Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras

Nancy Bradley Warren

Description

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.

Sujets

• Medieval
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Religión
• Edad Media
• Middle Ages
• Lollardy
• The Canterbury Tales
• Religion
• Geoffrey Chaucer
• Renaissance
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9780268105839
• Langue: English

Extrait

Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras
MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN
Series Editors: David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, and James Simpson
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CHAUCER and RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSIES in the MEDIEVAL and EARLY MODERN ERAS
NANCY BRADLEY WARREN
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
Copyright © 2019 by the University of Notre Dame
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Warren, Nancy Bradley, author.
Title: Chaucer and religious controversies in the medieval and early modern eras / Nancy Bradley Warren.
Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019003979 (print) | LCCN 2019006264 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268105846 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268105839 (epub) | ISBN 9780268105815 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268105812 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780268105822 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268105820 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Chaucer, Geoffrey, –1400—Appreciation—History. | Chaucer, Geoffrey, –1400—Influence. | Religion and literature.
Classification: LCC PR1914 (ebook) | LCC PR1914 . W37 2019 (print) | DDC 821/.1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019003979
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
For Paul Strohm and in memory of Emerson Brown The teachers who gave me my love of Chaucer
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 Female Spirituality and Religious Controversy in The Canterbury Tales
CHAPTER 2 Chaucer, the Chaucerian Tradition, and Female Monastic Readers
CHAPTER 3 Competing Chaucers: The Development of Religious Traditions of Reception
CHAPTER 4 “Let Chaucer Also Look to Himself”: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Canon Formation in Seventeenth-Century England
CHAPTER 5 “Flying from the Depravities of Europe , to the American Strand ”: Chaucer and the Chaucerian Tradition in Early America
Notes
Index
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FIGURE 1 . Frontispiece to Dryden’s Fables Ancient and Modern (Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin shelfmark PR 3418 F3 1713; used by permission; photograph by Aaron Pratt)
FIGURE 2 . Workshop of Robert Campin, Mérode Altarpiece (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; image and permission courtesy of Art Resource)
FIGURE 3 . Rogier van der Weyden, Annunciation Triptych Central Panel (The Louvre, Paris; image and permission courtesy of Art Resource)
FIGURE 4 . Peter Paul Rubens, Annunciation (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; image and permission courtesy of Art Resource)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As is the case for nearly everything I write, this book is the product of collaboration and conversation, and I am grateful to the many interlocutors who made it possible. Though it took me many years to feel comfortable writing about Chaucer, my love of Chaucer goes back to my earliest student days at Vanderbilt University, where I had the good fortune to take a Chaucer class with the late Emerson Brown in my very first semester. That class put me on the road to becoming a medievalist, and Emerson eventually steered me to Indiana University for my graduate study. There I had the opportunity to engage in further study of Chaucer, and so much else, with Paul Strohm. It is to these two wonderful teachers that this book is dedicated.
I began this book while I was a faculty member at Florida State University, and I must express my appreciation to the wonderful medievalist and early modernist colleagues with whom I shared my time there. They read, listened to, and commented on many early versions of material that became chapters of this project. Elaine Treharne, David Johnson, and Anne Coldiron were all especially generous, and the support of my then department chair Ralph Berry was invaluable. I also owe a particular debt to my early Americanist Florida State colleagues Dennis Moore and Joe McElrath, who guided my first forays into quite unfamiliar scholarly territory.
I wrote much of this book after I moved to Texas A&M to serve as department head. Having colleagues with whom I could be a scholar and not just an administrator did much to make administration more enjoyable and helped me refine my ideas. The Glasscock Humanities Center Medieval Studies Working Group has been a scholarly haven throughout my time at A&M. Particular thanks to Bob Boenig (who was also an excellent associate department head during part of my term), Larry Mitchell, Britt Mize, and Jennifer Wollock, all stalwart members of the Working Group and providers of excellent suggestions and excellent fellowship. Other colleagues at A&M also did a great deal to help me advance this project. Hilaire Kallendorf and Craig Kallendorf are both treasured friends and seemingly boundless intellectual resources, and Dennis Berthold, whom I knew as the soul of kindness from my first day as department head when he surprised me by taking me to lunch, was also a generous mentor in all things early American.
In my time in Texas I have also had the good fortune to get to know my “Texas Medievalist Crew.” Tom Hanks, Andrew Kraebel, Susan Signe Morrison, Liz Scala, Leah Schwebel, and Barbara Zimbalist have been particularly fine conversationalists; I appreciate the invitations to share my work with helpful audiences at their institutions as well as the many good times and good meals. Other colleagues across the country, and indeed across the globe, have also done much to support my work on this project. As always, thanks are due to David Wallace, mentor, friend, and extraordinary reader of my work. Lynn Staley, too, provided, as she has so many times before, insights and encouragement. Bob Yeager did much to help me refine my thoughts on the early modern Catholic tradition of Chaucer reception, as did Michael Kuczynski. I so appreciate Diane Watt’s having included me as a network partner in her Leverhulme Foundation–funded Women’s Literary Culture and the Medieval Literary Canon project. The three meetings of that group, at Chawton House, Boston University, and University of Bergen, were invaluable scholarly communities that contributed much to this book’s development. I greatly value all the friends I made through being part of that project; special thanks are due, though, to Laura Saetveit Miles and Sue Niebrzydowski for their conversations and contributions. My dear Judy Alexander, Tim Collier, and Amanda Alford McNeil listened to me chatter about Chaucer, nuns, and other things medieval and early modern through more than one marathon training season; they and all the members of Cypress Running Club are largely responsible for the preservation of my sanity! Possibly the latest adopter of social media one might find, I finally entered the world of Facebook in the course of writing this project. So, I want to thank all the old friends with whom I reconnected, and the new friends I made virtually, who have encouraged and supported me in that community as I posted both triumphantly and despairingly about the progress of this project.
Some parts of my discussion of the Prioress’s Prologue and Tale appeared in different form as “Sacraments, Gender, and Authority in the Prioress’s Prologue and Tale and Pearl ,” Christianity and Literature 66, no. 3 (2016): 85–403, copyright © 2016 SAGE Publications. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications. An earlier version of part of chapter 2 appeared as “Cha