{"title":"Writing the North of England in the Middle Ages: Regionalism and Nationalism in Medieval English Literature by Joseph Taylor (review)","authors":"E. Dolmans","doi":"10.1353/sac.2023.a913934","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2023.a913934","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138586380","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Wife of Bath: A Biography by Marion Turner (review)","authors":"Kristen Haas Curtis","doi":"10.1353/sac.2023.a913935","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2023.a913935","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138587526","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Diagnosis and Repair: Reading the Sick Body with Chaucer's Physician and Pardoner","authors":"Una Creedon-Carey","doi":"10.1353/sac.2023.a913913","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2023.a913913","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This paper theorizes fourteenth-century English metaphors of reading as a medical process, arguing that Canterbury Tales Block C showcases the interplay of the Physician's and Pardoner's two distinct medicalized hermeneutics. Turning to the queer disability politics of Eli Clare and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to unpack the ethical import of such metaphors of reading and repair, I argue that these two tales proffer first the Physician's systematized interpretive strategy of diagnosis and cure before turning to the immoral, anti-cure processes of interpretation offered by the Pardoner. Chaucer's Physician is widely acknowledged as an inadequate reader who fails to account for nuanced spiritual meaning in both his literary and medical practice. I argue that the Physician and his tale reveal the failures of interpretation that reads for harm's \"roote\" and \"boote\" (GP, 424–25), and, further, reveal the violence of authoritative cure applied without consent. In this paper's sick/queer lens, then, the Pardoner and his invitation to informed and consensual comfort become a response to such reading methods that seek to organize, cure, and adhere to coherent systems of meaning. Further, nuancing our current understanding of queer reparative practices in the context of chronic illness, the Pardoner's methods showcase the impossibility, at times undesirability, of interpretive repair that pursues wholeness. Refusing medical and spiritual intervention, the Pardoner comes to offer a participatory hermeneutic that prioritizes comfort over wholeness, and a model of care based not on authoritative cure but on iterative consent.","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138588301","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms by Jessica Brantley (review)","authors":"Martha Rust","doi":"10.1353/sac.2023.a913922","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2023.a913922","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138586445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Chaucer and the Ethics of Time by Gillian Adler (review)","authors":"George Edmondson","doi":"10.1353/sac.2023.a913920","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2023.a913920","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138587367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Chaucer's Wenches","authors":"Carissa M. Harris","doi":"10.1353/sac.2023.a913911","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2023.a913911","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay analyzes the eighteen occurrences of the word wenche in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and argues that the idea of the \"wenche\" persists today, most notably as implicit justification for the rescinding of the constitutional right to an abortion in the US Supreme Court's monumental decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (June 2022). It takes a Black feminist approach by situating Chaucer's wenches in the context of Black women's history and tracing how the word's resonances continued their pernicious work of making meaning and shaping material realities long after the Middle Ages. It first gives a careful history of wench's origins and accretion of meaning from the early to the late Middle Ages, paying particular attention to its relationship with the Latin ancilla. It uses the Wycliffite Bible as a lens to explore the term's rapidly accruing connotations of youth, servitude, femininity, and transgressive sexuality, and discusses the connections between \"wenche\" and reproduction in An Alphabet of Tales and Geoffrey the Grammarian's Promptorium parvulorum before tracing its symbolic freight across the Canterbury Tales and pointing to its underlying role in struggles for reproductive justice in our own time.","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138589846","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Loquela gravis iuvat\": Gower's O deus immense and the Place of Poetry, 1398–1400","authors":"Eric Weiskott","doi":"10.1353/sac.2023.a913916","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2023.a913916","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:John Gower's medium-length Latin poem O deus immense, little thought of even by most Gowerians, brings his career into focus. O deus immense synthesizes strands of Gower's self-presentation pursued far more diffusely in his titanic trilogy Mirour de l'omme–Vox clamantis–Confessio Amantis. The place Gower clears for poetry in 1398, 1399, or 1400—the date of O deus immense is uncertain, a point addressed here at length—is characterized by its public, monitory, prophetic, and enigmatic dimensions. Focusing on the historically remote genre of political prophecy, this essay compares O deus immense with other Gowerian and non-Gowerian English political verse in English and Latin datable to 1398–1400, including Bede's Prophecy, an anonymous rhyming English poem of 1400 inedited until recently and therefore, like O deus immense, not factoring into previous critical assessments of the poetry of the Lancastrian coup. Attending to the complex relationship between poetics and politics at the turn of the fifteenth century in England, the essay positions O deus immense as pivotal in Gower's career and essential for an evaluation of what he contributed to the first generation of Lancastrian poetry. Gower's \"most significant role\" in the field of English political poetry, 1398–1400, was as its leading theorist and most skillful advocate, a role he plays most assiduously in O deus immense; but it is both a credit to his depth of ambition and an explanation of the often violent contortions of his late Latin style that Gower's arguments for a poetry of moral clarity, social urgency, and political muscle transcend the very ideological commitments that transparently motivate them.","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138587128","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Landscape in Middle English Romance: The Medieval Imagination and the Natural World by Andrew M. Richmond (review)","authors":"Laura L. Howes","doi":"10.1353/sac.2023.a913931","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2023.a913931","url":null,"abstract":"When explored, the image suggests simultaneously different modes of looking at and representing birds. Movement through time (the modern and medieval) is both captured on a two-dimensional plane and freed by the godwits escaping the frame. In contrast to the stylized front cover, an austere black and white photograph by Brian Lawrence precedes each chapter, presenting a single species of bird important to the chapter’s focus. The list of illustrations (p. vi) replicates the captions that attend each photograph, which include the names of birds in modern English and Latin and selected lines of Old or Middle English poetry. Visually, the photographs are not just realism-infused reminders of the animals that inspired medieval authors. Their presence—although framed by human technology and aesthetic choices—affirms the otherness of birds, their strangeness, the inability to capture them (their thereness, their theirness) in a web of words, concepts, or images. If you wish to request a PDF of one of the book’s chapters, you might consider adding a page number to the start of the request so that a scan of the illustration will be included. (For example, request pp. 24–63 for chapter one, instead of pp. 25–63). The book closes with a glossary of Old and Middle English bird names (pp. 225–36), bibliography (pp. 237–54), and index (pp. 255–59). Heather Maring Arizona State University","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138588871","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages by Rita Copeland (review)","authors":"Jonathan M. Newman","doi":"10.1353/sac.2023.a913924","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2023.a913924","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138589654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World by Michelle Karnes (review)","authors":"E. K. Myerson","doi":"10.1353/sac.2023.a913926","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2023.a913926","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53678,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Age of Chaucer","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138586293","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}