Can an outrageously immoral man or a scandalous woman teach morality or lead people to virtue? Does personal fallibility devalue one's words and deeds? Is it possible to separate the private from the public, to segregate individual failing from official function? Chaucer addressed these perennial issues through two problematic authority figures, the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath. The Pardoner dares to assume official roles to which he has no legal claim and for which he is quite unsuited. We are faced with the shocking consequences of the belief, standard for the time, that immorality is not necessarily a bar to effective ministry. Even more subversively, the Wife of Bath, who represents one of the most despised stereotypes in medieval literature, the sexually rapacious widow, dispenses wisdom of the highest order. This innovative book places these "fallible authors" within the full intellectual context that gave them meaning. Alastair Minnis magisterially examines the impact of Aristotelian thought on preaching theory, the controversial practice of granting indulgences, religious and medical categorizations of deviant bodies, theological attempts to rationalize sex within marriage, Wycliffite doctrine that made authority dependent on individual grace and raised the specter of Donatism, and heretical speculation concerning the possibility of female teachers. Chaucer's Pardoner and Wife of Bath are revealed as interconnected aspects of a single radical experiment wherein the relationship between objective authority and subjective fallibility is confronted as never before.

The 3rd Edition of Literacy & Learning in the Content Areas helps readers build the knowledge, motivation, tools, and confidence they need as they integrate literacy into their middle and high school content area classrooms. Its unique approach to teaching content area literacy actively engages preservice and practicing teachers in reading and writing and the very activities that they will use to teach literacy to their own studentsin middle and high school classrooms . Rather than passively learning about strategies for incorporating content area literacy activities, readers get hands-on experience in such techniques as mapping/webbing, anticipation guides, booktalks, class websites, and journal writing and reflection. Readers also learn how to integrate children's and young adult literature, primary sources, biographies, essays, poetry, and online content, communities, and websites into their classrooms. Each chapter offers concrete teaching examples and practical suggestions to help make literacy relevant to students' content area learning. Author Sharon Kane demonstrates how relevant reading, writing, speaking, listening, and visual learning activities can improve learning in content area subjects and at the same time help readers meet national content knowledge standards and benchmarks.

"Many physicians think they need to be infallible to be successful, but no one is immune from mental illness."

Vernacular writers of late medieval England were engaged in global conversations about orthodoxy and heresy. Entering these conversations with a developing vernacular required lexical innovation. The Language of Heresy in Late Medieval English Literature examines the way in which these writers complemented seemingly straightforward terms, like heretic, with a range of synonyms that complicated the definitions of both those words and orthodoxy itself. This text proposes four specific terms that become collated with heretic in the parlance of medieval English writers of the 14th and 15th centuries: jangler, Jew, Saracen, and witch. These four labels are especially important insofar as they represent the way in which medieval Christianity appropriated and subverted marginalized or vulnerable identities to promote a false image of unassailable authority.