This do-it-yourself course for the first-time Chaucer reader is geared specifically to high school and undergraduate students because it systematically proceeds through a clear explication of each tale and makes the tales accessible to those unfamiliar with Chaucer's work. Reading this book along with Canterbury Tales, tale by tale, will help the reader to understand and appreciate each tale, Chaucer's world, and his language. This book differs from other guides to the tales because it takes the reader along on the pilgrimage through each tale and assumes no previous experience with Chaucer's work. Middle English and modern English paraphrases of passages from the tales are arranged together for the ease of the novice. Whether the reader is seeking assistance with a single tale or with the whole work, this companion provides a level of instruction appropriate for high school and college courses.

In individual essays, Hallissy introduces the literary pilgrim to Chaucer the writer, his world, and his language. An explicatory essay is provided for the General Prologue and for each major tale--the Knight, the Miller, the Reeve, the Man of Law, the Wife of Bath, the Friar, the Summoner, the Clerk, the Merchant, the Franklin, the Physician, the Pardoner, the Shipman, the Prioress, the Nun's Priest, the Second Nun, the Canon's Yeoman, and the Manciple. Six lesser-read tales are treated in an appendix. The tales are interpreted in terms of key patterns of medieval thought that Chaucer shared with his original audience. Hallissy's style is clear, readable, and jargon-free. Explications are thorough and consistent, and connections are drawn between the tales. Medieval visual images illuminate the text amd suggestions for further reading have been selected specifically for high school and undergraduate students. This work can be used as a reference volume for a reader interested in a single tale or for the entire Canterbury Tales and will be of great value to high school and college students reading Chaucer's work for the first time, as well as to high school teachers preparing for classes.

Chaucer was a keen observer of the lives of women with a remarkable ability to see beyond his culture's preconceptions concerning their proper roles. The lives of medieval women were divided into three estates--virginity, wifehood, and widowhood--each with complex rules extending to particulars of speech and dress, but all directed toward the single purpose of preserving female chastity, for which a woman was to be prepared to suffer or even die. Margaret Hallissy's lively and literate study traces Chaucer's female characterizations against a background of medieval rules and common assumptions governing women to determine where he adhered to or departed from the behavioral norms. She concludes that he discounted much of these codes of conduct as being detrimental to the development of a full human person. The Wife of Bath, Chaucer's most drastic deviation from the received wisdom about women of his day, could only have been developed by an author/narrator who turned from the prescribed written rules--which, sacred or secular, were all instruments of patriarchal power--to female discourse and action. Applying insights from the works of modern social historians of the Middle Ages and ranging widely in sources from the visual arts, civil and canon law, homiletics, theology, architecture, fashion history, and medicine, Hallissy illuminates the preconceptions with which Chaucer's original audience would have encountered his work and brings her findings to bear on a close analysis of literary characters in the text. The resulting study provides an original and essential dimension for reading Chaucer, while its feminist-historicist approach broadens the audience to those interested in medieval studies and women's studies in general.

This work demonstrates the ways in which a complex of ideas with a misogynistic basis relates to the image of the venomous woman--the woman who uses poisons or potions, who has a relationship with a venomous animal, or who is herself poisonous. Hallissy suggests that the venomous woman is an image of feminine power reflected in masculine fear. The study concentrates on periods when ignorance of the medicinal effects of poisons exaggerated the potency of this image. It examines works of literature which span a large period of time but are linked by this persistent image. Through its examination of the venomous women, it clarifies the function of misogyny as an expression of masculine fear.

Alice McDermott--winner of the National Book Award, American Book Award, and Whiting Award, and three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize--recently published her eighth novel, The Ninth Hour, to great critical and popular acclaim. Her previous books, including Charming Billy, At Weddings and Wakes, and That Night, have been lauded as crowning achievements of Irish American fiction. An Irish American Catholic born and raised in New York, McDermott uses multiple identities and a distinctive, nonchronological narrative style to create an unmistakable trademark. She currently serves as the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. Understanding Alice McDermott begins with a brief biography and transitions into a linear inquiry of McDermott's published works. In addition to interrogating her recurring motifs of memory and heritage, Margaret Hallissy tracks various themes that appear throughout the novels--religion, generational trauma, geography, family, motherhood, and displacement--topics that intertwine and inform the mentality of McDermott's characters. This volume deftly leads the reader through each of McDermott's novels, seeking connections and facilitating conversations among her earliest and most recent works. Hallissy demonstrates a deep critical understanding of intersections in McDermott's canon. Her characters in some ways are beleaguered by society's perception of them--uneducated, lower-middle-class immigrants or children of immigrants--but are also positively defined by their collective dream of a lost homeland and the shared hardship of motherhood. By tracing the shifting themes and motifs through eight novels, uncollected short stories, and essays published during McDermott's fruitful career, Understanding Alice McDermott provides a window into the decades-long development of a contemporary master.