First published in 1990, Chaucer and the Social Contest takes a fresh view of The Canterby Tales, by placing the storytelling contest among the Canterbury pilgrims within the larger social contests in the changing England of the late fourteenth century. The author focuses on three crucial fields of contention: the division of social duties into the three estates, the controversies around Wycliffite thought and practice, and the roles of women. Drawing on recent literary theory, particularly Bakhtin and Foucault, Peggy Knapp offers both a reading of nearly all the tales and an argument about how such readings come about, both for Chaucer's earliest audiences and for us.

First published in 1990, Chaucer and the Social Contest takes a fresh view of The Canterby Tales, by placing the storytelling contest among the Canterbury pilgrims within the larger social contests in the changing England of the late fourteenth century. The author focuses on three crucial fields of contention: the division of social duties into the three estates, the controversies around Wycliffite thought and practice, and the roles of women. Drawing on recent literary theory, particularly Bakhtin and Foucault, Peggy Knapp offers both a reading of nearly all the tales and an argument about how such readings come about, both for Chaucera (TM)s earliest audiences and for us.

Widely heard and read throughout the middle ages, romance literature has persisted for centuries and has lately re-emerged in the form of speculative fiction, inviting readers to step out of the actual world and experience the intriguing pleasure of possibility. Medieval Romance is the first study to focus on the deep philosophical underpinnings of the genre's fictional worlds. James F. Knapp and Peggy A. Knapp uniquely utilize Leibniz's "possible worlds" theory, Kant's aesthetic reflections, and Gadamer's writings on the apprehension of language over time, to bring the romance genre into critical dialogue with fundamental questions of philosophical aesthetics, modal logic, and the hermeneutics of literary transmission. The authors' compelling and illuminating analysis of six instances of medieval secular writing, including that of Marie de France, the Gawain-poet, and Chaucer demonstrates how the extravagantly imagined worlds of romance invite reflection about the nature of the real. These stories, which have delighted readers for hundreds of years, do so because the impossible fictions of one era prefigure desired realities for later generations.