Studies in the Age of Chaucer is the annual yearbook of the New Chaucer Society, publishing articles on the writing of Chaucer and his contemporaries, their antecedents and successors, and their intellectual and social contexts. More generally, articles explore the culture and writing of later medieval Britain (1200-1500). Each SAC volume also includes an annotated bibliography and reviews of Chaucer-related publications.

This text analyzes the effect of Chaucer's poetry on his contemporary readers, examining how he and his audience understood their society and how this is reflected in the works. This book provides a fuller understanding of Chaucer's world and the social implications of literary styles and form.

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

Tolkien's Lost Chaucer uncovers the story of an unpublished and previously unknown book by the author of The Lord of the Rings. It reveals how major episodes from the trilogy were inspired by Tolkien's editing and teaching of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

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