Throughout his work, Geoffrey Chaucer often returns to a well-known medieval commonplace: that “words” should be “cosyn” to the “deeds” they denote. After tracing the history of this commonplace and noting its prominence in fourteenth-century legal, philosophical, and literary discourse, this chapter turns to Chaucer’s use of the dictum in his Canterbury Tales. I argue that the Tales may be read as Chaucer’s free exploration of the different kinds of deeds, or matters, to which a poet’s words might be held “cosyn.” Different pilgrims take different positions on this question throughout the Tales, and this accounts, in part, for the variety of matter and styles employed in their narratives. This variety notwithstanding, I suggest the Tales ultimately posit that the proper “deed” of literature is historical in character. Chaucer comes to this insight over the course of Fragment Seven, and he makes his boldest claim for it in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, which suggests that poetry always retains the marks of the history that has produced its words and forms—no matter how autonomous or fictional that poetry may appear.

Focusing on the Middle English poem, Pearl (with evidence from other literary works), this essay considers how the initial situation of the Dreamer explores a half-dozen principles for literary invention that are distinctively medieval, including personal displacement and feelings of anxiety, bewilderment and marvelling. These qualities define the initial state of mind which enables the Dreamer’s visions to occur and develop. Aristotle wrote in his Metaphysics (I. 2) that philosophising begins with wondering and questioning, a principle revered throughout the Middle Ages. Though all these elements of what we now call ‘creativity’ have their roots in practices of invention and argumentation described in ancient philosophy and rhetoric, the particular shapes that these classical principles assume by the late Middle Ages derive from long-established traditions of monastic meditation and contemplative envisioning more than from academic rhetoric and logic. Bonaventure’s opening to his Itinerarium mentis ad Deum recounts the marvel of Francis of Assisi’s seraphic vision, adapting it as a general method for meditation; Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale turns the marvels of the flying horse and visionary mirror into problems in optics and engineering. Pearl turns the dreamer’s initial wondering within a brilliant fantasy to the means for understanding his own human condition.

Chaucer efficiently mimics northern English dialect in the Reeve’s Tale, and critics tend to see these imitations as attempts by the poet at linguistic realism or comedy, but Chaucer uses the North of England as setting in four of the eight stories from the Canterbury Tales that arguably take place on English soil. Chaucer does not view the North simply as a cultural “other”; he knew the region well through his own travels and through the many political relationships he maintained during his career as a bureaucrat. Chapter 4 argues, then, that while Chaucer engages base northern stereotypes at the surface of the Reeve’s Tale, this engagement betrays a more pronounced northern consciousness in Chaucer’s work than critics have previously noticed. Critics are not wrong to discuss Chaucer as a European author, but, this chapter contends, we must also recognize him as an English poet who understood the complex negotiations of nation that were taking place in England in the late-fourteenth century.

Chapter 2 discusses the scribes’ handling of damage and irregularity in parchment in manuscripts of English literature. It sets out how damage and irregularity arose and describes the methods scribes used to repair or counteract those features of parchment. From these methods, the author infers that scribes ignored and even obscured the organic oddity and damage in parchment, instead hylomorphically pursuing an idea of the page more perfect and more rectilinear than was the matter on which they imposed it, and in some cases worried about disruptions to the text’s appearance and reception. Rather than engage with the agency of their materials, they imposed on them immaterial ideas about the book and the use of its texts.

Chapter 5 examines the annotations by scribes and marginalia by readers in manuscripts of the poems of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Lydgate. A quantitative survey of the treatment of margins shows that, although poets planned elaborate paratexts for their works, scribes and readers seldom used the page for annotation or marginalia. From this survey the author deduces that scribes and readers in the fifteenth century were more interested in reading the poem continuously and for kinds of reading aloud or for pleasure, in ways that do not lend themselves to written record in margins. The poem lives in an immaterial dimension of cognition and feeling, beyond what appears on the material page.

Chapter 4 considers the division of texts into pages and leaves in manuscripts in English poetry and prose in the fifteenth century. It suggests that this material format allowed scribes to fanfare their own craft process, when they decorated the division of the codex into pages for its own sake, as a mere convention without textual function. But it then argues that page breaks contributed little to the text itself. It notes other methods used by scribes to override the page breaks and argued that they were more interested in the continuity of the text and of the reading process beyond the literal limits of the page.

Chapter 6 considers the scribes’ copying of the text itself in the fifteenth century, especially in works by Thomas Hoccleve and Geoffrey Chaucer and spurious lines added to Chaucer’s poetry. It queries the assumption that scribes vary the text a lot, and in three quantitative samples it suggests that, despite the difficulties of transcription and the acceptability of revision, scribes could copy exemplars very closely. As a result, despite the material differences between books, what most distinguished them was verbal likeness. It suggests that this reproduction reflects an interest in the text’s survival as an immaterial, verbal artefact, partly out of respect for certain kinds of English poetry, and a disregard for its material form.

Examining literary texts alongside contemporary legal and epistolary evidence regarding understandings and uses of seashores, Chapter 2 explains how a number of romances complement their larger themes with a concentration on the seaside as a simultaneously inviting and threatening space whose multifaceted nature as a geographical, political, and social boundary embodies the complex range of meanings embedded in the Middle English concept of “play” – a word that these texts often link with the seashore. Beaches, too, serve as stages upon which the romances act out their anxieties over the consequences of human economic endeavor. In Sir Amadace, Emaré, Sir Eglamour of Artois, and the Constance romances of Chaucer and Gower, shipwrecks are configured as opportunities for financial gain for scavengers and as mortal peril for sailors. Moreover, the coupling of the beach with concepts of play emerges in numerous scenes wherein beach-walking characters create – both in jest and in earnest – new identities for themselves, in order to elude past enemies or mistakes. My analysis thus explains how seaside scenes embody anxieties about human relationships with natural and divine forces.

Chapter 5 returns to the question of the affordance and ductility of paper in Italian, Welsh and English literature. The use of paper in literary manuscripts is not just a question of production, but has implications for the reading of medieval literature itself. The interplay of Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde and his sources in their comments on the material properties of writing-supports is evidence of paper’s wider cultural acceptance, as well as literary ingenuity. In the light of the foregoing chapters’ exploration of paper books as precisely defined and individually distinctive objects, with very specific properties and effects, this chapter explores the fascinating relationship between the material aspect of book production and the literary world of medieval authors to offer nuanced readings of their works.

Rather than a possible resolution to the “Marriage Debate,” Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale is a meta-critical poem designed to challenge his readers’ critical acumen and to assist in refining their interpretative skills. One element in the Tale’s instructive program is Aurelius’s little-noticed yet symptomatic love-wound, his sursanure. Outlining and then deploying the techniques of “symptomatic” literary criticism, this essay concentrates on five symptomatic modalities in the Tale—“parataxis,” “surface,” “intention,” “radical cure,” and “dehiscence.” While many readers share an unqualified admiration for the Franklin’s romance, the approach of this study argues for the necessity of reading the Tale symptomatically and “against the grain”—that is, closely, aggressively, unsentimentally, and counter-romantically.

Drawing on both Statius’s Thebaid and Boccaccio’s Teseida, TheKnight’s Tale uncomfortably sutures the horrors of epic tragedy to the idealism of chivalric romance, inflecting both with the philosophical ambitions of Boethius’s Consolation. This chapter traces the modern engagement with the tale as a history of attempts to understand the tensions produced by its multiple sources, genres, and rhetorical registers, and explores how accounts of its form inflect and are inflected by accounts of its politics. Politics here, as in other Canterbury Tales, is as much a matter of gender and sexuality as it is of class, rule, and social order. Moreover, the problems posed by aesthetic and political form become problems of how to understand the relations among the text, its pilgrim narrator, and the author. Beginning with the high formalist moment of postwar criticism, the chapter follows the development of ideology critique and of feminist and psychoanalytic criticism, each of which remains attuned to earlier formalist questions. TheKnight’s Tale that emerges from this history is a text of great aesthetic ambition, whose aims are as much reflected in its incoherences as in its formalist impulses.

No Middle English writer takes up as many different moral genres as Chaucer; the Canterbury Tales explores saints’ Life, pastoral treatise, fürstenspiegel, de casibus tragedy, Marian miracle, and exemplum-style tales oriented toward civic, spiritual, and domestic uses. That his work, so often associated in modern criticism and in the contemporary classroom with a genially ironic outlook, also appears to correspond with late medieval tastes in serious and devotional reading has tended to present something of a problem. This chapter explores the ways in which critical disagreements about the significance of the moral and religious tales can be a proxy for questions about alterity, that is, the problem we inevitably face when we read the works of the past. What we think about “moral Chaucer” will often enough be a reflection of what we think about “medieval Chaucer” and about our relationship with a middle ages whose affective and aesthetic attractions very often exceed the ethical appeal of its devotional commitments and conventions.

Through its overarching frame story but also in the interplay among its diverse tales, the Canterbury Tales again and again troubles our sense of how endings work, promising resolutions that never quite materialize or are undercut as soon as they do. This feature of the Tales offers us the opportunity to consider endings less as a single narrative feature than as a set of persistent and varied problems related to composition, to language, to audience, and to poetry, as a way of considering the cadence of life itself. We follow Rosemarie McGerr in asserting that a certain kind of “irresolution” is a defining feature of the Chaucerian poetic, a poetic of openness and ambiguity, a consideration of the limits and problems of teleology for the poetic enterprise, for an audience of hearers, or for human living. The poet’s troubles with endings date from the start of his career, with his earliest major poem, the Book of the Duchess, offering a particularly useful example, and they extend past the poet’s own ending, as Chaucer’s fifteenth-century audience saw the Canterbury Tales both as an “open” text, ripe for additions, and as an “unfinished” text, a structure begging to be completed.

Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale, a version of the well-known tale of the cock and the fox, has been read as a Menippean parody of a spectrum of authors: various forms and kinds of knowledge, from proverbs to dream theory to poetics to anti-Pelagian theology, proffer a myriad of ways in which to read the world without cohering in the slightest with one another, or solving the immediate, practical problem faced by the cock and his hens: the threat of death at the hands of a creature that they have not yet directly encountered. This chapter suggests how modern readers of the tale might negotiate its formidable critical legacy and find their way to a fresh, unique encounter with a tale in which direct experience promises a means of liberation from the plethora of discourses in which narration is always in danger of becoming mired. In pursuing experience rather than authority, the chapter argues, we are following a trail that begins within the tale itself.

Griselda has always challenged the status of the human, even though critics have long sought to elucidate prized human characteristics through her behavior as wife, mother, and political subject. Despite these efforts, our moral investments in Griselda - quite literally, the ways we have sought to associate her with a host of social and moral prescriptions concerning subjectivity, femininity, maternity, and sovereignty - are confounded by her unyielding submission. Griselda is unfeeling, but she gains a horrible autonomy that critiques patriarchal tyranny. Griselda affirms women’s material investment in the household, but to do so she sacrifices all ethical bonds outside those mandated by her pre-marital pact with Walter. Griselda is transcendent, but she is alienated from a common humanity, much less Christianity. This chapter argues that Griselda is not an inhuman monster; rather, through The Clerk’s Tale, Chaucer imagines a different view of humanity, one engendered according to modes of virtue typically associated with women, including patience, pity, humility, steadfastness, and submission.

The Prioress’s Tale, one of only three Canterbury Tales assigned to a female narrator, raises a number of questions related to gender and especially female devotion. But the central question has long been how to grapple with the explicitly antisemitic story she tells, and whether the antisemitism of the tale “belongs” to Chaucer, or, alternatively, to the tale-teller, whom Chaucer treats at least somewhat satirically in his portrait of her in the General Prologue. This chapter puts to one side the ultimately unanswerable question of whether Chaucer himself is or is not antisemitic, instead focusing on how the tale’s antisemitism is structured. The story, analogous to a number of Miracles of the Virgin that circulated widely in England and Europe, deploys several anti-Jewish tropes - concerned with the body and materiality, voice and spirit, spatiality, and temporality - to develop a simultaneous celebration of Christianity and denigration of Judaism. In analyzing the “economy” of antisemitism within the tale, we can begin to understand how powerfully attractive such constructions might be at the same time that we come to understand more fully how to confront and dismantle them.

Secondary school teachers are a natural constituency for expanding the reach of Chaucer Studies, and there are nnunmerous mechanisms, models, and resources already in place to help us reach them