Chaucer

This paper has been published in a somewhat different form in Meg Harris Williams' "Aesthetic Conflict  and its Clinical Relevance." - Karnac, 2018.

It outlines the various "knife-edge" defenses the infant mind must struggle with in the face of the emotional impact of the mother's beauty, particularly when there is no absolute guarantee of this being reciprocated.
An attempt is made to disambiguate this vulnerability from those which call into play defenses against (Kleinian) unconscious envy.
Both serve to protect the internal good/beautiful mother from destruction, in the infant mind.
One aspect of Narcissism, not usually emphasized, is the lack of conscious awareness of one's rejection of love and beauty when offered by another.
Instead, the narcissist remains almost totally merely conscious of his or her own feelings of being rejected, especially aesthetically.

Niniejsza praca ma na celu przedstawienie teorii mitotwórczej J. R. R. Tolkiena, z perspektywy jej wymiaru duchowego. Od czasów antycznych teorie, tudzież filozofie, opierały się na myśleniu abstrakcyjnym i miały za zadanie wyjaśnienie ówczesnemu człowiekowi otaczającej go rzeczywistości. Nie inaczej było z Tolkienowską teorią, na potrzebę której ukuł swój termin Mitopoeia. „Duchowy wymiar Tolkienowskiej Teorii Mitotwórczej” – tłumacząc tytuł tej pracy na język Polski – przekłada się na wiele sfer życia Tolkiena. Pierwsza z tych płaszczyzn, to przypisywany mu przez niektórych krytyków program filozoficzny. Na tym wymiarze skupia się pierwszy rozdział tej pracy: „The Philosophical Disenchantment.” Jednak jak sugeruje tytuł, stanowi on zaledwie tło wszelkich dalszych poszukiwań, gdyż oferuje badaczom Tolkienowskiej myśli jedynie jej racjonalizację i demitologizację. Życiowa pasja Tolkiena, filologia komparatywna, daje wystarczające zrozumienie jego fenomenu, a przynajmniej zdaniem kilku krytyków. Niezaprzeczalnie stanowiła ona inspirację, a zarazem była narzędziem, którego Tolkien użył podług swej ogromnej wiedzy z zakresu językoznawstwa. Pomimo, iż w tej pracy „Comparative Philology” jest omawiana w drugiej kolejności, to właśnie ta dyscyplina była źródłem znajomości filozofii u Tolkiena. Podążając krokami Tolkieniany nie można jednak na tym poprzestać. Trzeci wymiar, jakże metafizyczny i filozoficzny w swych założeniach i implikacjach to odkrycie Owena Barfielda, znajomego Tolkiena. Barfield odkrył Teorię „Jedności Semantycznej,” co Tolkienowi przyszło łatwo przyjąć do wiadomości: język jako narzędzie może również być transcendentny, ze względu na swe początki. Dla Tolkiena była to jedna z tych rzeczy, która pozwoliła mu uwierzyć w smoki. „Philological Philosophy: Let There Be Dragons” – jest zatem łącznikiem między dwoma światami. Jednakże Tolkien nie był byle fantastą, oderwanym od ziemi. Teoria Barfielda, obudziła w nim nadzieję. Pomimo to, tak jak każdy rozsądny i racjonalny człowiek Tolkien musiał dowiedzieć się, „czy to prawda.” Potrzebował czegoś, aby idee odnieść do nie tyle rzeczywistego doświadczenia, ile prawdy. Prawda, bowiem wyzwala. Mimo nieustannego negowania jego wiary, to właśnie ona umożliwiła mu dalsze rozważanie tych teorii. I nie da się inaczej wytłumaczyć jego mitotwórstwa, jak przez uznanie jego wiary. Miłości do Boga, która była tak głęboka, że aż sięgała wiedzy teologicznej. Tego, między innymi, tyczy ostatni rozdział tej pracy: „Myth Becomes Truth.”
Liczba stron: 51

This paper compares Chaucer's subtle satiric attitude toward pilgrimage and relics in the Canterbury Tales with the more overtly polemical tone of Erasmus's yet more polemical account.  I suggest that the name of the Tabard Inn, from which the pilgrims set off on their trip, is an allusion to one of the most famous of Becket's relics.

This article maintains that John Lydgate’s 'Testament' is not a rejection of his secular career but a literary palinode that attempts to impress a sense of coherence onto a diverse body of work. As the language of conversion, the repetitive litaneutical code at the end of the poem is vindicated by the earlier performance of poetic bravado. Lydgate’s textual piety, which I show to be indebted to the devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus, is paradoxically sustained by the displacement of prior secular forms. In a central gesture, the kneeling monk-poet presents his life’s work to God, who acts as his patron. Finally, I demonstrate that manuscript illuminations depicting a kneeling Lydgate confirm the reception of such a pose as simultaneously pious yet secular. As a result, I suggest that we view Lydgate not as a Chaucerian, but first and foremost as a poet dedicated to reconciling the writing of secular literature with a spiritual calling. From: The Chaucer Review Volume 49, Number 3, 2015 pp. 265-293 https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/chaucer_review/v049/49.3.sobecki.html https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/chaucerrev.49.3.issue-3

“Mirror of Chivalry: Salâh al-Dîn in the Medieval European Imagination,” in Images of the Other: Europe and the Muslim World before 1700. Cairo Papers on Social Science 19:2 (Summer, 1996), 7-38. Republished in J. Tolan, Sons of Ishmael: Muslims through European Eyes in the Middle Ages. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008.

Geoffrey Chaucer's interest in the women of his stories has often been noted, from Gavin Douglas's early comment that Chaucer was "euer, God wait, wemenis frend." This study starts from an opposing perspective, that Chaucer's focus on Dorigen in The Franklin's Tale has more to say about the men of the tale than about Dorigen herself. The argument is that the idealization and exchange of Dorigen by the men around her marks a level of anxiety underlying the men's contest to determine "which was the mooste fre." The tale begins with an attempt to escape honor's bonds through an ideal marriage, one in which the love between the knight Arveragus and his wife will free them of the need for one to act as lord over the other. The course of the narrative records the progressive erosion of this ideal under the stress of the various men's quests for honor, until by the end only the honor competition (and only the men) are left. By the end, Dorigen is excluded from the men's competition to perform the most "gentil dede," but her husband also does not gain what he had been seeking: the marriage is no longer a refuge of personal independence, but simply a final extension of the masculine network of authority and submission. The assertion and then erosion of that marriage ideal provides a dynamic portrait of the interplay between honor and masculine identity.

"Chaucer’s three major dream visions all follow their respective narrator-dreamers as they move through various interior spaces, on one level reproducing the mise-en-abyme effect of the framed dream narrative. This paper examines the series of three interiors structuring the narrative of the House of Fame, and specifically how these spaces are constructed through a technique of accumulative description, in which the contents of a given room are catalogued at great length but rarely placed in precise spatial relation to one another. To employ the catalogue as the primary tool of spatial description may seem capable of leading only to a jumbled, a-perspectival representation of an interior, but the strategy aligns with the narrator’s difficult task of organizing into narrative description the luxuriant confusion of the spaces he perceives. In the House of Fame, the narrator turns to the catalogue because he finds the corridors of dreams filled with objects of high signifying power, including statues and other images that serve as windows out of one interior and into other narrative spaces. The accumulative catalogue becomes at once a way to narrate an otherwise un-narratable profusion of objects and associations, and a way to limit that profusion to the catalogue’s conclusion.

We also find in the poem moments of more perspectival description linking these catalogues, as in the House of Fame itself, in which the narrator at first perceives only a formless crowd of heralds impossible to describe due to both their number and the semiotic complexity of their garments. After relegating their regalia to a short catalogue, the narrator can then move past the press and look up to observe a rising dais with the goddess Fame enthroned on it. Only after spatially locating arbitrary Fame as the principle governing the crowd in the room does the narrator notice and describe the pillar-lined corridor leading down to the hall’s wide doors. Since, upon closer examination, these pillars are seen to bear up the fame of ancient authors, they generate further descriptive catalogues. Throughout the poem we find this same sort of telescoping between the purposively cluttered catalogue and more perspectival articulations of space, presenting a challenge to spatial theories of narrative that would dismiss pre-modern narrative as crudely and/or flatly a-perspectival. Indeed, we will be unable to describe medieval literature as uninterested in perspective when we finally compare the navigation of space in House of Fame to the medieval and classical technique of the “memory palace,” in which memories are recalled based on their precise spatial relationships inside a mentally constructed building: Chaucer’s poem is at once such an edifice of memory and a challenge to the practice."

This chapter focuses on the problem of tale-order in the witnesses of the Canterbury Tales and pays special attention to the differences in the order of the tales in Cx1 and Cx2. A brief history of the problem of tale-order is offered first, since it is likely that that was what prompted Caxton to change the order of Cx1 was that ω presented a different tale-order. Although the tale-order in Cx2 is unique and probably conflated, this new order should partly reflect the order of the lost manuscript, and might offer new information about it.

This chapter focuses on the problem of tale-order in the witnesses of the Canterbury Tales and pays special attention to the differences in the order of the tales in Cx1 and Cx2. A brief history of the problem of tale-order is offered first, since it is likely that that was what prompted Caxton to change the order of Cx1 was that ω presented a different tale-order. Although the tale-order in Cx2 is unique and probably conflated, this new order should partly reflect the order of the lost manuscript, and might offer new information about it.

Special offer for the Tabula Gratulatoria for the festschrift for Prof. Nigel Saul!

The reign of Richard II is well known for its political turmoil as well as its literary and artistic innovations, all areas explored by Professor Nigel Saul during his distinguished career. The present volume interrogates many familiar literary and narrative sources, including works by Froissart, Gower, Chaucer, Clanvow, and the Continuation of the Eulogium Historiarum, along with those less well-known, such as coroner's inquests and gaol delivery proceedings. The reign is also notorious for its larger than life personalities-not least Richard himself. But how was he shaped by other personalities? A prosopographical study of Richard's bishops, a comparison of the literary biographies of his father the Black Prince, and Bertrand du Guesclin, and a reconsideration of Plantagenet family politics, all shed light on this question. Meanwhile, Richard II's tomb reflects his desire to shape a new vision of kingship. Commemoration more broadly was changing in the late fourteenth century, and this volume includes several studies of both individual and communal memorials of various types that illustrate this trend: again, appropriately for an area Professor Saul has made his own.

Chaucer’s depiction of the merchant in the Prologue presents the modern reader with a curious dichotomy. Many of medieval literature’s iniquitous mercantile stereotypes, such as Langland’s Covetise or Haukyn, are described as deceitful and avaricious with little hope of salvation. Yet Chaucer’s estimable merchant is portrayed as a worthy man: well-dressed, expert in business and skilled in negotiation. Chaucer has been interpreted as speaking ironically of the entire merchant class of his day. However, Chaucer came from a mercantile family (his father was a vintner), he was controller of Customs at the port of London and he had commercial dealings with London merchants. So, for much of his career, he was surrounded by exactly the sort of merchants he describes in his Prologue. They may have also have made up some of his potential audience. Of equal importance is the changing attitude to trade which was founded upon merchants’ virtuous role in enriching the state and its rulers.

Studies in the Age of Chaucer is the yearbook of the New Chaucer Society. It publishes articles on the writing of Chaucer and his contemporaries, their antecedents and successors, and their intellectual and social contexts. More generally, articles explore the culture and writing of later medieval Britain (1200-1500). SAC also includes an annotated bibliography and reviews of Chau cer-related publications.

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Law and Literature addresses the need for an authoritative guide  through the bewildering maze of medieval law as well as the need for concise examples of how the law infiltrated literary texts. The Companion combines accessible essays written by leading specialists in legal history with essays exploring literary conversations with the law in the works of later medieval authors
from Chaucer to Malory. The first half of this book contains detailed introductions to legal concepts, practices, and institutions in medieval England. In the second half, experts cover a number of texts and authors from across the later medieval period whose verse and prose can be understood as engaging with the law. In this way, the Cambridge Companion to Medieval Law and Literature forms the basis for students wishing to explore this rich area or for scholars to familiarise themselves with literary uses of the law.

ISBN: 9781316632345

Poor Poet’s Complaint: The Place and Role of the Moneybag in English Literature
The article presents four British poems from four different literary periods sharing a common theme: complaint about the poet’s poverty. Each of the poems – “Deor”, “Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse”, Barnfield’s “The Complaint of Poetrie, for the Death of Liberalitie” (his “The Encomion of Lady Pecunia: Or The Praise of Money” is also mentioned) and Burns’ „Lines Written on a Banknote” – is presented within the context of the contemporary economic situations of English poets in general, and the specific biographical circumstances in which they were written. In a broader sense the article presents in a brief and light way the economic reality of literary creativity in Great Britain from the early Middle Ages to our times. In Polish.

ln this essay, l examine how the much used rhetorical strategy of appropriation causes the text of the poet to disseminate the intended meaning of the poem. l also examine the reasons that necessitated those appropriations on the part of the poet as a means of creating authority for the text that is created. Specifically，l examine Edmund Spenser's use of text from the poems of Chaucer to inustrate the ways in which appropriated text cause the discourse of the created text to undermine itself thfough dissemination of meaning.

The paper delves into the motif of Loathly Lady found in many Arthurian Legends. It specifically uses the tales of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle and Wife Of Bath's Tale from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to show how the figure of the Loathly Lady is gendering of the beastial in literature.

This article examines the scene in Chaucer's Merchant's Tale in which May declares both that she is pregnant and that she suffers from a pregnancy-induced hunger for pears that must be satiated to preserve her life. Contextualizing Chaucer's text within medieval scientific discourses on pica (the medical term for often deviant pregnancy cravings), conception, and the physiological stimulation of desire, the article argues that the scene allows Chaucer to complicate more traditional narratives of human culpability and sinfulness in regards to the body's lusts.

This article combines critical race theory and adaptation studies to investigate racialized brownness in the Canterbury Tales and contemporary Chaucer receptions. The first section offers a close reading of somatic brownness in Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose and General Prologue, and it incorporates brown into a constellation of color terms-in conjunction with whiteness and blackness-that Chaucerians deploy to theorize medieval race metaphors and race-making. The second section builds on sociological research to examine constructions of brown as a capacious racial designation in the Middle Ages and today. The third section examines creative updates of Chaucer that explore meanings of brownness across time and space: Nigerian British poet Patience Agbabi's Telling Tales; Mexican American poet Frank Mundo's Brubury Tales; and Indian director Avie Luthra's "The Sea Captain's Tale, " a screen adaptation of the Shipman's Tale. The conclusion considers theories of "brown kinship" and their implications for Chaucer reception studies globally.

William Morris (1834-1896) was not only a prolic writer and artist of the Victorian Age,
but also the embodiment of Neo-medievalism, which dominated the age, with his interest
in medieval manuscripts, sagas, romances and the gothic tradition as reected in his
professional life. Trying to avoid the inuences of the Industrial Revolution on individuals, Morris turned to medieval ideals and materialised them in his paintings and drawings as a Victorian medievalist. Yet, it was the foundation of the Kelmscott Press that endowed Morris with the best means to display his interest in medieval arts and literature. The Kelmscott Chaucer (1896) can be regarded as the product both of Morris's idealisation of Chaucer as a medieval poet, and of what Karen Barad denes as the “intra-action” of matter and discourse. Accordingly, through an analysis of the illustrated pages of The Canterbury Tales section of the Kelmscott Chaucer, the aim of this article is to analyse this book as a pictorial utopia and argue that Morris displays the intra-action of matter and discourse through his search for medieval printing techniques.

Keywords: William Morris; Neo-medievalism; Chaucer; The Kelmscott Chaucer; Pictorial Utopia

Ankara University The Journal of the Faculty of Languages and History-Geography 57.2 (2017): 1055-1069.

"Maintaining a radical, unconventional, and ambitious thesis, to say the least, Workman makes his case so fully, and with such learning and conviction, that even his most resistant readers will find themselves forced to interrogate the comfort zone of their own critical habits of mind. Whether or not Workman succeeds entirely in elevating Chaucer's poetics into the neo-Platonic sublime remains an open question. But what is certain is this: Written with boldness and panache, this wonderfully readable study articulates an interpretative position that is unique among contemporary studies - not only of Chaucer, but of medieval literature generally."
- Peter W. Travis, Professor of English, Dartmouth College, USA

"This exhilarating study shows us Chaucer thinking the deepest of thoughts about the metaphysics of Art, but doing so with an entirely characteristic blend of high seriousness and low humour. Workman's approach offers a restless bricolage of analysis and analogy, illustration, and illumination, to reveal the essentially metapoetic and metaphysical basis of Chaucerian narrative. Workman's Chaucer is both Ancient and Modern, effortlessly classicising and radically posthumanist, spinning an elegant gossamer of Poetic theory from the fabric of his own narrative practice."
- Vincent Gillespie, J. R. R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language, University of Oxford, UK

Empire of Magic offers a genesis and genealogy for medieval romance and the King Arthur legend through the history of Europe's encounters with the East in crusades, travel, missionizing, and empire formation. The book argues that romance arose in the 12th century as a cultural response to the trauma and horror of taboo acts—in particular the cannibalism committed by crusaders on the bodies of Muslim enemies in Syria during the First Crusade. From such encounters with the East sprang the fantastical episodes featuring King Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth's chronicle, The History of the Kings of England, a work where history and fantasy collide and merge, each into the other, inventing crucial new examples and models for romances to come. After locating the rise of romance and Arthurian legend in the contact zones of East and West, Empire of Magic demonstrates the adaptability of romance and its key role in the genesis of an English national identity. Discussing Jews, women, ch...

This essay will discuss the early feminist ideas seen in "The Wife of Bath's Prologue", how the concepts add to the understanding the prologue and how The Wife of Bath's ideas can be analyzed as "protofeminist". The main question which will be examined in the essay is going to be; "Through which ideas from 'The Wife of Bath's Prologue' can be considered as a protofeminist piece?" With the quotes from the prologue, her actions towards patriarchy and how it can be interpreted as wrong are going to support the main idea behind the question. Her woman-dominant behaviors will be criticized as well as the general male-dominant regulations. Even though it is seen "protofeminist" mainly because the stories were written way before the concepts of feminism showed up, it wouldn't fit the understanding of equality anytime in history but it surely has some feminist characteristics to be labeled as "early forms of feminism". The early-feminist ideas from the text highlight that the concept of feminism have changed and shifted a lot throughout history. "The Wife of Bath's Prologue" is considered "protofeminist" because of her rejecting the biases of women in that time by using her ideas and attitudes such as being confident while talking, justifying sexual desire and taking the control in the marriage.

Course Description:

In contrast to popular depictions of the Middle Ages as an era of drab and dull suffering, games and other forms of play flourished across Western Europe. Contemporary games such as chess, backgammon, and playing cards began to develop into their modern forms during the Middle Ages, and the upper classes enjoyed numerous leisure activities including hunting,  hawking, jousting, and more. In this course, we will study the place of games and gaming in medieval culture, but with particular emphasis on the intersection of those games with Middle English literature. Evidence exists of the oral performance of medieval literary texts alongside other types of entertainments, and the distinction between "game" and "literature" can sometimes become blurred in, for example, the audience-driven "demaunde d'amor" poem; formal contests of poetic composition; and ritualized insult exchanges -- these last the medieval analogue of the rap battle. Our primary readings will include some of the major works of medieval English literature, including Beowulf, the Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and a selection of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. But we will read these texts paying particular attention to various issues related to games and gaming, contests, competitions, sport, entertainment, and play, for example the famous "beheading game" motif in Gawain and the exchange of boasts in Beowulf. Alongside these canonical literary narratives, we will also be reading some less familiar medieval texts, including the Lydgatean verse party game known as The Chance of the Dice; an allegorical poem on The Game and Play of the Chess; fortune-telling poems such as John Metham's Book of Destinies; and some Old English riddles and enigmas that influenced the riddling game in J.R.R. Tolkien's classic fantasy novel The Hobbit.

Note that there is a language component to the course, as more than half of the course readings will be in the original Middle English. In the final few weeks, we will examine some 20th and 21st-century games and literary texts that nevertheless bear many traces of the Middle Ages. A genericized version of the medieval West has become the default setting for a number of gaming genres, electronic and otherwise: there are video games based on particular medieval narratives and settings, but also innumerable fantasy role-playing games (Skyrim, World of Warcraft), as well as real-time strategy games (Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings) and even first-person shooters (Chivalry) and stealth games (Assassin's Creed). As we examine medieval games and their afterlives, we will take up several questions bearing on the epistemology of reading, writing, game-playing, and "game-making": what, for instance, might we learn from understanding literature itself as a kind of game?

This article considers the relationship between translation and historical alterity in Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer opens Book II of Troilus by admitting that the customs of the poem's ancient lovers might seem strange: culture, like language, changes over the centuries. This passage probably derives from Dante's Convivio, which argues that 1,000 years of linguistic change would render the vernacular of one's own city strange and foreign. In order to understand how such alterity can emerge in a translation like Troilus, this article considers Convivio's statements in the context of fourteenth-century Italian vernacular translations that emulate the syntax and lexicon of Latin source texts. These translations expand the expressive range of the vernacular, allowing linguistic change to be glimpsed as it happens. Similarly, in Troilus Chaucer exploits the transformative potential of translation, using close translation to create effects of linguistic-and hence historical-difference within his own lexicon.

"I’ve argued in Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (Columbia UP, 2003, 2004, 2012) that England’s coalescence as an imagined national polity—a medieval nation—required the historic manipulation of English Jews, a manipulation visible in England’s cultural artifacts, including its literature. 

In 1290, England became the first European country to expel its Jews, but the literary and cultural manipulation of its now-absent Jews continued into the early modern period, when Shakespeare’s famed Merchant of Venice set the activities of Shylock, arguably the most famous Jewish character in literature, in Venice, not England. 

My current book, the Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, includes a chapter that considers medieval England to be Europe's first racial state.  The chapter ends with "England's Dead Boys," an analysis of differences in the literary treatment of England’s Jews before and after the Expulsion of 1290, to gain a finer-grained perspective of what changes in the cultural manipulation of Jews. 

“England’s Dead Boys” compares three pre- and post-expulsion literary exemplars that narrate, invoke, or mime the plot of young Hugh of Lincoln’s putative murder by Jews in 1255.  The coda to this cluster of pre- and post-expulsion retellings is a literary tale that turns the boy-slaughter plot inside out, showing us what can be gained when the story is changed, and the boy does not die. 

Texts in this case study are: the Anglo-Norman ballad Hughes de Lincoln, Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, The Christian Child Slain by Jews, and The Jewish Boy.  "

The purpose of this essay is to examine the power structures in Chaucer’s The Knight’s and The Clerk’s Tales alongside the medieval concept of dulia and latria and Sarah Stanbury’s application of these concepts to both gender and gaze. It is my intention to argue that Chaucer’s physical and narrative placement of both Emelye and Griselde in relation to their male counterparts in their respective tales blatantly challenges the power structures usually inherent to the male gaze. The concept of the gaze can be analyzed as an exertion of masculine privilege on feminine passivity, but it can also be taken a step further to a question of reverence and visual worship. This subversion begs the question: who has the power, the viewer or the object?

Here, the attempt to empty the Flood of its religious meaning ignites a war of epistemologies. “Deerne love” and “Goddes pryvetee” are two universes set on a collision course. Human secrets will scale the wall to unseat God’s. The dust settles and the corroded theology of this New Flood opens on to a barren landscape. It is religious metapoetry, “the mighty, and the terrible God” cut loose from its mission and witness. Theology splinters into a chilly science of art rather than doctrine and “the rock of my strength, and my refuge” gives way to Fame’s “roche of yse.” It is one matter for religion to hover as medieval tropology, place Nicholas’s pagan spree in the crosshairs, and stump from our shores that “pride goeth before the destruction.” It is another for religion to become the world-weary irony that exploits his shortcomings as a poet and mythographer.

Resumo: Os Contos da Cantuária de Geoffrey Chaucer foram um marco para a Língua Inglesa, pois têm o objetivo de ser um extrato da vida dessa sociedade do final do século XIV. A partir deste, serão verificadas as transformações sociais ocorridas no período e como os ideais cristãos foram articulados pelo autor da obra. Deste modo, será analisado o discurso dos narradores em O Conto do Frade, O Conto do Beleguim, O prólogo do Vendedor de Indulgências e O Conto do Criado do Cônego, no que diz respeito à atuação do clero e seu espaço na sociedade medieval e em como a historiografia aborda os valores de conduta presentes nesses Contos, comparando-os com a crítica social presente em Chaucer.
Abstract: The Canterbury Tales written by Geoffrey Chaucer are considered a milestone for the English Language; they have the goal of being an extract of this society's life in the late fourteenth century. We will verify the social changes and how the Christian ideals were articulated by the author. We will analyze the speech of the narrators in The Friar's Tale, The Summoner's Tale, The Pardoner's Prologue and The Canon's Yeoman regarding to the role of clergy and their place in medieval society and how the values of conduct are discusses in these tales comparing them with the social critique presented in Chaucer's work.

NOTE: For the *Trotula* tradition in Middle English, please refer to my later survey: Monica H. Green, “A Handlist of the Latin and Vernacular Manuscripts of the So-Called Trotula Texts.  Part II: The Vernacular Texts and Latin Re-Writings,” Scriptorium 51 (1997), 80-104 (also available here on Academia.edu). I changed the designations of the different Middle English translations there, and that system should now be cited in all scholarly references. For further updates on the texts mentioned here, see Monica H. Green, “Bibliography on Medieval Women, Gender and Medicine, 1980-2009” (2010), which can likewise be found here on Academia.edu.

NOTE ALSO: Everything said here regarding the two versions of the Gilbertus Anglicus translation (Syknesse of Wymmen) should now be supplemented by the editorial commentary in Monica H. Green and Linne R. Mooney, “The Sickness of Women”, in Sex, Aging, and Death in a Medieval Medical Compendium: Trinity College Cambridge MS R.14.52, Its Texts, Language, and Scribe, ed. M. Teresa Tavormina, Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 292, 2 vols. (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), vol. 2, pp. 455-568.  This is a complete edition of and commentary on Version 2 of this Middle English gynecological text, with a full analysis of the genesis of both Version 1 and Version 2.

Studies in the Age of Chaucer is the yearbook of the New Chaucer Society. It publishes articles on the writing of Chaucer and his contemporaries, their antecedents and successors, and their intellectual and social contexts. More generally, articles explore the culture and writing of later medieval Britain (1200-1500). SAC also includes an annotated bibliography and reviews of Chaucer-related publications.