berghahn New York · Oxford

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

Engaging with Chaucer

Practice, Authority, Reading

Edited by C.W.R.D. Moseley

226 pages, bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-78920-999-0 Hb Published (November 2020)

eISBN 978-1-78920-476-6 eBook

Details

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.

C.W.R.D. Moseley teaches in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, and has been Director of Studies in English for several colleges of the university as well as Program Director of the university’s International Summer Schools in English Literature and Shakespeare.

Subject: Media Studies Cultural Studies (General)

Area:

BISAC: LIT000000 LITERARY CRITICISM/General; SOC052000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Media Studies