This book offers a completely new reading of Chaucer. While most critics have seen his work as essentially socially optimistic and congenial, Marion Turner argues that Chaucer was profoundly concerned with conflict and social antagonism. Chaucer's texts are examined alongside a wide variety of poetry and historical documents from the period.

Chaucerian Conflict explores the textual environment of London in the 1380s and 1390s, revealing a language of betrayal, surveillance, slander, treason, rebellion, flawed idealism, and corrupted compaignyes. Taking a strongly interdisciplinary approach, it examines how discourses about social antagonism work across different kinds of texts written at this time, including Chaucer's House of Fame, Troilus and Criseyde, and Canterbury Tales, and other literary texts such as St Erkenwald, Gower's Vox clamantis, Usk's Testament of Love, and Maidstone's Concordia. Many non-literary texts are also discussed, including the Mercers' Petition, Usk's Appeal, the guild returns, judicial letters, de Mezieres's Letter to Richard II, and chronicle accounts. These were tumultuous decades in London: some of the conflicts and problems discussed include the Peasants' Revolt, the mayoral rivalries of the 1380s, the Merciless Parliament, slander legislation, and contemporary suspicion of urban associations. While contemporary texts try to hold out hope for the future, or imagine an earlier Golden Age, Chaucer's texts foreground social conflict and antagonism. Though most critics have promoted an idea of Chaucer's texts as essentially socially optimistic and congenial, Marion Turner argues that Chaucer presents a vision of a society that is inevitably divided and destructive.

Building on recent work in critical animal studies and posthumanism, this book challenges past assumptions that animals were only explored as illustrative of humanity, not as interesting in their own right. The contributors combine close reading of Chaucer's texts with insights drawn from cultural or critical animal studies.

The English language has changed dramatically over the past 500 years, making it increasingly difficult for students to read Chaucer's works. Assuming no previous linguistic knowledge or familiarity with Middle English, Simon Horobin introduces students to Chaucer's language and the importance of reading Chaucer in the original, rather than modern translation. Chaucer's Language - leads the reader gently through basic linguistic concepts with appropriate explanation - highlights how Chaucer's English differs from present-day English, and the significance of this for interpreting and understanding his work - provides close analysis and comparison with the writings of Chaucer's contemporaries to show how Chaucer drew on the variety of Middle English to achieve particular poetic effects - includes sample texts, a glossary of linguistic terminology, a bibliography and suggestions for further reading to aid study. Authoritative and easy-to-follow, this is an indispensable guide to understanding, appreciating and enjoying the language of Chaucer. Assuming no previous linguistic knowledge, Simon Horobin introduces students to Chaucer's language and the importance of reading Chaucer in the original, rather than in a modern translation. This updated edition includes references to most recent scholarship, suggestions for future research and an extensive glossary with sample quotations. Assumes no prior knowledge of Middle English One of the few books available devoted exclusively to Chaucer's language Incorporates the latest research and scholarship, draws on modern linguistic methods

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.

Although centrally focused on varieties of friendship and love in Troilus and Criseyde, the discussion in Chaucer’s Neoplatonism includes the dream visions as well as aspects of The Canterbury Tales. It lays out Chaucer’s Boethian-inspired, cognitive approach, drawn mainly from Book V of the Consolatio, to whatever subject he treats. Far from courting skepticism, Chaucer gathers many variants of such matters as love, friendship, and community within a meditative mode that assess better and worse instances. He does so to illuminate a fuller sense of the forms that respectively underlie particular manifestations of love, joy, friendship or community. That process is both cognitive and aesthetic in that beauty and truth appear more fully as one assess both better and worse instances of an idea or of an experience. Chapters on the dream visions establish Chaucer’s reasonable belief in the truth-value of fictions, however grounded on exaggerated and mixed tidings of truth and falsehood. Chapters on Troilus and Criseyde examine relationships between the main characters given the place of noble friendship within an initially promising but then tragic love story. The drama of those relationships become Chaucer’s major claim to fame before the tales of Canterbury, where, for meditative purposes, he gathers various gestures toward community among the dramatically interacting pilgrims, while also exploring the dynamics of reconciliation.

"Eleven essays that explore how modern scholarship interprets Chaucer's writings"--Provided by publisher.