“PSU Press is thrilled to welcome Megan Murton and Leah Schwebel as coeditors of the Chaucer Review — and grateful for the outstanding impact that [previous editors] Susanna Fein and David Raybin have made on the journal during their years at the helm," said Julie Lambert, journals manager at Penn State University Press. "Megan and Leah demonstrate a strong commitment to the journal and to championing the Chaucerian scholarship community. We are excited to see the Chaucer Review enter a new phase of editorship and confident that Megan and Leah will continue the legacy of the journal while also pushing new boundaries, inviting fresh voices, and supporting innovative scholarship that will continue to shape our understanding of Chaucer well into the future,”

Founded in 1966, the Chaucer Review publishes studies of language, sources, social and political contexts, aesthetics, and associated meanings of Chaucer’s poetry as well as articles on medieval literature, philosophy, theology, and mythography relevant to the study of the poet and his contemporaries, predecessors, and audiences. It acts as a forum for the presentation and discussion of research and concepts about Chaucer and the literature of the Middle Ages.

Eduardo De Oliveira Correia, on behalf of the committee of the London Society for Medieval Studies

Abstract:

In a medieval debt bond—a contractual document which legally records a loan—the debtor will typically “bind (obligari)” themselves and their “heirs (heredes)” to the creditor. This “binding” was not just figurative. In the late Middle Ages, incarceration for debt rose at an exponential rate, transforming the debtor’s body, along with that of his heirs, into the creditor’s property upon default. While scholars of pre-modern debt have become increasingly interested in these consequences of forfeiture for the principal debtor, few have discussed their effects for the debtor’s heirs. Yet representations of bound heirs appear across varying genres of medieval literature, from the “spendthrift knight” in Sir Amadace who placed his wife and child in thralldom to his creditor, to the son in the mercantile lyric The Childe of Bristow who sold “[his] own body” to repay his father’s debts, to the penitential handbooks that define the Fall as a usurious debt bond between Eve and Satan which bound Adam’s entire progeny as collateral. In this paper, I highlight these bound bodies in hereditary debt as sites for writers to examine the fluidity of personhood and property for individuals bound within lineal responsibilities. What is more, I argue that this fluidity not only critiques the injustices of debt exploitation in this period of rapid consumerism but also advances the necessity of communal debt-bearing, offering readers an ethic of paying what others cannot.

In this paper, I shall argue that Geoffrey Chaucer, in one of his most problematic tales, The Clerk’s Tale, affirms the radical power of the will in terms consonant with the urgent debates about the nature of the will taking place among late medieval philosophers known as voluntarists. The tale’s heroine, Griselda, I argue, embodies that aspect of voluntarist thought that affirms the will as the source of freedom, the locus of moral responsibility, and the origin of autonomous personhood. When we acknowledge the role the voluntarist affirmation of the primacy of the will plays in Griselda’s behavior, we can see that the power in the tale resides not with the domestic tyrant, Walter, but rather with Griselda, a peasant, who, like the Virgin Mary with whom she is compared, repeatedly manifests the efficacious, though ineffable, power of her adherence to her own will. Drawing on voluntarist ideas about the will, Chaucer transforms the apparently pitiable and victimized heroine of his Petrarchan source from a Christian heroine who demonstrates exemplary patience into a fully discerning subject, that is, in Paul Smith’s understanding of the word discernment, a resistant subject who has the power to unravel tyranny in the secular sphere. Considering the tale within a voluntarist context, I suggest, can help correct a major critical misapprehension of Griselda as admirably enduring though powerless and morally suspect, showing her instead to be an influential, discerning moral agent.

‘Geoffrey Chaucer’s charming and trenchant A Parlement of Foules contains the first reference to St. Valentine as patron saint of lovers. The 14th-century poet’s vision of avian politics will be interspersed with bracing and intricate music of his times from England and France, perfectly mirrored by the newly-composed music of composer Juri Seo.’

For tickets and details see here: https://www.folger.edu/whats-on/the-love-birds/

The Half-Acre Café

With hosts 

Danielle Allor (Haverford College) and Shannon Gayk (Indiana University)

December 15, 12-1 PM ET 

 Zoom

(https://haverford.zoom.us/j/93452664297?pwd=ZTlyaE9CVGsvM2hYZnN5SzhyTVdmdz09)

Question to be debated: 

"Is Piers Plowman an Environmentally-Friendly Poem?"

Scholars have often been interested in the status and representation of nature in Piers Plowman, but can we say that Piers is an “environmentally-friendly” poem? What kinds of ecologies and ecological attitudes does it represent? How does it imagine the relationship between human beings and the more-than-human world they inhabit? How do its major literary modes and devices (dream vision, allegory, satire, biblical and historical allusion) affect its treatment of ecological concerns? 

In our first Half-Acre Café, we will consider the ecological ethics and aesthetics of the poem by focusing on several key moments in the B-text: Reason’s Sermon (B.5.9-20), The Vision of Kynde (B.11.319-371), and The Sowing of the Virtues (B.19.255-319). No preparation is required for this discussion, but you may wish to consider the excerpts as well as a brief selection from Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s Allegories of the Anthropocene in advance if time allows.