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"Paternity is a powerful metaphor for literary authority and legitimacy, and thus Geoffrey Chaucer has been granted the supposedly supreme honor of being termed the 'father of English poetry.' And yet, as this book argues, the idea of paternity as unchallenged authority is a far more modern construct. For Chaucer, the ability to create with certainty, with assurance in one's own posterity, was the ardent dream that haunted human men. It was, however, a dream defined by its impossibility. For Chaucer and his peers occupied a fallen world, one in which all true authority belonged to God alone. This book argues that man’s struggle to create something that would last beyond death is at the ver...
This volume offers a fresh interpretation of Geoffrey Chaucer both as a poet and as a man. Taking as its starting point the idea of Chaucer as the 'Father of English Poetry', the book explores how the poet's thoughts on paternity and creativity lie at the heart of The Canterbury Tales.
Reinvigorating the scholarly debate surrounding approaches to one of Chaucer's most notorious tales
Marginality assumes a variety of forms in current discussions of the Middle Ages. Modern scholars have considered a seemingly innumerable list of people to have been marginalized in the European Middle Ages: the poor, criminals, unorthodox religious, the disabled, the mentally ill, women, so-called infidels, and the list goes on. If so many inhabitants of medieval Europe can be qualified as "marginal," it is important to interrogate where the margins lay and what it means that the majority of people occupied them. In addition, we scholars need to reexamine our use of a term that seems to have such broad applicability to ensure that we avoid imposing marginality on groups in the Middle Ages t...
Pregnancy, birth, and postpartum recovery are challenging experiences that impact women’s physical, mental, and emotional health in ways that have been historically minimalized, dismissed, or neglected. A mother’s body becomes a public body, physically and politically not her own, instead shared by her spouse, her children, and those around her. Her body, therefore, makes the perfect vessel for an invasive presence—or possession. The Sinful Maternal: Motherhood in Possession Films examines the role of mothers and motherhood in ten possession films, including Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Babadook, and Hereditary. Chapters discuss the work of such directors as James Wan, Jennifer...
In Virgin Whore, Emma Maggie Solberg uncovers a surprisingly prevalent theme in late English medieval literature and culture: the celebration of the Virgin Mary’s sexuality. Although history is narrated as a progressive loss of innocence, the Madonna has grown purer with each passing century. Looking to a period before the idea of her purity and virginity had ossified, Solberg uncovers depictions and interpretations of Mary, discernible in jokes and insults, icons and rituals, prayers and revelations, allegories and typologies—and in late medieval vernacular biblical drama. More unmistakable than any cultural artifact from late medieval England, these biblical plays do not exclusively in...
This book gathers contributions negotiating feminism's place within medieval studies. It is about overlaps and twists, about the inseparability of multiple means of critique – ecocriticism and disability studies, art history and race studies, legal history and modern activism – from a feminist perspective. The feminist scholarship in this book moves in many different directions and examines the medieval past (and its role in the present) from many different angles. What remains consistent throughout is the dedication to reconfiguring medieval studies, a commitment not to be content simply with adding women on as an extra in conventional European patriarchal accounts, or with analyzing gender in history or literature without fundamentally re-envisioning the intellectual foundations upon which those fields of study have been built. Previously published in postmedieval Volume 10, issue 3, September 2019
"This book demonstrates how Chaucer recognized the unsurpassable value of the Bible as an authoritative literary source and model for his own literary production, his self-definition as an author, and the invention of his audience. Chad Schrock unravels Chaucer's Tales in the light of topics important to biblical reception in 14th-century England: authority, textuality, interpretation, translation, rephrasing and marginalia. When the Canterbury Tales are summed up in this way, they show the great extent to which Chaucer was drawing upon the Bible as a meta-poetical resource for his own poetry"--
From the award-winning biographer of Chaucer, the story of his most popular and scandalous character, from the Middle Ages to #MeToo Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers—from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched her influence or capacity for reinvention in poetry, drama, fiction, and film. In The Wife of Bath, Marion Turner tells the fascinating story of where Chaucer’s favourite character came from, how she related to real medieval women, and w...
Explores how the earliest printers moulded demand and created new markets and argues that marketing changed what was read and the place of reading in sixteenth-century readers' lives, shaping their expectations, tastes, and their practices and beliefs.