{"title":"Chaucer's Proleptic Palinode","authors":"Michelle Ripplinger","doi":"10.1353/sac.2023.a913914","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2023.a913914","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Chaucer intervenes in late medieval debates about the dangers of fictive mimesis by reimagining the unanticipated woman reader's role in the repentant narrative of the vita Ovidiana. To defend the Ars amatoria from accusations of immorality, Ovid had claimed that it had been misinterpreted by women readers he had not anticipated. The medieval Ovid tradition absorbed this feminized figure into the biography it retroactively constructed for him; the Heroides became a palinode, an apology for or corrective to the youthful poetic indiscretions that supposedly misled these women readers. Chaucer turns this tradition knowingly on its head. In Troilus and Criseyde, he not only sets the stage for his own Heroides by giving himself something to apologize for, but also revalues the unanticipated woman reader and her interpretive faults. His sustained engagement with the vita Ovidiana in turn elucidates the literary-theoretical stakes of The Legend of Good Women, which defends the ethical value of narrative fiction, without moralizing commentary, even as it asks the reader to remain alert to its risks.","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":"138588735","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":"\"Piers Plowman\" and Its Manuscript Tradition by Sarah Wood (review)","authors":"Kathryn Kerby-Fulton","doi":"10.1353/sac.2023.a913938","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2023.a913938","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":"138589889","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":"Constance and the Holy Land in the Cronicles of Nicholas Trevet","authors":"Jonathan Brent","doi":"10.1353/sac.2023.a913915","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2023.a913915","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Nicholas Trevet's version of the Constance story, most often read in excerpt against its poetic adaptations (The Man of Law's Tale and Gower's \"Tale of Constance\"), falls at the middle of Trevet's Anglo-Norman Cronicles (c. 1334), a history of the world from Creation to the 1320s. This article suggests that Trevet's Constance story gains political and historical meaning as a part of this longer world history. The Cronicles uses the \"Old Testament\" as a frame for the Anglo-British past, positing a certain affinity between Israel and England. That the biblical Maccabees—who had been cast in Latin Europe as prototypical crusaders—play a major role in this project points to Trevet's interest in holy war. The Maccabees help to demonstrate that righteous actors oppose idolatry; the Constance story represents an epochal moment in which \"idolatry\" is reformulated as Islam. The Constance story further suggests the nation's special place in the history of crusade, yoking Christian England to Islam at their respective points of origin. Later episodes, such as that of the Third Crusade, pick up where the Constance story leaves off, with Plantagenet kings continuing the work of their Maccabean forebears. Like the Maccabees, however, England's righteous kings are threatened by the treachery of their co-religionists. That Trevet highlights such fissures within \"Christendom\" points to the rhetorical environment of 1330s geopolitics, a time when religious authority facilitated English nation-building and the prospect of an Anglo-French crusade was intractably connected to more local projects of regnal expansion.","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":"138589140","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":"An Annotated Chaucer Bibliography, 2021","authors":"Stephanie Amsel, Will Rogers","doi":"10.1353/sac.2023.a913941","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2023.a913941","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":"138589466","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 Medieval Hospital: Literary Culture and Community in England, 1350–1550 by Nicole Rice (review)","authors":"Ellen R. Ketels","doi":"10.1353/sac.2023.a913930","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2023.a913930","url":null,"abstract":"early","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":"138588252","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":"Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature, with an Edition of Middle English and Middle Scots Pastourelles ed. by Sarah Baechle, Carissa M. Harris, and Elizaveta Strakhov (review)","authors":"Kathy Cawsey","doi":"10.1353/sac.2023.a913921","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2023.a913921","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":"138588927","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 Medieval Postcolonial Jew, in and out of Time by Miriamne Ara Krummel (review)","authors":"Samantha Katz Seal","doi":"10.1353/sac.2023.a913927","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2023.a913927","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":"138589428","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":"Richard Sotheworth, Chancery Clerks, and a Discourse of Books","authors":"Matthew Fisher","doi":"10.1353/sac.2023.a913919","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2023.a913919","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The Chancery clerk Richard Sotheworth (d. 1419) listed a copy of the Canterbury Tales and three other books in his will, making him the earliest named owner of Chaucer's poem. I identify here a manuscript owned and copied by Sotheworth, and also a number of Chancery documents in his hand. Considering the wills and manuscripts owned by individuals connected to Sotheworth, this essay recovers a network of the books and belongings of Chancery clerks. From this network, I demonstrate that a distinct discourse emerges from how Chancery clerks described the books that were their daily business and also occupied them as they imagined their own deaths. The recurring attention in these wills to who bought, copied, and owned books of every type reveals the ways in which Sotheworth and his colleagues conceived of books as things that themselves required narration—as objects that Chancery clerks conceptualized, described, and valued not only for their texts, but in terms of the social relationships they embodied and the personal memories they evoked.","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":"138587827","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":"Risk before Risk: Actuarial Logic and Mercantile Metaphors in the Canterbury Tales","authors":"Tekla Bude","doi":"10.1353/sac.2023.a913912","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2023.a913912","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Thinking in terms of risk means imagining the future as a set of potential outcomes and ameliorating potentially problematic ones through action in the present. Modern theorists of risk consider risk and its mitigation to be, by definition, modern, but this essay argues that the medieval period has something important to offer histories of risk, showing that actuarial attitudes (if not modern actuarial math) are present in literary accounts of social cohesion and identity, and that medieval \"pre-risk\" forms of actuarial thought serve as the basis of modern attitudes toward risk and its unequal social management. Focusing on specific moments in the frame narrative of the Canterbury Tales, it argues that The General Prologue initially presents the Tales as a seemingly egalitarian experiment in risk mitigation, but that closer inspection of the descriptions of the Merchant and Shipman—and later the Canon and Canon's Yeoman—reveals an inequality of access to risk-mitigation strategies that anticipates the modern inequalities of a global risk society. Even as certain dangerous behaviors (large risks taken on by the mercantile class) are seen as insurable and therefore licit, other behaviors (small-scale risks taken on by lower-class laborers) are portrayed as criminal and damaging to the common good. By approaching Chaucer's Canterbury Tales with risk and risk mitigation in mind, readers might more clearly see how the felaweshipe of the Canterbury pilgrimage, what David Wallace calls its \"associational form,\" holds within it a fundamental disunity and distrust that seeks to manage the future through the hedging of bets in the present.","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":"138589765","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":"Balaam's Ass: Vernacular Theology before the English Reformation. Volume I: Frameworks, Arguments, English to 1250 by Nicholas Watson (review)","authors":"Thomas O'Donnell","doi":"10.1353/sac.2023.a913937","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2023.a913937","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":"138587488","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}