Description
Book Synopsis Why do we still read and discuss Chaucer? The answer may be simple: he is fun, and he challenges our intelligence and questions our certainties. This collected volume represents an homage to a toweringly great poet, as well as an acknowledgement of the intellectual excitement, challenges, and pleasure that readers owe to him as even today, his poems have the capacity to change the way we engage with fundamental questions of knowledge, understanding, and beauty.
Table of Contents Introduction: ‘The craft so long to lerne…’
C.W.R.D. Moseley
Chapter 1. ‘And gret wel Chaucer whan ye mete’: Chaucer’s Earliest Readers, Addresses and Audiences
Sebastian Sobecki
Chapter 2. Unhap, Misadventures, Infortune: Chaucer’s Vocabulary of Mischance
Helen Cooper
Chapter 3. Chaucer’s Tears
Barry Windeatt
Chapter 4. In Appreciation of Metrical Abnormality: Headless Lines and Initial Inversion in Chaucer
Ad Putter
Chapter 5. Blanche, Two Chaucers and the Stanley Family: Rethinking the Reception of The Book of the Duchess
Simon Meecham-Jones
Chapter 6. ‘Tu Numeris Elementa Ligas’: The Consolation of Nature’s Numbers in Parlement of Foulys
C.W.R.D. Moseley
Chapter 7. Troilus and Criseyde and the ‘Parfit Blisse of Love’
Simone Fryer-Bovair
Chapter 8. Hateful Contraries in ‘The Merchant’s Tale’
John M. Fyler
Chapter 9. String Theory and ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’: Where is Constancy?
William A. Quinn
Chapter 10. The Pardoner’s Passing and How It Matters: Gender, Relics and Speech Acts
Alex da Costa
Chapter 11. ‘Double Sorrow’: The Complexity of Compaint in Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite and Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid
Jackie Tasioulas
Index
