In the Man of Law’s Tale the Sultaness of Syria worries over her son’s impending marriage to the Christian daughter of the emperor of Rome. At the prospect of converting to Christianity, the Sultaness exclaims to her council of conspirators:
As I finish writing this post, America stands on the brink of a new era, one that appears poised to revive a monolithic concept of what America and Americans should look and sound like. The implications of this have not been lost on the medieval studies community. In December, Sierra Lomuto wrote an entry for …
Medievalists who use rare books and manuscripts in their research will remember the first time they stepped into a magnificent reading room—the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge, say, or, before the opening of the Weston Library, Bodley’s Duke Humfrey’s Library. The romance of working in such environments, combined with the intellectual pleasures of …
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We have long acknowledged the formative role of desire when reading literary texts. Readers never come to texts without their desires—what appear more neutrally in the form of “expectations”—some of which may be completely unrelated to the actual text at hand. But it’s not as if these excessive desires can be done without. For …
A little over a year ago the MLA Leadership raised the desirability of consolidating the MLA Division on Chaucer with two other MLA Divisions, those on Old and Middle English. Facebook was abuzz. Most of us considered this to be among the worst of recent institutional ideas, which, given the ongoing assaults on the …
Not long ago, in the context of a book on medievalism, I confidently pronounced that in Anglophone culture the novel in its highbrow canonical guise just didn’t work with medieval settings. I was looking back to the 1840s, when Edward Bulwer Lytton seemed the obvious heir to the Walter Scott of Ivanhoe (1819) and Quentin Durward (1823), perhaps …
In his blog post of August 7, 2012 on In the Middle, entitled “Curiosity, Mars/Venus, and Chaucer,” Jonathan Hsy discusses how a medieval understanding of curiosity helps us to think about the art of translation, as well as the role of curiosity and wonder in scholarship and the classroom more generally. I want to …
One evening the model Kate Moss appeared on my television, looked directly at me, and asked if I was “ready for the Apocalips [sic]?”. This appeal turned out to be an advert for a lipstick, a lipstick so chromatically superlative, its strapline claims, that it portends “the end of lip colour as you know it.” …
I’d like to pick up on the keyword used by Jonathan Hsy in his retrospective blog on the Third International Congress of the John Gower Society, posted on “In the Middle” (July 9, 2014), and apply it to the experience of moving from the Gower conference in Rochester, N.Y., which ended on July 3, 2014, …
The entries in this blog so far have been exemplary in asking fundamental questions about Chaucer, concerning the fragmentary structure of the Canterbury Tales and how, if at all, we can locate Chaucer’s voice in that polycephalic text. I want to ask another fundamental question, one so basic I’m worried I don’t have anything interesting to say …
