This book examines the scholarly construction of Geoffrey Chaucer in different historical eras, and challenges long-standing assumptions to enhance the theoretical dialogue on Chaucer's historical reception.

- provides the first comprehensive overview of the critical history of Book of the Duchess - offers for the first time a thorough analysis of Book of the Duchess’s medieval and early modern reception - establishes Book of the Duchess’s structuring investment in the idea of ‘the book’ – its construction, consumption, and transmission - as it contributes to a poetics of intertextuality

Mythodologies challenges the implied methodology in contemporary studies in the humanities. We claim, at times, that we gather facts or what we will call evidence, and from that form hypotheses and conclusions. Of course, we recognize that the sum total of evidence for any argument is beyond comprehension; therefore, we construct, and we claim, preliminary hypotheses, perhaps to organize the chaos of evidence, or perhaps simply to find it; we might then see (we claim) whether that evidence challenges our tentative hypotheses. Ideally, we could work this way. Yet the history of scholarship and our own practices suggest we do nothing of the kind. Rather, we work the way we teach our composition students to write: choose or construct a thesis, then invent the evidence to support it. This book has three parts, examining such methods and pseudo-methods of invention in medieval studies, bibliography, and editing. Part One, "Noster Chaucer," looks at examples in Chaucer studies, such as the notion that Chaucer wrote iambic pentameter, and the definition of a canon in Chaucer. "Our" Chaucer has, it seems, little to do with Chaucer himself, and in constructing this entity, Chaucerians are engaged largely in self-validation of their own tradition. Part Two, "Bibliography and Book History," consists of three studies in the field of bibliography: the recent rise in studies of annotations; the implications of presumably neutral terminology in editing, a case-study in cataloguing. Part Three, "Cacophonies: A Bibliographical Rondo," is a series of brief studies extending these critiques to other areas in the humanities. It seems not to matter what we talk about: meter, book history, the sex life of bonobos. In all of these discussions, we see the persistence of error, the intractability of uncritical assumptions, and the dominance of authority over evidence. TABLE OF CONTENTS // Part I. Noster Chaucerus Chap. 1. How Many Chaucerians Does it Take to Count to Eleven? The Meter of Kynaston's 1635 Translation of Troilus and Criseyde and its Implications for Chaucerian Metrics Chap. 2. Chaucer's "Rude Times" Chap. 3. Meditation on Our Chaucer and the History of the Canon Coda. Godwin's Portrait of Chaucer Part II. Bibliography and Book History Chap. 4. The Singularities of Books and Reading . Chap. 5. Editorial Projecting Chap. 6. The Haunting of Suckling's Fragmenta Aurea (1646) Coda. T. F. Dibdin: The Rhetoric of Bibliophilia Part III. Cacophonies: A Bibliographic Rondo Fakes and Frauds: The "Flewelling Antiphonary" and Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius Modernity and Middle English The Quantification of Readability The Elephant Paper and Histories of Medieval Drama The Pynson Chaucer(s) of 1526: Bibliographical Circularity Margaret Mead and the Bonobos Reading My Library

Playing the Canterbury Tales addresses the additions, continuations, and reordering of the Canterbury Tales found in the manuscripts and early printed editions of the Tales. Many modern editions present a specific set of tales in a specific order, and often leave out an entire corpus of continuations and additions. Andrew Higl makes a case for understanding the additions and changes to Chaucer's original open and fragmented work by thinking of them as distinct interactive moves in a game similar to the storytelling game the pilgrims play. Using examples and theories from new media studies, Higl demonstrates that the Tales are best viewed as an "interactive fiction," reshaped by active readers. Readers participated in the ongoing creation and production of the tales by adding new text and rearranging existing text, and through this textual transmission, they introduced new social and literary meaning to the work. This theoretical model and the boundaries between the canonical and apocryphal texts are explored in six case studies: the spurious prologues of the Wife of Bath's Tale, John Lydgate's influence on the Tales, the Northumberland manuscript, the ploughman character, and the Cook's Tale. The Canterbury Tales are a more dynamic and unstable literary work than usually encountered in a modern critical edition.

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

This book argues that Chaucer challenges his culture's mounting obsession with vision, constructing a model of 'manhed' that blurs the distinction between agency and passivity in a traditional gender binary.

"A lively microbiography of Geoffrey Chaucer, the "father of English literature", focusing on the surprising and fascinating story of the tumultuous year that led to the creation of the Canterbury Tales"--Provided by publisher.