As the "father" of the English literary canon, one of a very few writers to appear in every "great books" syllabus, Chaucer is seen as an author whose works are fundamentally timeless: an author who, like Shakespeare, exemplifies the almost magical power of poetry to appeal to each generation of
readers. Every age remakes its own Chaucer, developing new understandings of how his poetry intersects with contemporary ways of seeing the world, and the place of the subject who lives in it. This Handbook comprises a series of essays by established scholars and emerging voices that address
Chaucer's poetry in the context of several disciplines, including late medieval philosophy and science, Mediterranean Studies, comparative literature, vernacular theology, and popular devotion.
The volume paints the field in broad strokes and sections include Biography and Circumstances
of Daily Life; Chaucer in the European Frame; Philosophy and Science in the Universities; Christian Doctrine and Religious Heterodoxy; and the Chaucerian Afterlife. Taken as a whole, The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer offers a snapshot of the current state of the field, and a bold suggestion of the
trajectories along which Chaucer studies are likely to develop in the future.
Suzanne Conklin Akbari: Introduction: Placing the Past
Part 1: Biography and Circumstances of Daily Life
1. Peter Brown: Chaucer's Travels for the Court
2. Matthew Giancarlo: Chaucer and Contemporary Courts of Law and Politics: House, Law, Game
3. Jonathan Hsy: At Home in
the 'Countour-Hous': Inhabiting Space on Chaucer's Polyglot Dwellings
4. Kellie Robertson: Labour and Time
5. Alexandra Gillespie: Books and Booklessness in Chaucer's England
6. Martha Rust: The Role of the Scribe: Genius of the Book
7. James Simpson: 'Gaufred, deere maister
soverain': Chaucer and Rhetoric
Part 2: Chaucer in the Mediterranean Frame
8. Steven F. Kruger: Anti-Judaism / Anti-Semitism and the Structures of Chaucerian Thought
9. Ruth Nisse: 'O Hebraic People!' English Jews and the Twelfth-Century Literary Scene
10. Karla Mallette: The
Hazards of Narration: Frame-Tale Technologies and the Oriental Tale
11. Suzanne M. Yeager: Fictions of Espionage: Performing Pilgrim and Crusader Identities in the Age of Chaucer
Part 3: Chaucer in the European Frame
12. Jamie C. Fumo: Ovid: Artistic Identity and
Intertextuality
13. Marilynn Desmond: Chaucer and the Textualities of Troy
14. David F. Hult: The Romance of the Rose: Allegory and Lyric Voice
15. Deborah McGrady: Challenging the Patronage Paradigm: Late-Medieval Francophone Writers and the Poet-Prince Relationship
16. Martin
Eisner: Dante and the Author of the Decameron: Love, Literature, and Authority in Boccaccio
17. Warren Ginsberg: Boccaccio's Early Romances
18. Ronald Martinez: Chaucer's Petrarch: 'enlumnyed ben they'
19. David L. Pike: Dante and the Medieval City: How the Dead Live
20. Suzanne
Conklin Akbari: Historiography: Nicholas Trevet's Transnational History
Part 4: Philosophy and Science in the Universities
21. Rita Copeland: Grammar and Rhetoric c. 1100-c. 1400
22. Fabienne Michelet and Martin Pickavé: Philosophy, Logic, and Nominalism
23. Eleanor Johnson:
The Poetics of Trespass and Duress: Chaucer and the Fifth Inn of Court,
24. E. Ruth Harvey: Medicine and Science in Chaucer's Day
25. Edith Dudley Sylla: Logic and Mathematics. The Oxford Calculators
Part 5: Christian Doctrine and Religious Heterodoxy
26. Stephen E. Lahey:
Wycliffism and its After-Effects
27. o Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Melissa Mayus, and Katie Bugyis: Anticlericalism', Inter-clerical Polemic and Theological Vernaculars
28. Denise Despres: Chaucer as Image-Maker
Part 6: The Chaucerian Afterlife
29. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen:
Geographesis, or the Afterlife of Britain in Chaucer
30. T. Matthew N. McCabe: Vernacular Authorship and Public Poetry: John Gower
31. Anthony Bale: Lydgate's Chaucer
32. Jonathan Newman: Dialogism in Hoccleve
33. Iain MacLeod Higgins: Old Books and New Beginnings North of Chaucer:
Revisionary Reframings in the Kingis Quair and the Testament of Cresseid
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Suzanne Conklin Akbari is Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and was educated at Johns Hopkins and Columbia. She has written books on optics and allegory (Seeing Through the Veil) and European views of Islam and the Orient (Idols in the East), and edited
collections on travel literature (Marco Polo), Mediterranean Studies (A Sea of Languages), and somatic histories (The Ends of the Body).
James Simpson is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. He was formerly Professor of Medieval and Renaissance
English at the University of Cambridge. His most recent books are Reform and Cultural Revolution, being volume 2 in the Oxford English Literary History (Oxford University Press, 2002); Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Harvard University Press, 2007), and Under
the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2010).
