The questions of fame and reputation are central to Chaucer's writings; the essays here discuss their various treatments and manifestations. Fama, or fame, is a central concern of late medieval literature: where fame came from, who deserved it, whether it was desirable and how it was acquired and kept. An interest in fame was not new but was renewed and rethought within the vernacular revolutions of the later Middle Ages. The work of Geoffrey Chaucer collates received ideas on the subject of fama, both from the classical world and from the work of his contemporaries. Chaucer's place in these intertextual negotiations was readily recognized in his aftermath, as later writers adopted and reworked postures which Chaucer had struck, in their own bids for literary authority. This volume tracks debates onfama which were past, present and future to Chaucer, using his work as a centre point to investigate canon formation in European literature from the late Middle Ages and into the Early Modern period. Isabel Davis is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Birkbeck, University of London; Catherine Nall is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Contributors: Joanna Bellis, Alcuin Blamires, Julia Boffey, Isabel Davis, Stephanie Downes, A.S.G. Edwards, Jamie C. Fumo, Andrew Galloway, Nick Havely, Thomas A. Prendergast, Mike Rodman Jones, William T. Rossiter, Elizaveta Strakhov.

New essays on Chaucer's engagement with religion and the religious controversies of the fourteenth century. How do critics, religious scholars and historians in the early twenty-first century view Chaucer's relationship to religion? And how can he be taught and studied in an increasingly secular and multi-cultural environment? The essays here, on [the Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, lyrics and dream poems, aim to provide an orientation on the study of the the religions, the religious traditions and the religious controversies of his era - and to offer new perspectives upon them. Using a variety of theoretical, critical and historical approaches, they deal with topics that include Chaucer in relation to lollardy, devotion to the saint and the Virgin Mary, Judaism andIslam, and the Bible; attitudes towards sex, marriage and love; ethics, both Christian and secular; ideas on death and the Judgement; Chaucer's handling of religious genres such as hagiography and miracles, as well as other literary traditions - romance, ballade, dream poetry, fablliaux and the middle ages' classical inheritance - which pose challenges to religious world views. These are complemented by discussion of a range of issues related to teachingChaucer in Britain and America today, drawn from practical experience. Contributors: Anthony Bale, Alcuin Blamires, Laurel Broughton, Helen Cooper, Graham D. Caie, Roger Dalrymple, Dee Dyas, D. Thomas Hanks Jr., Stephen Knight, Carl Phelpstead, Helen Phillips, David Raybin, Sherry Reames, Jill Rudd.

This is the first volume to be published by York Medieval Press, under the aegis of University of York's Centre for Medieval Studies in association with Boydell & Brewer, with the aim of promoting innovative scholarship and fresh criticism on medieval culture. It has a special commitment to interdisciplinary study, in line with the Centre's belief that the future of medieval studies lies in areas in which its major disciplines at once inform and challenge each other. The attitudes towards the human body held by different branches of medieval theology are currently a major focus of scholarly attention. This first volume from York Medieval Press includes studies of the metaphor of man as head and woman as body, Abelard, women and Catharism, the female body as an impediment to ordination, women mystics, and the University of York's 1995 Quodlibet Lecture given by Eamon Duffy on the early iconography and lives' of St Francis of Assisi..... Thenew scholarly essays collected here explore ways in which the human body - a major focus of attention in recent work on literary theory and cultural studies -was treated by several branches of medieval theology; they are derived in the mainfrom a conference held at York in 1995, under the title This Body of Death', together with further invited papers on the same theme. It includes the first of the Annual Quodlibet Lectures in medieval theology, Eamon Duffy's masterly study of the early iconography and lives' of St Francis of Assisi. PETER BILLER is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of York; A.J. MINNIS is Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of York. Contributors: PETER BILLER, ALCUIN BLAMIRES, DAVID LUSCOMBE, W.G.EAST, A.J. MINNIS, DYAN ELLIOTT, ROSALYNN VOADEN, EAMON DUFFY

This book reproduces in colour, with commentary and full contextual discussion, all the miniatures from unpublished illuminated manuscripts of Le Roman de la Rose in the National Library of Wales. A central work in medieval culture, the Rose was among the most consistently illustrated of medieval secular texts. By presenting all the illuminations from all five illuminated Aberystwyth manuscripts the present study enables absorbing comparisons to be made. This is a book that will stir controversy through its scepticism about moral readings of Rose illustrations and through its insistence on an "accidental" element in the interpretative value of miniatures in secular texts. It will interest anyone who studies art and literature, including students of Chaucer - a poet who absorbed the Roman de la Rose to the core by translating it. The reader is first introduced to the narrative and to characteristic sites of illustration within it. The introduction goes on to identify existing published sources of reproductions, and then to argue the crucial role that a grasp of the practical circumstances of production should play in interpreting medieval miniatures. A final complementary chapter formally describes all seven Aberystwyth Rose manuscripts.

Papers on women and religion in the middle ages, drawn from archive, manuscipt and early printed sources. Taking a variety of critical approaches, the papers in Women, the Book and the Godlyanalyse the subject of women and religion, illustrating clearly the wealth of previously untapped material on this topic, whether in archive, manuscript or early printed source. The volume examines writing by women, writing which excludes women, and writing which ignores them, as well as women readers, women patrons, and women who were read to. Archaeology, canon and civil law, and trial depositions are all represented. The common determinants of marital and social status are, of course, explored, but so also are the problems of women and language, women's various roles as creators, recipients, and objects, and women's positions on the sliding scale between the orthodox, the reforming, and the heterodox churches. The essays thus represent something of the variety and range of work being done on medieval women today. Contributors: ALCUIN BLAMIRES, JACQUELINE MURRAY, WYBREN SCHEEPSMA, ANNEM. DUTTON, ROSALYNN VOADEN, GRACE JANTZEN, ELIZABETH A. ANDERSEN, THOMAS LUONGO, BENEDICTA WARD, GOPA ROY, GEORGES WHALEN, CATHERINE INNES-PARKER, HELENPHILLIPS, SHANNON McSHEFFREY, PETER BILLER

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.
The book will be absorbing for all serious readers or teachers of Chaucer because it is packed with commanding new insights. It offers illuminating explanations concerning topics that have often eluded critics in the past: the flood-forecast in The Miller's Tale, for example; or the status of emotion and equanimity in The Franklin's Tale; the "unethical" sexual trading in The Shipman's Tale; the contemporary moral force of a widow's curse in The Friar's Tale; and the quizzical moral link between The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale. There is even a newhypothesis about the conceptual design of The Canterbury Tales as a whole. Deeply informed and historically alert, this is a book that engages its reader in the vital role played by ethical assumptions (with their attendant gender assumptions) in Chaucer's major poetry.

The medieval period is commonly perceived as particularly misogynistic, yet the culture of the time constructed a case for women that is little known today. This book sets out to demonstrate the existence of substantial profeminine traditions extending back from the Middle Ages to the fourth century. What kind of feminism or otherwise these traditions amount to, and what they contribute to key writers such as Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, and Abelard, are part of the objectives of this refreshing and readable approach to medieval culture.

This sourcebook of texts in modern translation makes accessible key anti-feminist works, together with a surprising range of early texts championing women.