In the later nineteenth century, British scholars were ambivalent about their nation’s state as part of Europe, but they were certain that it had participated in one of the staging-posts of European civilization’s history, the Renaissance. In the early modern period, something closer to the opposite was the case. Those earlier authors did not have recourse to the term ‘Renaissance’ and they talked more specifically of a revival of good letters, meaning being able to write Latin and Greek as the best ancient authors did; to those studies they also added knowledge of Hebrew. In Italy, this revival was sometimes seen as a local phenomenon, which they had to export to the rest of Europe, including far-off Britons. In England in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, John Leland constructed a different vision in which compatriots from the preceding hundred years were instrumental in the revival’s success. There were, then, competing models, one of centre and periphery, another of collaboration diffused across Europe. Both these models, however, came under extreme strain when faced with the divisions created by the Reformation.

Like Europe, the Mediterranean is a British imaginary and a geographical reality. The term ’Mediterranean’ signifies the narrative of cultural origin and the history of maritime trade, militarism, and diplomacy. The chapter begins with an account of a neoclassical rotunda in Ickworth House, Suffolk, which exemplifies the interfused, recursive narratives and traditions which constitute Greco-Roman antiquity, before tracing those traditions across the medieval Troy narrative and the Romantic response to the Elgin Marbles. The theme tying the cases together, as a means of traversing the immense distances between the Homeric epics and the ongoing debate over the Parthenon sculptures, is the metonymic relationship between totality and fragmentation, which Keats calls ‘the shadow of a magnitude’. The fragment triggers the imaginative reconstruction of the whole, and, by claim of cultural heritage, informs the ambition to possess the whole. The emphasis on the dialectic of unity/fragmentation confirms the narrative of a shared, antique, Mediterranean monoculture to be riven with competing, contested or colonial histories – as expressed by the cultural patchwork of the Ickworth rotunda.

Before Chaucer became ‘the Father of English Poetry’, the French poet Eustace Deschamps had called him ’Grant translateur’. In fact, Chaucer was the fons et origo of the English poetic tradition precisely because he was the Great Translator, because the history of English literature is also the history of European translation. Beginning with the medieval practice of translatio, whereby source and commentary fused into the new work, this chapter charts the contested views of translation from primary mode of making, to secondary exercise, back to primary production as literary translation reaffirms its centrality to the literary polysystem. It also traces the rise of the professional translator, the evolution of the literary translator, and translation studies as a discipline predicated on the development of translation theory. While Dryden in the seventeenth century could draw crucial distinctions between modes of translation, the development of translation as a formal and theorized practice (exemplified by Schleiermacher in early nineteenth-century Germany) could not be disassociated from the efflorescence of national literatures, pace Goethe, the Romantics, and George Eliot.

This chapter focuses on the literary debates provoked by the appearance of mechanical clocks – and “clockworks” more generally – in medieval England. Invented in China in the eighth century, the first European mechanical clocks were manufactured in the early fourteenth century. The contemporaneous literary record shows that clocks did not immediately impose a secular conception of time that regulated human life; instead, the population of medieval Christian Europe continued to reckon time through cycles of light and dark and according to the liturgical calendar. Drawing on readings of Christine de Pizan, Philippe de Mézières, Jean Froissart, and Geoffrey Chaucer, Lightsey argues that clocks were primarily received in the time of their invention as mechanical wonders, and primarily employed as displays of wealth.

With his ‘imaginary portraits’, Pater developed a hybrid genre blending biography with travel writing, fiction, and criticism. The cross-pollination between Pater’s fiction and his essays remained strong throughout his career. This chapter explores how Pater employed the genre to engage with both English and French critics (Arnold, Newman, Sainte-Beuve) in the debates about the relations between reading, writing, the individual, and the nation through a series of character sketches. Seen in the light of an unfinished manuscript for a lecture on English literature, Pater’s early imaginary portraits raise questions of periodisation, of how far back the beginnings of English literature could be traced, while essentially questioning its Englishness. Stressing the significance of medieval rather than Elizabethan literature in the formation of a national canon, Pater selected Chaucer as the proclaimed father of English literature, thus selecting a writer with a profound European background, whose character sketches in The Canterbury Tales in some respects became precursors of Pater’s own studies of the individual.

This essay focuses on the two most influential English authors of the later medieval period, Geoffrey Chaucer and his contemporary, John Gower, to analyse the roles of women within their corpus, both as subjects and as extra-textual readers. Bridges asks what femininity enables in their works and how ߝ and what ߝwomen mean, emphasising the embeddedness of both writers in long-established and international textual cultures. Central to her analysis is the notion of a hermeneutic that constructs women and femininity in ethical terms, as bound up with notions of vice and virtue. The essay explores questions of voice, agency, and genre across Chaucerߣs works to demonstrate the intimate connection of femininity with questions of reading and interpretation. For Gower too, ethics are shown to be a central focus, and treatments of femininity open onto moral and political debates. Differing presentations of women treated in common by Chaucer and Gower illuminate their ideological priorities and contrasting practices of poetic translatio studii. For both, womenߣs presence proves a complex, powerful, but often ambiguous textual phenomenon.

This chapter demonstrates the seriousness and the versatility of the romance genre in the hands of two important late medieval English writers. Examples from the writings of fourteenth-century poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, and fifteenth-century translator and editor, Thomas Malory, reveal romance to be a fictionalizing genre capable of probing serious matters of broad political, social, ethical, or aesthetic concern. The range and versatility of the genre, moreover, offered these writers crucial opportunities for creative and editorial experimentation.

This chapter asks where and how Rome (and, by extension, polemics self-consciously characterized as reactions against Rome) figures in efforts to determine what the living owe to the dead, and what the dead can do for the living. Latin occupies a controlling position within this inquiry; so, too, do texts that cast the world of the living as the home of the dead; so, finally, do Reformation-era debates about the soteriological stakes of praying for the dead. These topics span a period of time in which Rome is the gravitational centre of a sequence of massive upheavals in vernacular piety and attendant debates about the relationship between the living and the dead. The chapter argues that interpreting these debates as facets of the fact of Rome alerts us to the role that the human voice plays in probing the limits of mortality and the nature of the human as such.

This chapter assesses the linguistic evidence of politeness in medieval Britain. The written sources are scarce, especially for the Anglo-Saxon period. An analysis of relevant lexical items suggests that in Old English, politeness in the modern sense did not play a significant role. Discernment politeness (i.e. the appropriateness of behaviour in given situations) was more important in a strictly hierarchical society, and in religious contexts there is evidence of a politeness of humility and gentleness. The influence of French on Middle English brought new concepts, in particular the concept of courtesy. Detailed case studies of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and of the anonymous poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight show how this concept reflects a new type of courtly politeness.

This chapter investigates the use of nominal and pronominal terms of address in Middle English. Under the influence of French, Middle English adopted the distinction between two different pronouns of address for a single addressee: ye and thou. The chapter presents detailed case studies of selected tales of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (the Wife of Bath’s Tale, the Miller’s Tale and the Friar’s Tale) and of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The characters in these sources are shown to use a complex system that is highly responsive to their interactional status, including not only their social relationships but also temporary shifts of conversational power within an interaction. Nominal terms of address are shown to be equally sensitive interpersonal devices that reflect the interactive behaviour between the characters and their social class distinctions.

This chapter surveys food and food practices in a variety of medieval texts, including Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Havelok, and the mystic visions of Julian of Norwich, as well as recent scholarship in the field of medieval food studies. It argues that literary depictions of medieval eating, feasting, and mealtime decorum offer us crucial, if often overlooked, commentaries on political power and social pretensions as well as religious practice and hypocrisy, while also revealing key aspects of medieval food culture otherwise glossed over or omitted in culinary texts from the time, including the centrality of meat carving and the multi-sensory scale of medieval banquets.

This essay argues that an examination of Chaucer’s work reveals his indebtedness to the tradition of literary dialogue, understood as a work constructed in the form of an exchange between two or more persons, with characteristic concerns centred on questions of ethics, politics and religion. Critical to the form is its explicit engagement with different argumentative positions; a dialogue text may then, as in the Socratic tradition, leave the reader with a concluding aporia, or, as in Aquinas’ Summa, provide a resolution. After briefly reviewing the use of the dialogue form in classical and Late Antique writing, the essay goes on to explore the significant influence of dialogue in a number of Chaucer’s works, including The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls and the Tale of Melibee, and argues that he is fully alive to the potentialities of the form for encouraging and indeed demanding readerly engagement.

Chaucer’s life, from birth as a vintner’s son in the 1340s to burial in Westminster Abbey in 1400, is visible not from literary genius but from his roles as civil servant and diplomat in a period of expanding bureaucracy.His intellectual range and ambitions were unusual for a layman, not only in Latin texts but also astronomy and French and Italian literature, amid other ‘literacies’ suitable for a tangential member of the courtly world.His associations, marriage, and release from a charge of rape can only be dimly and partly discerned.Clearer but still mysterious is his commitment to writing literature only in English, at a time when that lacked nationally identifying authority.Amid the several languages mingled around him in poetry and life, Chaucer’s literary monolinguism may not be simply social positioning but an aesthetic constraint, forcing innovation under formal limits as he did in other ways in poetry.

This is not a collection of essays on Chaucer in the normal sense. Neither is it a ‘Companion’ or ‘Guide’ or ‘Handbook’ to Chaucer. It does not have the primary intention of providing readings of the texts of Chaucer (even though it contains much illuminating treatment of his works). It endeavours to be more lastingly helpful than that. Its key aim is to enhance the independence and critical capacities of modern readers of Chaucer by giving them a rich repertoire of contexts – historical and conceptual information and perspectives – through which to read, interpret and enjoy the primary text themselves with greater confidence and assurance.

Readers of Chaucer’s poetry hear in it a distinctive and individual voice. More than any other medieval English poet, Chaucer seems to invite the question ‘what was he like?’. The many official records about him have no occasion to shed light on this question. Though Thomas Hoccleve arranged that a lifelike portrait of his dear master should appear in copies of his Regiment, this does not carry us too far into knowing what the poet was really like. Chaucer, for example, despite apparently always saying the best, seemed to have reserved his true opinions, leaving both contemporaries and readers alike to wonder what he really thought – be it about fellow-writers like Hoccleve and Lydgate, or Criseyde, or about his fictional Merchant. Moreover, not only does he persistently credit others with the best that can be said of them, he also discredits himself. It is perhaps appropriate, then, that the ironic Chaucer should represent himself as a reserved and private sort of person – one conceivably well equipped to cope with the many vicissitudes of his time, as the poet evidently did.

Readers of Chaucer’s poetry hear in it a distinctive and individual voice. More than any other medieval English poet, Chaucer seems to invite the question ‘what was he like?’. The many official records about him have no occasion to shed light on this question. Though Thomas Hoccleve arranged that a lifelike portrait of his dear master should appear in copies of his Regiment, this does not carry us too far into knowing what the poet was really like. Chaucer, for example, despite apparently always saying the best, seemed to have reserved his true opinions, leaving both contemporaries and readers alike to wonder what he really thought – be it about fellow-writers like Hoccleve and Lydgate, or Criseyde, or about his fictional Merchant. Moreover, not only does he persistently credit others with the best that can be said of them, he also discredits himself. It is perhaps appropriate, then, that the ironic Chaucer should represent himself as a reserved and private sort of person – one conceivably well equipped to cope with the many vicissitudes of his time, as the poet evidently did.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.