Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender

This book makes a vigorous reassessment of the moral dimension in Chaucer's writings. For the Middle Ages, the study of human behaviour generally signified the study of the morality of attitudes, choices, and actions. Moreover, moral analysis was not gender neutral: it presupposed that certain virtues and certain failings were largely gender-specific. Alcuin Blamires - mainly concentrating on The Canterbury Tales - discloses how Chaucer adapts the composite inherited traditions of moral literature to shape the significance and the gender implications of his narratives. Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender is therefore not a theorization of ethical reading but a discussion of Chaucer's engagement with the literature of practical ethical advice. Working with the commonplace primary sources of the period, Blamires demonstrates that Stoic ideals, somewhat uncomfortably absorbed within medieval Christian moral codes as Chaucer realized, penetrate the poet's constructions of how women and men behave in matters (for instance) of friendship and anger, sexuality and chastity, protest and sufferance, generosity and greed, credulity and foresight

Medieval Individuality

The study of medieval literature has experienced a revolution in the last two decades, which has reinvigorated many parts of the discipline and changed the shape of the subject in relation to the scholarship of the previous generation. 'New' texts (laws and penitentials, women's writing, drama records), innovative fields and objects of study (the history of the book, the study of space and the body, medieval masculinities), and original ways of studying them (the Sociology of the Text, performance studies) have emerged. This has brought fresh vigour and impetus to medieval studies, and impacted significantly on cognate periods and areas. The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English brings together the insights of these new fields and approaches with those of more familiar texts and methods of study, to provide a comprehensive overview of the state of medieval literature today. It also returns to first principles in posing fundamental questions about the nature, scope, and significance of the discipline, and the directions that it might take in the next decade. The Handbook contains 44 newly commissioned essays from both world-leading scholars and exciting new scholarly voices. Topics covered range from the canonical genres of Saints' lives, sermons, romance, lyric poetry, and heroic poetry; major themes including monstrosity and marginality, patronage and literary politics, manuscript studies and vernacularity are investigated; and there are close readings of key texts, such as Beowulf, Wulf and Eadwacer, and Ancrene Wisse and key authors from Ælfric to Geoffrey Chaucer, Langland, and the Gawain Poet

'Women and Creative Intelligence in Medieval Thought'

Using a dialogue format, contributors to this collection of essays outline key issues in the cultural history of medieval women. Many of the essays in this volume provide compelling evidence that women in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages achieved an accomplished form of literacy and became actively involved in literary networks of textual production and exchange. These essays also present new research on questions of the literacy and authorship of historical women. In so doing they demonstrate that medieval women, like many medieval men, did not read and write in isolation, but were surrounded and assisted by both male and female colleagues. The issue of women's ministry is another key theme addressed in this volume. Contributors examine the conditions under which women's spiritual leadership could extend to male-designated roles and mixed audiences. Several essays also address the ways in which late medieval religious women, though hampered by severe official legislation, managed to appropriate to themselves a surprising range of supposedly forbidden ecclesiastical roles. Voices in Dialogue challenges the historical and literary work of modern medieval scholars by questioning traditionally accepted evidence, methodologies, and conclusions. It will push those engaged in the field of medieval studies to reflect upon the manner in which they conceive, write, and teach history, as it urges them to situate historical women prominently within the intellectual and spiritual culture of the Middle Ages

'Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde'

A Companion to Medieval Poetry presents a series of original essays from leading literary scholars that explore English poetry from the Anglo–Saxon period up to the 15 th century. •Organised into three parts to echo the chronological and stylistic divisions between the Anglo–Saxon, Middle English and Post–Chaucerian periods, each section is introduced with contextual essays, providing a valuable introduction to the society and culture of the time •Combines a general discussion of genres of medieval poetry, with specific consideration of texts and authors, including Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer, Gower and Langland •Features original essays by eminent scholars, including Andy Orchard, Carl Schmidt, Douglas Gray, and Barry Windeatt, who present a range of theoretical, historical, and cultural approaches to reading medieval poetry, as well as offering close analysis of individual texts and tradition

'Sexuality'

This book is the most comprehensive guide to Chaucer's work and the history of its reception available. It comprises 37 specially commissioned chapters by an outstanding team of contemporary Chaucer scholars and combines general essays offering background and contextual information with detailed readings of specific Chaucerian texts. The volume is divided into five parts - 'Historical Contexts', 'Literary Contexts', 'Readings', 'Afterlife' and 'Study Resources'. Each chaper includes a Guide to Further Reading and there is a Chronology at the end of the volume. The Guide is accompanied by a companion web site which includes four additional contributions for teachers and lecturers on teaching and learning issues related to Chaucer

The Case for Women in Medieval Culture

Misogyny is of course not the whole story of medieval discourse on women: medieval culture also envisaged a case for women. But hitherto studies of profeminine attitudes in that periods culture have tended to concentrate on courtly literature or on female visionary writings or on attempts to transcend misogyny by major authors such as Christine de Pizan and Chaucer. This book sets out to demonstrate something different: that there existed from early in the Middle Ages a corpus of substantial traditions in defence of women, on which the more familiar authors drew, and that this corpus itself consolidated strands of profeminine thought that had been present as far back as the patristic literature of the fourth century. The Case for Women surveys extant writings formally defending women in the Middle Ages; breaks new ground by identifying a source for profeminine argument in biblical apocrypha; offers a series of explorations of the background and circulation of central arguments on behalf of women; and seeks to situate relevant texts by Christine de Pizan, Chaucer, Abelard, and Hrotsvitha in relation to these arguments. Topics covered range from the privileges of women, and pro-Eve polemic, to the social and moral strengths attributed to women, and to the powerful modelsfrequently disruptive of patriarchal complacencypresented by Old and New Testament women. The contribution made by these emphases (which are not to be confused with feminism in a modern sense) to medieval constructions of gender is throughout critically assessed, and the book concludes by asking how far defenders were controlled by, or able to query, assumptions about what was natural (and therefore imagined inflexible) in gender theory

Karma Lochrie. — Covert Operations : The Medieval Uses of Secrecy. Philadelphie, University of Pennsylvania Pr., 1999 (Middle Age Series)

Blamires Alcuin, Jouet Laurent. Karma Lochrie. — Covert Operations : The Medieval Uses of Secrecy. Philadelphie, University of Pennsylvania Pr., 1999 (Middle Age Series). In: Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, 45e année (n°180), Octobre-décembre 2002. pp. 383-385