• Frontmatter
• FOREWORD
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• PART ONE: IMAGERY: MODERN INTEREST AND MEDIEVAL DOCTRINE
• I. Chaucer and the modern interest in imagery
• II. The medieval concept of imagery
• PART TWO: IMAGERY: SELECTED CANTERBURY TALES IN RELATION TO CHAUCER'S SOURCES AND ANALOGUES
• III. Introduction to a Chaucerian technique
• IV. The Friar's Tale
• V. The Reeve's Tale
• VI. The Shipman's Tale
• VII. The Merchant's Tale
• VIII. The Summoner's Tale
• IX. The Miller's Tale
• X. Conclusion
• Bibliography of works cited
• Index.

• Frontmatter
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• I. Introduction
• II. The "Physician's Tale"
• III. The "Clerk's Tale"
• IV. The "Knight's Tale"
• Bibliography.

• Acknowledgments ; Introduction ;
• CHAPTER I: Masculinity in Romance;
• CHAPTER II: Feminine Mimicry and Masquerade;
• CHAPTER III: Gender and Social Hierarchy;
• CHAPTER IV: Subtle Clerks and Uncammy Women ;
• CHAPTER V: Adventure ; Bibliography ; Primary Sources; Secondary Sources; Index.

In this fresh look at Chaucer's relation to English and French romances of the late Middle Ages, Crane shows that Chaucer's depictions of masculinity and femininity constitute an extensive and sympathetic response to the genre. For Chaucer, she proposes, gender is the defining concern of romance. As the foundational narratives of courtship, romances participate in the late medieval elaboration of new meanings around heterosexual identity. Crane draws on feminist and genre theory to argue that Chaucer's profound interest in the cultural construction of masculinity and femininity arises in la.

• Preface
• Reading Chaucer: Literature, History and Ideology
• Chaucer the Poet, Chaucer the Pilgrim
• The Knight
• The Squire
• The Yeoman
• The Prioress and the Second Nun
• The Nun's Priest
• The Monk
• The Friar
• The Merchant
• The Clerk
• The Sergeant of Law
• The Franklin
• The Five Guildsmen
• The Cook
• The Shipman
• The Doctor of Physic
• The Wife of Bath
• The Parson
• The Ploughman
• The Miller
• The Manciple
• The Reeve
• The Summoner
• The Pardoner
• The Host
• Conclusion: Historicism and its Limits.
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As literary scholars have long insisted, an interdisciplinary approach is vital if modern readers are to make sense of works of medieval literature. In particular, rather than reading the works of medieval authors as addressing us across the centuries about some timeless or ahistorical 'human condition', critics from a wide range of theoretical approaches have in recent years shown how the work of poets such as Chaucer constituted engagements with the power relations and social inequalities of their time. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, medieval historians have played little part in this 'historical turn' in the study of medieval literature. The aim of this volume is to allow historians who are experts in the fields of economic, social, political, religious, and intellectual history the chance to interpret one of the most famous works of Middle English literature, Geoffrey Chaucer's 'General Prologue' to the Canterbury Tales, in its contemporary context. Rather than resorting to traditional historical attempts to see Chaucer's descriptions of the Canterbury pilgrims as immediate reflections of historical reality or as portraits of real-life people whom Chaucer knew, the contributors to this volume have sought to show what interpretive frameworks were available to Chaucer in order to make sense of reality and how he adapted his literary and ideological inheritance so as to engage with the controversies and conflicts of his own day. Beginning with a survey of recent debates about the social meaning of Chaucer's work, the volume then discusses each of the Canterbury pilgrims in turn. Historians on Chaucer should be of interest to all scholars and students of medieval culture whether they are specialists in literature or history, .
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• and here we are as on a darkling plain / Gary J. Shipley
• Dark whiteness : Benjamin Brawley and Chaucer / Candace Barrington
• Saturn's darkness / Brantley Bryant & Alia
• A dark stain and a non-encounter / Ruth Evans
• Chaucerian afterlives : reception and eschatology / Gaelan Gilbert
• Black gold : the former (and future) age / Leigh Harrison
• Half dead : parsing Cecelia / Nicola Masciandaro
• In the event of the Franklin's tale / J. Allan Mitchell
• Black as the crow / Travis Neel and Andrew Richmond
• Unraveling Constance / Hannah Priest
• L'O de V : a palimpsest / Lisa Schamess
• Disconsolate art / Myra Seaman
• Kill me, save me, let me go : Custance, Virginia, Emelye / Karl Steel
• The Physician's tale as hagioclasm / Elaine Treharne
• The light has lifted : trickster Pandare / Bob Valasek
• Suffer the little children, or, a rumination on the faith of zombies / Lisa Weston
• The dark is light enough : the layout of The tale of Sir Thopas / Thomas White.

Although widely beloved for its playfulness and comic sensibility, Chaucer's poetry is also subtly shot through with dark moments that open into obscure and irresolvably haunting vistas, passages into which one might fall head-first and never reach the abyssal bottom, scenes and events where everything could possibly go horribly wrong or where everything that matters seems, if even momentarily, altogether and irretrievably lost. And then sometimes, things really do go wrong. Opting to dilate rather than cordon off this darkness, this volume assembles a variety of attempts to follow such moments into their folds of blackness and horror, to chart their endless sorrows and recursive gloom, and to take depth soundings in the darker recesses of the Chaucerian lakes in order to bring back palm- or bite-sized pieces (black jewels) of bitter Chaucer that could be shared with others ... an "assortment," if you will. Not that this collection finds only emptiness and non-meaning in these caves and lakes. You never know what you will discover in the dark.

• Acknowledgement Introduction One: Chaucer's Changing Design of the Canterbury Tales Two: Towards Composing a Testament of Love Three: The Sergeant and Man of Law as Gower Four: The Testament of Love Five: Confession, Sin and the Wife of Bath Six: The Pardoner's Confession of Sin Seven: The Wife of Bath's Sermon Eight: The Pardoner's Double Sermon Conclusion Reference Register.
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Venus' Owne Clerk: Chaucer's Debt to the "Confessio Amantis" will appeal to all those who value a bit of integration of Chaucer and Gower studies. It develops the unusual theme that the Canterbury Tales were signally influenced by John Gower's Confessio Amantis, resulting in a set-up which is entirely different from the one announced in the General Prologue. Lindeboom seeks to show that this results from Gower's call, at the end of his first redaction of the Confessio, for a work similar to his - a testament of love. Much of the argument centres upon the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner, who are shown to follow Gower's lead by both engaging in confessing to all the Seven Deadly Sins while preaching a typically fourteenth-century sermon at the same time. While not beyond speculation at times, the author offers his readers a well-documented and tantalizing glimpse of Chaucer turning away from his original concept for the Canterbury Tales and realigning them along lines far closer to Gower.
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This study follows the fortunes of individual bodies in the Canterbury Tales to their surprising, often shocking, involvements in both the humour and the horror of being human. Neither wholly carnal nor wholly spiritual, bodies in Chaucer's poem emerge as sites of resistance to economic, political, social and sexual forces.
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• Table of Contents; Preface vii; Prologue: Marriage Contracts through the Centuries 1; Part I. Chaucer;
• 1. Rewriting the Marriage Contract: Adultery in the Canterbury Tales 15;
• 2. Marriage Ceremonies and Property in the Canterbury Tales 28;
• 3. Extramarital Contracts in the Canterbury Tales 47;
• 4. The Legacy of the Marriage Contract: Chaucer's Widows 70; Entr'acte: When the Law Changed 93; Part II. Religious and Renaissance Drama;
• 5. Under Stress: The Marriage Contracts of the Mystery Cycles, and the Trailing Spouse 101;
• 6. Unlawful Unions on the Renaissance Stage 115.

From the 14th century to the middle of the 17th, changes in marriage law affected literary depictions of marriage in marked ways, according to Kathryn Jacobs's interdisciplinary treatment of nuptial contracts. She relates the changes in marriage law and also the enforcement policies of church courts to the changing literary treatment of marriage in Chaucer's work, in mediaeval mystery plays, and in the Renaissance plays of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. When Chaucer was writing his ""Canterbury Tales"", Jacobs argues, the marriage contract was well known to his audience. He could therefore count on them to recognize the parallels he draws between this familiar contract and the extramarital or postmarital ""contracts"" he designed. The mystery plays, meanwhile, were popular precisely because they violated the marriage contract as it was commonly known. By the Renaissance, however, church law had changed drastically, and the drama reflected public resentment and confusion about the new policies. One of the unexpected results of this was the birth of the ""lusty widow"" as a stage fantasy figure. Focusing first on Chaucer and then on drama, Jacobs offers a bridge between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, showing how the lives of everyday people in each age were affected by the handling of marriage law in the ecclesiastical courts.
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• The Energy of Creation
• The Organization of the Canterbury Tales
• The First Fragment
• The Imperfect Knight and His Perfect Tale
• The Miller, the Reeve, the Cook
• The Man of Law's Tale
• Stability and the Language of Agreements
• Two Weavers from Bath
• Two Witty Glosses: Friar's Tale and Summoner's Tale
• Two Kinds of Agreement: Before God and Before Man
• Two Versions of Magic: Squire's Tale and Franklin's Tale
• From Flesh to Spirit
• Fragment VI: The Physician's Tale, The Pardoner, His Prologue, and His Tale
• Fragment VII: The Craft of Letters
• Fragments IX and X: Poetic Fruition/Spiritual Apotheosis
• The Chaucer Portrait at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Using extant manuscripts as his starting point, Edward Condren argues that the overall design of the ""Canterbury Tales"" has a structural parallel with Dante's ""Commedia"". He demonstrates how individual tales support this design and how the design itself confers rich meaning, in some instances investing with new complexity tales that otherwise have been little appreciated. Dividing its focus between the underlying unity of the poem as a whole and the discrete tales that create this unity, this book advances several interpretations: the progressive dislocation and displacement in Fragment One; a claim for the unity of the ""marriage group""; the survey of the poet's literary career in Fragment Seven; and the merging of Chaucer's professional and spiritual lives at the end of the poem.
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J. Stephen Russell examines the impact that Chaucer's education had on his greatest work, the ""Canterbury Tales"", and demonstrates that understanding the nature of education in the Middle Ages, especially linguistic education, provides important insights into Chaucer's poem. Specifically, he shows that the mediaeval trivium (a curriculum of logic, grammar and rhetoric) conveyed attitudes about expression, communication and personality subtly but powerfully different from modern attitudes and that a recognition of these differences completely changes the nature of poems such as the general prologue and the tales of the knight, man of law, and clerk. Russell begins with an account of the mediaeval trivium, synthesizing a variety of sources in an engaging explanation of such potentially dry subjects as grammar and conceptual hierarchies. He then examines four parts of the ""Canterbury Tales"", providing insight into Chaucer's method of presenting information about the pilgrims in the ""General Prologue"", the role of language in the ""Man of Law's Tale"", the definition of ""man"" in the ""Knight's Tale"", and the ""Artes"" in the ""Clerk's Tale"". Finally, he extends his discussion to the ""Tale of Melibee"" and the tales of the wife of Bath, franklin, and nun's priest and suggests avenues for further research based on the trivium. For the modern reader, this work re-creates the mental parameters of a mediaeval education and provides a view of Chaucer's conception of the way the world is organized, the foundation of his intellectual and artistic development.
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• 1. The pastoral movement and deviant speech: major texts
• 2. The lies of the Fall, the tongues of Pentecost: typing and converting the deviant speaker
• 3. Exemplifying deviant speech: murmur in Patience
• 4. Confessing the deviant speaker: verbal deception in the Confessio Amantis
• 5. Reforming deviant social practices: turpiloquium/scurrilitas in the B Version of Piers Plowman
• 6. Restraining the deviant speaker: Chaucer's Manciple and Parson.

Drawing on manuscript sources, this book examines how the medieval clergy developed the authority and persuasive force to attempt to govern the day-to-day speech of Western Christians. It shows how attempts were made to portray some political, social and private speech as deviant and destructive, labelling it lying, slander, blasphemy and other Sins of the Tongue. It explores, for the first time, how Chaucer, Langland, Gower and the 'Patience' poet use the different strains of this pastoral discourse not only to expose the destructive power of speech in political and social life but also to judge clerical claims to authority and efficacy in formulating and applying codes of speech.
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• Machine generated contents note: 2. Wife of Bath and the painting of lions
• Afterword / Mary Carruthers
• 3. Engendering pity in the Franklin's Tale / Felicity Riddy
• 4. Sexual economics, Chaucer's Wife of Bath and The Book of Margery Kempe / Sheila Delany
• 5. Mysticism and hysteria: the histories of Margery Kempe and Anna O. / Julia Long
• 6. Body politics: engendering medieval cycle drama / Ruth Evans
• 7. Lady Holy Church and Meed the Maid: re-envisioning female personifications in Piers Plowman / Colette Murphy
• 8. Virgin's Tale / Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
• 9. Reincarnations of Griselda: contexts for the Clerk's Tale? / Lesley Johnson
• 10. 'Taking the gold out of Egypt': the art of reading as a woman / Susan Schibanoff.

An essential work for study and reference in the fields of medieval and feminist literature. Designed with the student reader in mind, this volume covers a diversity of key medieval texts and feminist approaches. A stunning collection.
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This volume, designed with the student reader in mind, is an indispensable blend of key essays in the field with specially commissioned new material by feminist scholars from the UK and the US. It includes a diversity of texts and feminist approaches, a substantial and very illuminating introduction by the editors, and an annotated list of Further Reading, offering preliminary guidance to the reader approaching the topic of gender and medieval literature for the first time. Works and writers covered include: * Chaucer * Margery Kempe * Christine de Pisan * The Katherine group of Saints' Lives * Langland's Piers Plowman * Medieval cycle drama Students of both medieval and feminist literature will find this an essential work for study and reference.
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"The freshest and most challenging work on Chaucer to have appeared in many years." -Chauncey Wood, McMaster University "Saving the appearances of the Ellesmere Manuscript order by means of a bold and brilliant hypothesis about the composition of the Canterbury Tales, Dolores Frese offers Chaucerians some of the most original and persuasive readings of the poem to appear in recent memory; in particular, her demonstration of Chaucer's intertextual strategies with the Pardoner's Tale and the Roman de la Rose are most impressive and will probably inaugurate new and vigorous debate about Chaucer's reading and his allusive sophistication." -R.A. Shoaf, University of Florida in a daring, original study, Frese argues that the Ellesmere Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales represents Chaucer's own final plans for the order and number of the Tales, traditionally thought to be unfinished at the time of the poet's death. Frese contends that Chaucer devised a final plan for the order and number of the Canterbury Tales, that he inscribed this plan into the poetic text, and that this order and number are integral to the poem's meaning. The poet's final intentions can be retrieved, reconstructed, and internally verified, she claims, by an intertextual reading of the work as a whole. Frese maintains that the instructions found in the text are retrievable only through the Ellesmere Manuscript, held at the Huntington Library in California. The author discusses number itself as an important textual trope and provides an analysis of the medieval poetic practices of intnegumentum and involucrum. Finally, she postulates how and why early exemplars of Chaucer's poem became "disordered" in the arrangements represented in the early Hengwrt manuscript and suggests that Chaucer created the "Canon's Yeoman's Tale"--included in Ellesmere but not in Hengwrt--to comment on this disaster. Chaucerians, literary theorists, and scholars of medieval French and Italian literature will welcome this modern reading of the Canterbury Tales.
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• ""Contents""; ""General Editor's Preface""; ""Preface""; ""Abbreviations and Master List of Periodicals""; ""Introduction""; ""1 Editions""; ""2 Bibliographies, Indexes, and Other Research Tools""; ""3 General Criticism and Cultural Background""; ""4 Language, Metrics, and Studies of the Manuscripts or Early Editions""; ""5 The Springtime Setting, the Narrator, and the Gathering at the Tabard (lines 1â€?42) ""; ""6 The Knight (lines 43â€?78)""; ""7 The Squire (lines 79â€?100)""; ""8 The Yeoman (lines 101â€?17)""; ""9 The Prioress and her Companions (lines 118â€?64)""

• ""10 The Monk (lines 165â€?207)""""11 The Friar (lines 208â€?69)""; ""12 The Merchant (lines 270â€?84)""; ""13 The Clerk (lines 285â€?308)""; ""14 The Serjeant of the Law (lines 309â€?30)""; ""15 The Franklin (lines 331â€?60)""; ""16 The Guildsmen (lines 361â€?78)""; ""17 The Cook (lines 379â€?87)""; ""18 The Shipman (lines 388â€?410)""; ""19 The Physician (lines 411â€?44)""; ""20 The Wife of Bath (lines 445â€?76)""; ""21 The Parson (lines 477â€?528)""; ""22 The Plowman (lines 529â€?41)""; ""23 The Transition and the Miller (lines 542â€?66)""; ""24 The Manciple (lines 567â€?86)""

• ""25 The Reeve (lines 587â€?622)""""26 The Summoner (lines 623â€?68 and 673)""; ""27 The Pardoner (lines 669â€?714)""; ""28 The Narrator's Comments and Apology for His Style (lines 715â€?46)""; ""29 The Host and the Establishment of the Storytelling Contest (lines 747â€?858)""; ""Index""; ""A""; ""B""; ""C""; ""D""; ""E""; ""F""; ""G""; ""H""; ""I""; ""J""; ""K""; ""L""; ""M""; ""N""; ""O""; ""P""; ""Q""; ""R""; ""S""; ""T""; ""U""; ""V""; ""W""; ""Y""; ""Z""

• *FrontMatter, pg. i*Contents, pg. vii*List of Illustrations, pg. ix*Abbreviations, pg. xv*Preface, pg. xvii*Introduction. On Looking at the Meaning of Chaucer's Language, pg. 3*1. The General Prologue, the Three-Estate Theory, and the "Age and Body" of the Time, pg. 19*2. The Order of the Passion and Internal Order, pg. 49*3. The Lawyer's Tale and the History of Christian English Law, pg. 85*4. Chaucer on Temporal Power and Art, pg. 104*5. Stratford's Nunnery, Sapience, and Monasticism's Critical Role, pg. 127*6. Monasticism's Royal Claim, pg. 160*7. The Hierarchy's Keys, pg. 183*8. Summoner Wrath on Friar Perfection, pg. 214*9. The Sect of the Wife of Bath and the Quest for Perfection, pg. 235*10. In Conclusion, pg. 276*APPENDIX. A Note on the Relationship of Meaning and Historical Forms of Life, pg. 301*Index, pg. 303.
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Paul Olson argues that Chaucer's narratives emerge from his deep concern about the crises of late fourteenth-century England and his vision of the renewal of that troubled society through the ideal of parlement, the various orders of society speaking together, and through a perfective religious discipline. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
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