These thirteen essays by distinguished Chaucerians deal with the most neglected genre of the 'Canterbury Tales', the religious tales. Although the prose works are also discussed, the primary focus of the volume is on Chaucer's four poems in rhyme royal: the 'Clerk's Tale', the 'Man of Law's Tale', the 'Second Nun's Tale' and the 'Prioress's Tale'. Almost all of Chaucer's tales are religious in some sense, but these four works deal specifically and deeply with faith and spiritual transcendence. They appeal to qualities, such as pathos, not now in critical fashion, but at the same time they seem extraordinarily contemporary in their special interest in women and feminist issues. The time is appropriate to recognise their importance in Chaucer's canon, for he is a religious poet as surely as he is a poet of comedy and secular love. These essays survey past criticism on the religious tales and offer new approaches.Contributors: C.DAVID BENSON, ELIZABETH ROBINSON, DEREK PEARSALL, BARBARA NOLAN, ROBERT WORTH FRANK, LINDA GEORGIANNA, CHARLOTTE C. MORSEA.S.G. EDWARDS, CAROLYN COLETTE, ELIZABETH D. KIRK, GEORGE R. KEISER, JANE COWGILL.

Chaucer's writings (the 'Canterbury Tales', lyrics and dream poems and Troilus) are here freshly examined in relation to the religions, the religious traditions and the religious controversies of his era.

Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras adopts a comparative, boundary-crossing approach to consider one of the most canonical of literary figures, Geoffrey Chaucer. The idea that Chaucer is an international writer raises no eyebrows. Similarly, a claim that Chaucer's writings participate in English confessional controversies in his own day and afterward provokes no surprise. This book breaks new ground by considering Chaucer's Continental interests as they inform his participation in religious debates concerning such subjects as female spirituality and Lollardy. Similarly, this project explores the little-studied ways in which those who took religious vows, especially nuns, engaged with works by Chaucer and in the Chaucerian tradition. Furthermore, while the early modern "Protestant Chaucer" is a familiar figure, this book explores the creation and circulation of an early modern "Catholic Chaucer" that has not received much attention. This study seeks to fill gaps in Chaucer scholarship by situating Chaucer and the Chaucerian tradition in an international textual environment of religious controversy spanning four centuries and crossing both the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean. This book presents a nuanced analysis of the high stakes religiopolitical struggle inherent in the creation of the canon of English literature, a struggle that participates in the complex processes of national identity formation in Europe and the New World alike.

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is a discourse of desire. Beyond the many pilgrims' stories taking desire as their topic, Elizabeth Scala argues that desire operates in structurally significant ways found in the signifying chains that link the tales to each other. Desire in the Canterbury Tales coordinates the compulsions of desire with the act of misreading to define the driving force of Chaucer's story collection. With Chaucer's competitive pilgrimage as an important point of departure, this study examines the collection's manner of generating stories out of division, difference, and contestation. It argues that Chaucer's tales are produced as misreadings and misrecognitions of each other. Looking to the main predicate of the General Prologue's famous opening sentence ("longen") as well as the thematic concerns of a number of tale-tellers, and working with a theoretical model that exposes language as the product of such longing, Scala posits desire as the very subject of the Canterbury Tales and misrecognition as its productive effect. In chapters focusing on both the well-discussed tales of fragment 1 and the marriage group as well as the more recalcitrant religious stories, Desire in the Canterbury Tales offers a comprehensive means of accounting for Chaucer's poem.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE TED HUGHES PRIZE 2015 Tabard Inn to Canterb'ry Cathedral, Poet pilgrims competing for free picks, Chaucer Tales, track by track, it's the remix From below-the-belt base to the topnotch; I won't stop all the clocks with a stopwatch when the tales overrun, run offensive, or run clean out of steam, they're authentic and we're keeping it real, reminisce this: Chaucer Tales were an unfinished business. In Telling Tales award-winning poet Patience Agbabi presents an inspired 21st-Century remix of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales retelling all of the stories, from the Miller's Tale to the Wife of Bath's in her own critically acclaimed poetic style. Celebrating Chaucer's Middle-English masterwork for its performance element as well as its poetry and pilgrims, Agbabi's newest collection is utterly unique. Boisterous, funky, foul-mouthed, sublimely lyrical and bursting at the seams, Telling Tales takes one of Britain's most significant works of literature and gives it thrilling new life.

"As the psalms are a microcosm of the Old Testament, so the Expositions of the Psalms can be seen as a microcosm of Augustinian thought. In the Book of Psalms are to be found the history of the people of Israel, the theology and spirituality of the Old Covenant, and a treasury of human experience expressed in prayer and poetry. So too does the work of expounding the psalms recapitulate and focus the experiences of Augustine's personal life, his theological reflections and his pastoral concerns as Bishop of Hippo."--Publisher's website.