-giving in the poem comes to signify not only the marital relationship and the role of wife but also the composition of poetry itself. The House of Fame is discussed by Alexandra Cook in ‘Creative Memory and Visual Image in Chaucer’s House of Fame’ (in Fein and Raybin, eds., pp. 23–39). Cook argues that in the House of Fame Chaucer offers an examination of medieval mnemonic theory to comment on poetic invention. Through the detailed depictions of the Temple of Venus, the House of Fame and the House of Rumour, Chaucer demonstrates how artificial memory is an inherently creative source which ‘can serve as a tool for narrative genesis’ (p. 34). Chaucer’s House of Fame is also discussed in the first chapter of Steele Nowlin’s monograph, Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention (see Section 2 above). Nowlin argues that the House of Fame explores the theme of invention through an emphasis on movement. The second chapter Nowlin’s study argues that the Legend of Good Women ‘takes up affect and invention together as components of a single poetic project’ (p. 70). The Prologue and the legends are seen as working together through their shared emphasis on the relationship between emotional experience and poetic art. Megan Murton’s ‘Secular Consolation in Chaucer’s Complaint of Mars’ (SAC 38[2016] 75–107) argues that the exploration of secularity and temporality found in the Complaint of Mars challenges the popular conception of Chaucer as a ‘secular poet’. Cynthia A. Rogers examines Chaucer’s Complaint unto Pity in ‘ “Buried in an Herte”: French Poetics and the Ends of Genre in Chaucer’s Complaint unto Pity’ (ChauR 51[2016] 187–208). Rogers approaches the poem through a consideration of Chaucer’s use of the complaint form, particularly with regard to its relation to the conventions of French poetry and the tradition of fin’amors. The lyrics Fortune and Truth are examined by Katarzyna Stadnik in ‘Sharing Minds in Panchrony: Chaucer’s Fortune and Truth’ (in Łozowski and Stadnik, eds., Visions and Revisions: Studies in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, pp. 179–86). Stadnik argues that the imagery deployed in Fortune and Truth engages with Boethian images of mutability and Fortune. A study of Chaucer’s Boece forms an important part of Melinda E. Nielsen’s article, ‘Translating Lady Philosophy: Chaucer and the Boethian Corpus of Cambridge, University Library MS Ii.3.21’ (ChauR 51[2016] 209–26). Cambridge, University Library MS Ii.3.21 contains copies of the Latin De consolatione philosophiae and Chaucer’s Boece, as well as marginal glosses taken from the Latin commentary written by Nicholas Trevet. Nielsen argues that the texts and glosses preserved in this manuscript can aid our understanding of Lady Philosophy. In contrast to the language of the Latin Consolatio, Chaucer’s Lady Philosophy is repeatedly described as ‘norisschynge’ Boethius with her wisdom and authority. Finally, Joe Stadolnik’s ‘Naming the Unnamed “Philosofre” in Chaucer’s Prologue to the Treatise on the Astrolabe’ (MÆ 85[2016] 314–18) suggests the possible identity of the unnamed ‘philosofre’ referred to at the opening of the Treatise on the Astrolabe. Stadolnik argues that lines 5–10 of the Treatise, which take the form of a maxim on friendship spoken by this ‘philosofre’, find their source in the opening line of the prologue to the Practica brevis, a medical treatise attributed to Johannes Platearius which circulated in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. 5. Reception and Reputation Elizaveta Strakhov’s ‘Tending to One’s Garden: Deschamps’ “Ballade to Chaucer” Reconsidered’ (MÆ 85[2016] 236–58), reads Deschamps’s ballade not as the unequivocal praise it is often taken to be, but as an aspect of Deschamps’s interest in the politics of cultural exchange. In its emphasis on Chaucer as grant translateur, she sees it as a loaded commentary on the legitimacy of using classical and francophone material. Sebastian Langdell, ‘ “What shal I calle thee? What is thy name?”: Thomas Hoccleve and the Making of “Chaucer” ’ (NML16[2016] 250–76), examines the ways in which Hoccleve does not merely emulate Chaucer’s poetic persona, but actively reconstructs the earlier poet. He sees Hoccleve as bringing about a shift in the valuation of Chaucer’s authorship, one that departs from the earlier comments of Walton, Gower, and Usk to create a Chaucer who is ‘not only a historical figure, but a figure of learning’ (p. 275). Patrick Timmis reads Henryson’s engagement with his predecessor in ‘Saturn and Soliloquy: Henryson’s Conversation with Chaucerian Free Will’ (ChauR 51[2016] 453–68). According to Timmis, Henryson also depicts a protagonist struggling against, and eventually coming to terms with, the place of individual agency in a providential universe, transferring this moment of revelation from Troilus to Criseyde. Most scholarship on Chaucer’s earliest readers is concentrated on the physical traces they left behind in manuscripts. Kara Doyle, ‘ “Je maviseray”: Chaucer’s Anelida, Shirley’s Chaucer, Shirley’s Readers’ (SAC 38[2016] 275–85), examines Shirley’s annotations in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.20, especially his contrasting treatment of Anelida and Arcite and Lydgate’s Mumming at Wyndsore. Doyle suggests that these annotations show a nuanced understanding of Chaucer’s treatment of women in the first decades of the fifteenth century. Gender and manuscript studies also combine in Nancy Bradley Warren, ‘Chaucer, the Chaucer Tradition, and Female Monastic Readers’ (ChauR 51[2016] 88–106). Warren looks at the traces left by nuns at Syon and Amesbury in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud misc. 416 and British Library MS Add. 18632, which reveal marked interest in Chaucer and the Chaucerian tradition. She uncovers an emphasis on texts without obvious utility for female monasticism, such as the Parliament of Fowls. Warren discusses the histories of the two manuscripts, and seeks to reconstruct the potential uses such works might have had in a monastic context. William A. Quinn, ‘Odd Bits of Troilus and Criseyde and the Rights of Chaucer’s Early Readers’ (ChauR 51[2016] 338–81), discusses sixteen fragments of Troilus and Criseyde, ranging from repurposed folia to passages of a few stanzas or lines. He cautions against dismissing these texts as mere scraps or remnants: not only do they range across several different categories of use, but most constitute ‘completed acts of transcription’ for their copyists rather than partial efforts to record the poem (p. 340). As a whole, they show readers freely adapting the poem to suit their own needs, from the various decontextualized copies of the ‘Canticus Troili’, to the lines from Pandarus reproduced by Shirley in a Huntingdon Library manuscript, to the collection of refabricated quotations known as ‘The Tongue’; even vandalized pieces, such as the Cecil Fragment, sewn into the cover of a sixteenth-century accounts book, highlight the general disposability of vernacular manuscripts, and their lack of prestige as objects. Christopher de Hamel’s Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts includes the Hengwrt Chaucer as one of the ‘most celebrated illuminated manuscripts in the world’ (p. 1). De Hamel gives a detailed account of the construction and appearance of the manuscript, and provides an overview of the Pinkhurst controversy in the wake of Linne Mooney’s work. While he treats Mooney’s findings with respect, he finds that he cannot ultimately support her conclusions. Devani Singh evaluates Speght as a mediator of Chaucer for early modern readers in ‘ “In his old dress”: Packaging Thomas Speght’s Chaucer for Renaissance Readers’ (ChauR 51[2016] 478–502). Singh assesses the paratexts that accompany Speght’s edition of the Workes, especially Beaumont’s epistle to Speght, and Speght’s own address ‘To the Reader’, and analyses the ways in which they bring their late Elizabethan interpretative community into focus. In the first of two essays on Chaucer’s early modern reception, Megan Cook considers the history of the Retraction of the Canterbury Tales, in ‘ “Here taketh the makere of this book his leve”: The Retraction and Chaucer’s Works in Tudor England’ (SP 113[2016] 32–54). The Retraction was either ignored or treated with distrust by early editors, despite its strong manuscript authority; as late as Urry in the eighteenth century it was seen as a scribal forgery, produced to cover up alleged suppression of the Wycliffite Plowman’s Tale. In a second article, Cook considers the activities of a sixteenth-century reader: ‘Joseph Holland and the Idea of the Chaucerian Book’ (ManStud 1[2016] 165–88). Holland, a lawyer and member of the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries who died around 1605, owned Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.4 27, containing copies of the Canterbury Tales, Troilus, and the Legend of Good Women. Cook finds that Holland’s revisions and annotations, which emend Chaucer’s spellings as well as explaining his references, are in line with Speght’s printed editions; she argues that Holland shows a general tendency towards ‘inverted transmission’, awarding the modern printed copies greater weight and authority than the medieval manuscripts on which they were based (p. 166). Several essays consider Spenser’s use of Chaucer. Jeff Espie looks at one of the places where this debt lies heaviest, the opening of the fourth book of the Faerie Queene, in ‘Literary Paternity and Narrative Revival: Chaucer’s Soul(s) from Spenser to Dryden’ (MP 114[2016] 39–58). Espie contends that Spenser brings Anelida and Arcite into play here as well as the Knight’s and Squire’s Tales; as a consequence, Spenser's relationship with Chaucer becomes not merely filial, but restorative, patching up the absences that litter the Knight's Tale. This approach is also found in Dryden, who plays with the same themes of inheritance and renovation. A literary lineage with a similar reach is mapped out by Alexandra Gillespie, ‘Unknowe, unkow, Vncovthe, uncouth: From Chaucer and Gower to Spenser and Milton’ (in King and Woodcock, eds., Medieval into Renaissance: Essays for Helen Cooper, pp. 15–34). Gillespie’s central claim is that Chaucer provided a ‘complex, self-reflexive, relentlessly ironizing’ persona for his early modern followers (p. 20). This point comes to light particularly clearly in the term ‘uncouth’ in E.K.’s commentary on Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender; since this masquerades as a quotation from Troilus, it encapsulates the instability of Chaucer in the period. Links between the two poets continue to provoke commentary in Katherine C. Little, ‘What Spenser Took from Chaucer: Worldly Vanity in The Ruines of Time and Troilus and Criseyde (ELH 83[2016] 431–55). Little asks why Spenser should describe Chaucer with the Virgilian pseudonym ‘Tityrus’ in the Shepheardes Calender. She argues that this merging of Chaucer and Virgil serves to present Chaucer’s work as more than a simple vehicle for ‘moralitee’; it turns him into the equivalent of a classical writer, ‘capable of teaching the same sorts of lessons as classical texts’, and even promoting him as an influence to rival the poets of Greek and Rome (p. 435). Shakespeare’s debt to Chaucer receives extensive treatment in Andrew James Johnston, Russell West-Pavlov, and Elisabeth Kempf, eds., Love, History and Emotion in Chaucer and Shakespeare. Many contributions find Shakespeare extending or reiterating tendencies in Chaucer’s text. Andreas Mahler’s contribution, ‘Potent Raisings: Performing Passion in Chaucer and Shakespeare’ (pp. 32–45), argues that Chaucer and Shakespeare both refuse to allow any single conception of love to predominate, juggling between Platonic, Petrarchan and hedonistic models. Paul Strohm finds similar parallels in ‘The Space of Desire in Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s Troy’ (pp. 46–60). He notes that Troy is a virtual code-word for London for both poets, owing to the well-worn conception of London as ‘Troynovaunt’. Both writers approach Troy/London as markedly claustrophobic locations, in which any distinction between private and public place is difficult to assert. However, divergences between the two authors appear in other chapters. Wolfram R. Keller, ‘Arrogant Authorial Performances’ (pp. 141–56), finds Chaucer and Shakespeare dealing with different models of authorship, one ‘self-effacing’, the other ‘self-crowning’. These positions drive their characterization of Criseyde and Cressida: while both treat her as a sort of ‘counter-author’ attempting to script her own narrative, her scandalous arrogance in Chaucer becomes a marked humilitas in Shakespeare. Differences are also analysed by Stephanie Trigg in ‘Language in Her Eye: The Expressive Face of Criseyde/Cressida’ (pp. 94–108). While Chaucer treats Criseyde's appearance as a potent source of meaning, Shakespeare is more reductive, presenting her facial signs as marks of promiscuity. David Wallace finds a more combatative relationship between the two versions of the Troilus narrative in ‘Changing Emotions in Troilus: The Crucial Year’ (pp. 157–71). While Chaucer creates an emotional core in his text by means of a running commentary on its narrator’s feelings, Shakespeare sets hostility at the heart of his own adaptation, particularly in the recurrent references to disease and infection. Philip Knox, William Poole, and Mark Griffith reach further into the seventeenth century with ‘Reading Chaucer in New College, Oxford, in the 1630s: The Commendatory Verses to Francis Kynaston’s Amorum Troili et Criseidæ’ (MÆ 85[2016] 33–58). The authors concentrate on the paratexts that accompany Kynaston’s Latin translation of Troilus, printed in part in 1635, particularly the sequence of fifteen English poems that precedes the translation, composed by figures such as Samuel Evans and William Barker. They find that the verses grapple with questions about the merit of Chaucer and his culture, and strike a variety of tones from respectful to irreverent. They also reveal an interest in Chaucer at New College, Oxford. Misha Teramura, ‘Chaucer Folios in Colonial America: A Correction’ (ChauR 51[2016] 503–14) revisits the claim that the 1679 will of Daniel Russell, a resident of Charlestown, offers the first evidence of Chaucer ownership in the New World. She shows that the reference is in fact to the Huguenot theologian Daniel Chamier. Peter Beidler finds a previously unnoticed reference to Chaucer in H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, in ‘ “An Old-Fashioned Form of the Zulu Tongue”: A Nineteenth-Century Chaucer Allusion’ (ChauR 51[2016] 518–19). Carolyn Collette, ‘Drawing Out a Tale: Elisabeth Frink’s Etchings Illustrating Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales’ (in Fein and Raybin, eds., pp. 245–66), examines the work of the British sculptor Elisabeth Frink, who produced two series of prints based on episodes from the Canterbury Tales in 1970–2. Collette finds that Frink’s work anticipates many of the critical preoccupations of Chaucerians in the last decades of the twentieth century, especially in its emphasis on the gendered power dynamics of the Tales. The most sustained discussion of Chaucer in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries comes in Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh, eds., Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the Canterbury Tales, which brings together seventeen essays that weigh up Chaucer’s varying fortunes on television and at the movies. After a brief foreword by Terry Jones, Kelly and Pugh’s introduction (pp. 1–16) points to the neglect that Chaucer has received from screenwriters. Elizabeth Scala’s ‘Naked Yet Invisible: Filming Chaucer’s Narrator’ (pp. 19–32) compares Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale to the treatment Shakespeare receives in John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love. She finds that Chaucer’s evasiveness as an author, his lack of direct and unequivocal ‘presence’ in his work, has conspired to keep him at arm’s length for audiences and filmmakers; she also finds Helgeland acknowledging and defying this circumstance in equal measure. Shakespeare continues to provide a touchstone in Susan Aronstein and Peter Parolin’s ‘The Play’s the Thing: The Cinematic Fortunes of Chaucer and Shakespeare’ (pp. 33–44). Taking a wider, more theoretical view, Aronstein and Parolin argue that Chaucer has come to epitomize the ‘expert paradigm’ in the arts, being confined to the schoolroom and to specialist study; Shakespeare, on the other hand, embodies the collaborative potentialities of ‘convergence culture’. More theoretical in another sense is Larry D. Scanlon’s ‘Chaucer, Film and the Desert of the Real; or, Why Geoffrey Chaucer Will Never Be Jane Austen’ (pp. 45–55), which seeks to understand why Chaucer’s chosen mode of irony might not lend itself readily to cinematic language. His counterpoint is Austen’s more marketable mode of irony, free indirect discourse, with its gestures towards objecthood and ‘the look of truth’. Kathleen Forni then discusses ‘Profit, Politics, and Prurience; or, Why Chaucer is Bad Box Office’ (pp. 56–66). She suggests that the dearth of Chaucer film adaptations must rest on his lack of commercial viability, a result of his lack of cultural capital in the United States, and his deliberate mingling of genres, which confounds the implicit demands of modern-day consumers of heroic fantasy. Elsewhere, Chaucer’s absence continues to guide case-studies of particular films or periods of filmmaking. As Lynn Arner observes in ‘Chaucer and the Moving Image in Pre-World War II America’ (pp. 69–87), Chaucer is already notable by his absence in the first decades of Hollywood: despite finding room for Dante, Boccaccio, and Villon, the silent era had as little interest in Chaucer as did later periods of American cinema. Absence of a different kind is presented by Candace Barrington in ‘Natalie Wood’s “The Deadly Riddle” and the Golden Age of American Television’ (pp. 88–107). This essay details its author’s attempts to locate a loose adaptation of the Wife of Bath’s Tale produced by Warner Bros for television in 1956. The movie itself remains irrecoverable, and can only be reconstructed in part from such paratexts as publicity shots and reviews. Another sequence of essays concerns the few times when celluloid has been expended on Chaucer. Tison Pugh considers ‘Chaucerian History and Cinematic Perversions in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale’ (pp. 111–29). Pugh argues that the film uses Chaucer to libel its own medium, and to assert a transcendent, timeless Englishness. Siân Echard’s ‘The Naked Truth: Chaucerian Spectacle in Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale’ (pp. 167–83) argues that the film, with its wilful anachronism and knowing reference to Chaucer’s canon, and above all its involvement of the viewer in sustained ironic play, exhibits ‘unexpected points of contact’ with its source (p. 168). Kathryn L. Lynch’s ‘Idols of the Marketplace: Chaucer/Pasolini’ (pp. 130–48) attempts to rehabilitate the oft-maligned second instalment of Pasolini’s Trilogia della vita, I racconti di Canterbury [1974], especially against the charge of neglecting Chaucer’s text. Lynch finds a sensitive engagement at work in the film. George Shuffleton, ‘Sorry Chaucer: Mixed Feelings and Hypatia Lee’s Ribald Tales of Canterbury’ (pp. 149–66), examines one of the most notable fruits of Pasolini’s legacy, a hardcore pornographic adaptation produced in 1985 by the husband-and-wife team of Bud and Hypatia Lee. As Shuffleton notes, this follows a long line of ‘quasi-medieval erotica’ that used Chaucer or Canterbury as ‘code words hinting at pornographic spectacle’ in the wake of Pasolini’s Racconti (p. 153). Laurie Finke and Martin B. Shichtman’s ‘Marketing Chaucer: Mad Men and the Wife of Bath’ (pp. 251–65) sees analogies between Don Draper and Alisoun not as ‘direct quotation or traditional intertextual reference’ but ‘as a ghostly presence that haunts … a kind of spectral remediation’ (p. 254). The final group of essays looks to the series of adaptations produced by the BBC in 2003. Steve Ellis begins with ‘Putting the Second First: The BBC “Miller’s Tale” ’ (pp. 187–95); he suggests that the removal of any connection to a dialogic frame, and of a cathartic, carnivalesque ending, masks Chaucer’s artistry. Sarah Stanbury takes on ‘Midlife Sex in the BBC “Wife of Bath” ’ (pp. 196–207), and finds that its ‘transformation of its Chaucerian source into a fable about female midlife sexuality’ sets up a confluence between the indecorous, ‘uncouth’ medieval and the ageing female body (p. 200). According to Louise D’Arcens, ‘Serving Time: The BBC “Knight’s Tale” in the Prison-House of Free Adaptation’ (pp. 206–17), the decision to reimagine Emelya as tutor to two prisoners exposes a confusion at work across the series, simultaneously gesturing towards its pedagogical and its revisionary aspirations. In their contributions, Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Arthur Bahr find their chosen episodes exposing rather than suppressing features of their source-texts. In ‘The Color of Money: The BBC’s “Sea Captain’s Tale” ’ (pp. 218–29), Kelly points out that relocating the narrative to an émigré Indian community reconnects the story with its Eastern origins; likewise, Bahr’s ‘Sex, Plague, and Resonance: Reflections on the BBC’s “Pardoner’s Tale” ’ (pp. 230–8) finds a pattern of de-queering in the televisual version that nonetheless lends a new and unsettling charge to its handling of death. In like manner, Kathleen Davis’s ‘Time, Memory, and Desire in the BBC “Man of Law’s Tale” ’ (pp. 239–48) meditates on the ways in which Chaucer’s vexed sense of temporality comes to the fore in the episode’s handling of trauma and amnesia. Books Reviewed Allen Valerie , Evans Ruth , eds. Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads . ManUP . [ 2016 ] pp. 384 . £70. ISBN 9 7807 1908 5062. Classen Albrecht , ed. Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: The Material and Spiritual Conditions of the Culture of Death . Gruyter . [ 2016 ] pp. 546 . £117.99 ISBN 9 7831 1043 6976. Contzen Eva von , Bernau Anke , eds. Sanctity in Literature in Late Medieval Britain . ManUP . [ 2016 ] pp. 277 . £70 ISBN 9 7807 1908 9701. Copeland Rita , ed. The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. 1: 800–1558 . OUP . [ 2016 ] pp. 776 . £195 ISBN 9 7801 9958 7230. De Hamel Christopher . Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts . Lane . [ 2016 ] pp. 640 . £30 ISBN 9 7802 4100 3046. Dearnley Elizabeth . Translators and their Prologues in Medieval England . Brewer . [ 2016 ] pp. 300 . £60 ISBN 9 7818 4384 4426. Fannon Beatrice , ed. Medieval English Literature . Palgrave . [ 2015 ] pp. 280 . £19.99 ISBN 9 7811 3746 9588. Fein Susanna , ed. The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives . York Medieval . [ 2016 ] pp. xi + 253 . £60 ISBN 9 7819 0315 3659. Fein Susanna , Raybin David , eds. Chaucer: Visual Approaches . PSUP . [ 2016 ] pp. 302 . $69.95 ISBN 9 7802 7107 4801. Johnston Andrew James , West-Pavlov Russell , Kempf Elisabeth , eds. Love, History and Emotion in Chaucer and Shakespeare: Troilus and Criseyde and Troilus and Cressida . ManUP . [ 2016 ] pp. 216 . £70 ISBN 9 7807 1909 0226. Kaufman Alexander L. , Hughes Shaun F.D. , Armstrong Dorsey , eds. Telling Tales and Crafting Books: Essays in Honour of Thomas H. Ohlgren . MIP . [ 2016 ] pp. 386 . £88 ISBN 9 7815 8044 2190. Kelly, Kathleen Coyne, and Tison Pugh, eds. Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the Canterbury Tales. OSUP. [2016] pp. 296. $95 ISBN 9 7808 1421 3179. King Andrew , Woodcock Matthew , eds. Medieval into Renaissance: Essays for Helen Cooper . Brewer . [ 2016 ] pp. 295 . £60 ISBN 9 7818 4384 4327. Klassen Norm . The Fellowship of the Beatific Vision: Chaucer on Overcoming Tyranny and Becoming Ourselves . Cascade Books . [ 2016 ] pp. 234 . $24 ISBN 9 7814 9828 3687. Lavezzo Kathy . The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton . CornUP . [ 2016 ] pp. xv + 374 . $65 ISBN 9 7815 0170 3157. Łozowski Przemysław , Stadnik Katarzyna , eds. Visions and Revisions: Studies in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics . Lang . [ 2016 ] pp. 251 . £46 ISBN 9 7836 3165 6259. McClellan William . Reading Chaucer After Auschwitz: Sovereign Power and Bare Life . PalMac . [ 2016 ] pp. 123 . £90 ISBN 9 7811 3756 5440. Nowlin Steele . Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention . OSUP . [ 2016 ] pp. 234 . $99.95 ISBN 9 7808 1421 3100. Sidhu Nicole Nolan . Indecent Exposure: Gender, Politics, and Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature . UPennP . [ 2016 ] pp. 303 . £58 ISBN 9 7808 1224 8043. Smyth Adam , ed. A History of English Autobiography . CUP . [ 2016 ] pp. 432 . £64.99 ISBN 9781 1399 39799. Stokes Richard , ed. The Penguin Book of English Song . Penguin . [ 2016 ] pp. xxx + 945 . £30 ISBN 9 7802 4124 4784. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the English Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - IVChaucer
JF - The Year's Work in English Studies
DO - 10.1093/ywes/may003
DA - 2018-10-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/ivchaucer-XZVOdcLki0
SP - 286
VL - 97
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -