Description
Book SynopsisChaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras adopts a comparative, boundary-crossing approach to consider one of the most canonical of literary figures, Geoffrey Chaucer. The idea that Chaucer is an international writer raises no eyebrows. Similarly, a claim that Chaucer''s writings participate in English confessional controversies in his own day and afterward provokes no surprise. This book breaks new ground by considering Chaucer''s Continental interests as they inform his participation in religious debates concerning such subjects as female spirituality and Lollardy. Similarly, this project explores the little-studied ways in which those who took religious vows, especially nuns, engaged with works by Chaucer and in the Chaucerian tradition. Furthermore, while the early modern Protestant Chaucer is a familiar figure, this book explores the creation and circulation of an early modern Catholic Chaucer that has not received much attention. This stu
Trade Review
"This study traces the history of Chaucer reception in the context of Christian controversies spanning four centuries, from the time of Chaucer up to the English Augustan Age and the Puritan project in America. It tells a compelling story that—to the best of my knowledge—has until now remained largely untold." —Jennifer Sisk, University of Vermont
"In her latest book, Nancy Bradley Warren—who in her previous publications has already shed so much light on the complex relays among literature, religion, gender, politics, authority, and historical periodization across the late medieval / early modern divide—focuses her considerable powers of insight on the works of Chaucer, taking them as both a meditation upon and catalyst or “touchstone” of these relays. In a dazzling set of chapters that span Chaucer’s own time and place through the religious conflicts in early modern Britain to colonial New England, Warren demonstrates the myriad ways in which Chaucer’s works have served as a labile signifier underlying contested constructions of the mutually implicated categories of orthodox and heterodox, masculine and feminine, and nation and canon." —Robert Meyer-Lee, Agnes Scott College
“Nancy Bradley Warren’s study . . . singles out a series of moments in the history of Chaucer’s reception, using responses to various of his works as points of entry into investigation of forms of piety or of religious dissent.” —The Times Literary Supplement
“This careful and creative work of scholarship is an important contribution to the study of Chaucer’s legacy.” —Choice
"Chaucerians will find Chaucer and Religious Controversies a fascinating read and a valuable corrective to our understanding of post-medieval reception of medieval writing." —Speculum
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Introduction
1. Female Spirituality and Religious Controversy in the Canterbury Tales
2. Chaucer, the Chaucerian Tradition, and Female Monastic Readers
3. Competing Chaucers: The Development of Religious Traditions of Reception
4. “Let Chaucer also look to himself”: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Canon Formation in Seventeenth-Century England
5. “Flying from the Depravities of Europe, to the American Strand”: Chaucer and the Chaucerian Tradition in Early America
