Reference: Approaching Medieval Texts

What Does It Mean to Read a Medieval Text?

Prompts for New “Pilgrims”  

A reference chapter from The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales (September 2017)

Curated by Moira Fitzgibbons (Moira.Fitzgibbons@marist.edu)

Welcome to our compaignye of readers! We might begin by acknowledging that it is no easy task to define reading practices in our own age. Many scholars use the term “multimodal” when describing literacy in the 21st century. The emergence of digital culture, along with the continued production of printed resources, means that a typical day can involve our posting, texting, watching, viewing, commenting, and sharing in a wide variety of formats. Each situation requires us to make nuanced rhetorical decisions, whether we are pondering the most professional way to close an email or the best emoji for conveying sarcasm.

In many respects, medieval culture was multimodal as well. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was not simply a verbal text to be perused in silence by individual readers. Many audiences may have encountered the Tales by hearing them recited among a group of listeners.[1] Some versions, such as the illustrated Ellesmere Manuscript, contain images that provide a complement and counterpoint to the written text. In other manuscript contexts, the Tales take their place alongside other works bound together into one compilation. The decisions made by illustrators, compilers, adaptors, and speakers meant that there was no one way to understand the Tales, even in Chaucer’s own time and place.[2]

If the fictional spaces Chaucer created are any indication, then he seems to have embraced this rich variety of literate practices and meanings. His writers and tale-tellers not only draw freely from their own dreams, memories, and beliefs, but also place their ideas in dialogue with paintings, poems, sermons, and the speakers and listeners right in front of them. Chaucer’s work makes it impossible for us to regard his tellers as separate from the texts they have read, the tales they have heard, or the images they have seen.

In keeping with this aspect of the Tales and other medieval texts, the contributors below describe how reading the literature of the period engages them emotionally, intellectually, and imaginatively. The vignettes are organized into three categories of reading experience: 1) visual narratives; 2) unexpected affinities; and 3) creative performances. At the outset of each section is a brief analysis of how the topic in question emerges within works written by Chaucer or other medieval writers. Each portion concludes with a brief list of suggested sources for further exploration of the three topics. These categories are, of course, far from exhaustive. To get a sense of just how widely medieval studies ranges in its responses to the Tales and other works, you might explore this Companion’s chapters; explore the “Resources” section of the New Chaucer Society website; investigate the wide range of sources gathered on the Global Chaucers archive and community; or scan the program for the most recent International Congress on Medieval Studies held each year at Western Michigan University. Amid this plenitude of information, the collection of perspectives in this chapter could provide useful touchstones for your own investigations into Chaucer and medieval literature.

Part One: Visual Narratives

Yet saugh I Woodnesse [“Madness”], laughynge in his rage,
Armed Compleint, Outhees [Outcry], and fiers Outrage [Cruelty]…
The Knight’s Tale (2011-12)[3]

Chaucer’s speakers and readers frequently invoke visual information in their efforts to understand the world around them. Perhaps most famously, the narrator of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales introduces us to his fellow pilgrims by detailing the appearance of their clothing and bodies: who can forget, for example, its description of the Miller’s furnace-sized mouth or the hairy “werte” atop his nose (555)? Even as he invokes these details, however, Chaucer makes clear that the sense of sight cannot be regarded as neutral or trustworthy. At the end of the Merchant’s Tale, for example, Januarie regains his eyesight but is persuaded to disregard the evidence of his young wife’s adultery. For his part, in the epigraph above, the Knight blurs the boundary between artifice and memory: his blunt listing of atrocities depicted on a fictional temple wall may also reflect horrors that he witnessed personally during his long career as a soldier.

The contributors to our first section evoke sight in similarly complex ways. New images or designs in Chaucer’s work or even in a piece of embroidered cloth can powerfully reframe the way we perceive ourselves and our surroundings. What kinds of new perspectives might you gain on our own world by temporarily taking on a Canterbury Tale-teller’s point of view?

Chaucer’s Earth and NASA’s Space Photography

by Susan Crane (susan.crane@columbia.edu)

What connection could Chaucer possibly have to our own environmental moment? At first glance, it seems that Chaucer’s poetry could only tell us about a long-lost earth that has radically changed. The earth that now seems depleted, fragile, and at risk, back then seemed dense and vast, stretching well beyond human reach. Today, we feel ourselves to be facing an unprecedented environmental crisis. Our responses to the earth also feel unprecedented to us. Environmental writing today is calling for a new “posthuman” consciousness that deeply values the more-than-human world.[4]

Despite the differences that separate Chaucer’s fourteenth century from ours, I found that Chaucer sends us a signal of his attentiveness to the earth right at the beginning of his Parliament of Fowls. In a lucky coincidence, I was reading about the first years of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s just as I was also reading Chaucer’s Parliament. For the environmental movement, one early inspiration was space photography: how the earth looked from far away. The Parliament of Fowls begins from a similar viewpoint.

Celestial spheres, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1522, fol. 25r (English, c. 1350). By permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.

Chaucer’s narrator recounts the Dream of Scipio, in which Scipio’s ancestor Africanus came to him in a dream and lifted him up to “a sterry place. . . Thanne shewede he hym the lytil erthe that here is, / At regard of the hevenes quantite [“so little in comparison with the hugeness of the heavens”]” (43, 57-8).

Apollo 17 photograph, December 7, 1972. Courtesy of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Photo no. AS17-148-22727.

The photos from NASA’s Apollo missions between 1968 and 1972 gave our contemporaries their first look at a “little earth,” widely dubbed “the blue marble,” afloat in vast space. The Apollo program was designed to lead outward, to the moon and beyond, but it also turned back to look at earth from far away.

These two perspectives from above—from Scipio’s eighth sphere and from Apollo’s moon orbit—gave rise to two very different ethical responses. In Scipio’s dream, the radical change of physical perspective urges us to turn away from earthly things:

Than bad he hym [“Africanus instructed him”], syn erthe was so lyte,
And dissevable and ful of harde grace,
That he ne shulde hym in the world delyte. (64-66)

Life on earth, says Africanus, is “but a maner deth”; life on earth should be directed toward winning a place in heaven (54, 73-77). In contrast, the Apollo missions, aimed up and away from earth, ironically launched a public movement of concern for earth’s finite, fragile materiality. The first of the Apollo photos, “Earthrise,” was “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken,” according to nature photographer Galen Rowell. It was an inspiration for the first international Earth Day in 1970. The astronaut who shot “earthrise” while orbiting the Moon, William Anders, later commented on this turn of events, “We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”

Apollo 8 photograph, December 24, 1968. Courtesy of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Photo no. AS8-14-2383.

Caring about the “little earth” goes against Africanus’s instruction to transcend earthly concerns. Chaucer’s narrator, however, aligns himself with the earth, rather than with transcendence, by refusing to join the celestial perspective of Africanus on “the litel erth that here is.” This wording locates Chaucer’s narrator down on earth, here and now. He could easily have joined the lofty perspective of Africanus by ending his line with “the litel erth below” or “the litel erth adoun.” Instead, Chaucer’s narrator differentiates his perspective from that of Africanus, and emphasizes the differentiation by placing a verb at the line’s eleventh syllable, producing a potential sixth stress in the line “and shewed him the litel erth that here is.” The reference to here and now conjures a wider public around the narrator, shifting the perspective point back to earth. Africanus, like the Apollo missions, aimed outward and upward to ponder the heavens; Africanus, like the Apollo missions, turned to look back on earth in an instructional mode—philosophic, scientific—but in both cases an audience, Chaucer’s narrator and the public of 1968, felt a response of concern for and interest in the earth.

Thanks to reading about the public reaction to space photography, I noticed that Chaucer’s first scene rejects the belittling perspective of Africanus and his pedagogical certainty about turning our attention beyond earthly things. Then the rest of this wonderful poem opens as a longer correction to the authoritative Dream of Scipio. Chaucer’s narrator has his own dream, in which wise and preachy Africanus reappears—but he does not lift Chaucer’s dreamer to the heavens. Instead, he takes the dreamer to a beautiful earthly landscape and then vanishes, leaving the dreamer to puzzle out his place in the natural world. The Dream of Scipio taught transcendence; Chaucer directs our attention to “the litel erthe that here is.”

Susan Crane is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

The Bayeux Graphic Novel

by Tom Doyle (tmdoyle2@yahoo.com)

My all-time favorite encounter with a medieval text was with nose practically rubbing along seventy meters of glass, and came by way of comic books. I was a late fan of graphic storytelling, only buying comics for myself starting in law school. But I made up for lost time, collecting numerous titles of the Vertigo line as well as indie publishers.

So, while visiting France two years ago, I was particularly eager to view the Bayeux Tapestry. Besides being fascinated by the Battle of Hastings and the events that led up to it, I loved visual narrative.

From my motel, I crossed the modern ring road toward the city center as if traveling by Doctor Who‘s TARDIS into the past. It was early in the day, before the tour buses would arrive. I had the tapestry almost to myself, and I could walk its length without feeling crowded or rushed.

Others have pointed out the connection of comic books to the tapestry, but I didn’t fully understand the parallels until seeing the work as a whole. I only knew the tapestry from a few famous images: the comet, the supposed arrow in Harold’s eye. I’d never seen it before as a continuous graphic story.

The museum’s controlled light created an atmosphere that was neither typically modern nor medieval, and the manner of display provided a more intimate experience than could have been had by most over the centuries. Up so close, I saw every detail of the stitching and the bright colors. The textual element was at a bare minimum. Like many comics, the tapestry visually stereotyped some people and things while giving individual life and detail to others. I carried the personal baggage of an odd, probably Tolkien-inspired anger at Norman propaganda, yet I enjoyed the surprise at finding the tapestry’s story to be so much more (additionally, this great visual story was probably sewn by Anglo-Saxons).[5]

The best moment of the tapestry came early for me, in Scene 16. The Norman army was passing a structure on a hill. Without looking at the Latin text and before the audio guide spoke, I had a frisson of recognition–I’d just been there the previous morning. This rough image was so obviously Mont Saint-Michel! One thousand years vanished, and I laughed with the pure joy of it.

Another highlight, if a grimmer one, was how the tapestry conveyed the horrors of the Battle of Hastings. It showed men and animals dying brutally, both in the central story and in the lower border. This was no airbrushed, pseudo-medieval, epic fantasy view of combat, and the tapestry’s frankness again bridged the centuries for me. I tend to forget a great deal of what I see in museums, but I’ll never forget Bayeux’s unique view into the medieval world.

It also gave me a snapshot in linguistic and literary history to contrast with The Canterbury Tales. With the tapestry, the conquering Normans attempted to speak to their French and Anglo-Saxon subjects in a common visual language. Several centuries later, Chaucer would make splendid use of the language, Middle English, that emerged from this cultural conflict and convergence.

Tom Doyle is a novelist.

Reading The Tale of Sir Thopas as Text and Image

by Kathryn Vulic (Kathryn.Vulic@wwu.edu)

What does it mean to read a medieval text in its manuscript context?

Reading a Middle English text involves not just interpreting words on the page, but also understanding how the text’s manuscript layout contributes to the meaning. Chaucer’s The Tale of Sir Thopas is a great example of this. Someone reading the edited version sees tail-rhyme stanzas laid out in straightforward verse:

Listeth, lordes, in good entent,
And I wol telle verrayment
Of myrthe and of solas,
Al of a knyght was fair and gent
In bataille and in tourneyment;
His name was sire Thopas. (712-17)

But if one looks at the version of the poem in the Ellesmere manuscript, one encounters utterly different formatting:

Ellesmere Chaucer, EL 26 C 9, f.151v, the Huntington Library, San Marino, California

In the edited text, the poem is a lilting (and not particularly good) poem about a rather odd romance hero. In the manuscript, however, the page layout distracts a reader away from the poem’s content all together; a reader is struck by the question, How do I make sense of this? It often takes a few moments for a reader to figure out in what order to read the lines. Indeed, multiple readings seem possible. One can follow the order in the quote above, or one can read four lines and then the two to the right—it takes several stanzas before this order becomes nonsense.

The brackets serve to demonstrate how little it matters in what order the words are read. The extra-textual visual distractions put so much emphasis on the poem’s form that the layout becomes a punch-line: the page itself seems to suggest that the single most redeeming feature of the poem is that some words rhyme.

And the joke continues. Further on in the manuscript (and just as a reader is developing a good reading rhythm), the stanzas and rhyme become irregular, and marginal notations appear to struggle to map out the rhyme scheme.

Ellesmere Chaucer, EL 26 C 9, f.152r, the Huntington Library, San Marino, California

When the Host finally says, “Namoore of this, for Goddes dignitee! / … / Myn eres aken of thy drasty speche!” (919, 923), one is compelled to agree: what the Host hears as “drasty speche” affects a reader’s eye the same way. The poem is made ridiculous by the sight gag of the page re-ordering the lines to foreground the highly unimpressive verse.

It’s a commonplace that Chaucer the poet pokes fun at Chaucer the pilgrim by having his pilgrim self tell a terrible, and ultimately truncated, verse tale. But what’s less commonly taught is the huge experiential difference between encountering it in an edited text versus seeing it on the manuscript page. Also, given that some manuscripts format the poem very differently, it’s instructive to compare them with each other. For example, one might wish to compare the samples above with the parallel lines in Hengwrt 154 / Peniarth 392D (which also lays out Sir Thopas with two columns and brackets, though with a slightly different look than in Ellesmere; see ff. 213v-215r) and in British Library Harley 7334 (which lays out Sir Thopas in just one column; see ff. 203v-206r). Each manuscript’s presentation of Sir Thopas creates its own unique reading experience, each suggesting a distinct idea of where the reader’s attention should lie. This variety of formatting choices across manuscripts is not exclusive to Sir Thopas, though; it’s actually characteristic of the ways in which other Middle English tail-rhyme poems appear in their various manuscript contexts.

As digital reproductions of manuscripts become more widely available, readers may well want to try their hand at studying medieval texts in their manuscript contexts to see what light the original layouts may shed on their content.

Kathryn Vulic is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Western Washington University.

Starting Points for Further Exploration:

Chwast, Seymour. The Canterbury Tales (a graphic novel). New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011.

Hilmo, Maidie. Medieval Images, Icons, and Illustrated Literary Texts from the Ruthwell Cross to the Ellesmere Chaucer. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004.

Images and Illustrations. Background, Biography, and Bibliography for the Father of English Literature. http://geoffreychaucer.org/images/.

An Introduction to Illuminated Manuscripts, 1200-1400. British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts,       https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/TourIntro4.asp.

Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, Maidie Hilmo, and Linda Olson. Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2012.

Mittman, Asa. Maps and Monsters in Medieval England. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Richmond, Velma. Chaucer as Children’s Literature: Retellings from the Victorian and Edwardian Eras. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2004. 

Part Two: Unexpected Affinities

For thus moche dar I saye wel:
I had be dolven [“buried”] everydel [“entirely”]
And ded, ryght thurgh defaute [“lack”] of slep,
Yif I ne had red and take kep
Of this tale next before.
Book of the Duchess (221-24)

Chaucer’s work is full of surprising encounters between people and written texts. In the passage above, the Book of the Duchess’s insomnia-plagued narrator’s randomly chosen book of fables leads him to the story of Ceyx and Alcyone, which itself involves sleeplessness; the narrator takes the tale to heart and finds that it helps him nod off (see Kisha Tracy’s contribution below for an exploration of this poem’s emotional resonance). Other speakers describe the sheer pleasure of reading. In the prologue to the Legend of Good Women, for example, the narrator describes his relationship to books as one of “delyte” [“delight”], “reverence,” and “devocioun”—at least, before the nice weather comes along in May. Other moments of reading involve confrontation rather than connection, as when Alison becomes enraged by Jankin’s gleeful reading of the “Book of Wicked Wives” in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue.

Reading can also lead to negative responses on the part of modern-day readers: Middle English often appears intimidatingly unfamiliar to twenty-first-century eyes. As several of the contributors below point out, people who keep reading in spite of this sensation often receive something much more positive—an unanticipated shock of recognition between a character’s or speaker’s stories and their own. This kind of connection can become all the more satisfying given the chronological and cultural gaps separating us from medieval writers. If you’ve ever fallen asleep with a smartphone in your hand, you might find it reassuring to know that when The Book of the Duchess’s speaker finally awakes, he recounts that “the book that I hadde red…[was] in myn hond ful even [“wide open”]” (1326-29). With this in mind, you might want to remain open to the possibility that The Canterbury Tales will speak in strange and satisfying ways to your scholarly interests, storytelling techniques, and emotional experiences.

Victorianists, Victorians, and the “Father of English Poetry”

 by Vincent A. Lankewish (VLankewish@ppasshare.org)

To ask “What does it mean to read a text from medieval England?” is to invite reflection not only on twenty-first-century readers’ responses to medieval texts, but also on the complex relationship between other time periods and the Middle Ages as well. In this essay, I explore Victorianists’ engagement with the multiple, competing readings of Chaucer’s poetry by Victorians themselves. Indeed, I am one such Victorianist, engaged in a study of Victorian perceptions of gender and genre in the The Legend of Good Women, a less well-known poem compared to The Canterbury Tales, but one in which scholars have become increasingly interested over the past three decades.

Medievalists, of course, have long urged colleagues in other period fields to read, study, and teach medieval literature even if they don’t consider themselves experts on the Middle Ages. In his 1990 essay “On the Margin,” Lee Patterson, for example, stresses the need “to dismantle the barriers that divide medieval studies from the rest of the human sciences” (104).[6] As a doctoral student at Rutgers-New Brunswick in the early 1990s, I unknowingly found myself heeding Patterson’s advice, taking courses not only in Victorian poetry, prose, and fiction, my designated areas of specialization, but also in the history of the English language, medieval romance, and medievalism. Little did I realize at the time, however, the degree to which studying Victorian literature is contingent upon at least a working knowledge of the medieval history, literature, and culture that plays so central a role in so many major texts of the period.

In this light, I initially planned to write my dissertation on Chaucer and the Victorians—a project in which I am still interested.[7] Although I eventually jettisoned that topic, I continued to study and write about both medieval literature itself and Victorian interest in medieval authors, presenting my work several times at the International Congress on Medieval Studies and at conferences sponsored by the New Chaucer Society, as well as contributing an article on the twelfth-century French Roman d’Enéas to Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles’s essay collection Text and Territory: Geographic Imagination in the European Middle Ages. Moreover, as a graduate student and, later, an assistant professor of English at Penn State-University Park, I happily taught undergraduate courses on the history of English and Chaucer, as well as undergraduate and graduate courses called “Inventing the Past: Nineteenth-Century Medievalisms.”

My split identity as a Victorianist and occasional medievalist has been a source of satisfaction and, at times, frustration. Take, for example, a proposal entitled “On the Edge of Ruskin’s Chaucer” that I recently submitted for consideration to members of the program committee organizing a Victorian studies conference. In July 2004, I had travelled to the Ruskin Library and Research Centre at Lancaster University to study the annotations in the margins of Ruskin’s copy of the 1843 Edward Moxon edition of Thomas Tyrwhitt’s Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. I found Ruskin’s marginalia on the pages of Chaucer’s poem The Legend of Good Women especially intriguing as they offered an unusual glimpse of the interpretive processes through which Ruskin came to adduce the Legend as literary support for the domestic and civic duties that he assigns to men and women in his book Sesame and Lilies (1865).

Sesame and Lilies comprises two lectures, “Of Kings’ Treasuries” and “Of Queens’ Gardens,” that address the education of boys and girls in Victorian society and ostensibly challenges the prevailing notion of woman as “the shadow and attendant image of her lord” (111). For Ruskin, the belief that a woman “[owes her lord] a thoughtless and servile obedience, and [is] supported altogether in her weakness by the pre-eminence of his fortitude” denigrates her (111). He therefore redefines the functions of each sex: “The man’s power,” he asserts, “is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender” (121). “[The woman’s] intellect,” he maintains, “is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision. She sees the qualities of things, their claims and their places. Her great function is Praise” (122). Possessing “a guiding, not a determining function,” a woman, Ruskin argues, must exert a positive influence on her husband, thereby leading him toward fulfillment of his domestic and civic responsibilities (121).

In my conference presentation, I planned to argue that Ruskin’s commentary serves as a summons to examine the annotated text as a work in and of itself. Using my own transcriptions of these as yet unpublished glosses on the Legend, I would suggest that the seemingly peripheral annotations are central to any understanding of Ruskin’s gender theory.   In the end, my paper was rejected, albeit with some kind words about the mostly favorable response to my abstract. Later on, however, I heard through the academic grapevine that some members of the committee had found my proposal a bit baffling: Is it about Ruskin? Is it about Chaucer? Is its focus Victorian literature or medieval literature? The answer to these questions, of course, would be “yes” and “both.”

Vincent A. Lankewish teaches literature and history at the Professional Performing Arts High School in New York City.

Modular Storytelling in Literature and Video Games

by Lee Sheldon

I’m going to tell you a story about a form of writing for video games I call modular storytelling where players can experience plot moves in any order they wish.

My first major video game was Ripley’s Believe It or Not: The Riddle of Master Lu (1995). Set in the late 1930s, the game featured fictional exploits of real-life globetrotting adventurer and collector of curios, Robert Ripley. The game was designed so that the player could experience any of multiple major locations in the game from the Himalayas to Easter Island in any order. The exercise was so successful that several reviewers complained that the game was linear, not realizing that any path chosen by the player would appear to be linear to that player. My current game, The Lion’s Song (2016-17) set in Vienna, Austria in the early years of the twentieth century, is an episodic exploration of the creative process. Each episode follows a different character (a journalist, a composer, a painter, and a mathematician), each struggling to complete a creative work. Any of the episodes can be played in any order and player choices affect how the stories unfold as a result.

We have twentieth and twenty-first century examples of the potential for modular storytelling in episodic television, soap opera, cliffhanger movie serials, and the “crime dossiers” of Dennis Wheatley and J.G. Links in the late 1930’s.

The novels of Charles Dickens and his contemporaries, published “in parts,” a few chapters released each week, were exactly like a TV series of today where the story progresses and characters develop from episode to episode. Yet consider A Christmas Carol. What if the order of the ghosts were rearranged? It might be intriguing if Scrooge started with the Ghost of Future Yet to Come and traveled back in time to where Scrooge makes his first mistake in his descent into miserly misery.

Miguel de Cervantes wrote Don Quixote de la Mancha in 1605. Don Quixote is a picaresque novel. Structurally, this means it is constructed of a series of loosely connected episodes. In fact, once Don Quixote and Sancho start out on their quest to prove that chivalry is not dead, the episodes could be presented in any order leading to the same poignant climax of the Don on his deathbed believing he has failed in his quest. Yet the reader knows he has succeeded. We most remember the episode where the Don tilts at the windmills. It feels like the climax of the story. It has entered our language to signify a foolhardy action. Yet after Don Quixote has gathered his traveling companions, it is the first episode in the story.

In the 1380s Geoffrey Chaucer began writing The Canterbury Tales. These vignettes lie within a structure: stories told by a group of pilgrims en route to Canterbury from London. After the Prologue the order of all the tales is, in many instances, flexible. This is made possible because the “structure” focuses on the characters, rather than a linear story. And here is Chaucer’s great gift to videogame writers. We can create our non-linear stories by using characters as stops within a modular structure that mirrors the open world gameplay players crave, and never interrupts the play to forcibly inject a plot development.

The main structure of Homer’s Odyssey is a series of flashbacks Odysseus recounts to the Phoenicians late in the narrative. Each flashback is an episode, and they can be rearranged in any order with a simple adjustment here and there.

I am at heart a storyteller. At the heart of each of my games is, I hope, a compelling story, whether they are set in the past, present day, or the far future. It was my knowledge of how games can support non-linear story structures that led me to seek out examples in other media. Finding these made me realize that modular storytelling is as old as the Bardic tradition.[8] More work, both in game studies and practical game production, is now being done to uncover early examples of non-linear storytelling. The free-flowing structure maps seamlessly to game designs seeking to allow meaningful player choice. This can be seen in Christopher Totten’s instructive contribution to this very chapter (see part III below).

This little story of how I came to create a non-linear form of storytelling for games that I call modular storytelling is itself divided into paragraphs. Let’s call them episodes, for fun. Ignoring the first and last paragraphs, they are thinly tied together; creating a structure that takes the reader back through time. But they could be structured in chronological order, or they could be structured by medium. Print this out and cut them into pieces, a paragraph each, and assemble them in any order you wish. The message is the same.

Lee Sheldon is a professional game designer and Professor of Practice at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Millennials, Monsters, and the Middle Ages

by Brendan Fitzgerald

I began my academic career in London, England. Not surprisingly, much of my early education focused on medieval English culture, castles, and mythology. As a five-year-old boy, I was entranced by the tales of knights, grotesque monsters, and superhuman kings repeatedly encountered in school and on field trips. All of this undoubtedly played a role in my decision to study medieval monsters as part of an independent high school research project. As detailed below, the project involved both unexpected challenges and new insights into the connections between medieval and modern culture.

The most difficult aspect of reading medieval mythology involved rewiring my brain to analyze texts at length and in depth. As a millennial student, my world is almost exclusively condensed into seconds-long sound bytes of information which convey meaning, descriptions and ideas quickly and without the need to engage in independent thought. Messages are almost always easily discernible. Consequently, I believe that the art of creative, meaningful writing is endangered. Texting, smartphones and digital applications have reduced communication down to acronyms and condensed words. Detailed descriptions are replaced by photographs snapped on a smartphone.

That is not to suggest, however, that a millennial must be disconnected from studying, and even enjoying, medieval literature and culture. On the contrary, my “Medieval Monsters” project demonstrated to me that humans are still humans and continue to experience fear, love, beauty, loyalty, and seek understanding of the world and events surrounding them. Focusing on a variety of popular medieval “monsters”, such as the Dragon and Banshee, I discovered that the medieval oral tradition and illuminated manuscripts utilized wild descriptions of monsters to explain that which they could not otherwise understand. The Dragon, for example, may have represented the eternal battle between good and evil in medieval English literature. The Banshee mythology may have provided medieval Celts with a means of understanding what happens to a deceased’s soul after death. The logical progression of my interest was to locate other ways that medieval literature utilized character descriptions.  Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales satisfied this curiosity. I found that analyzing Chaucer’s use of physiognomy as a means of revealing the inner personality of his characters was similar to analyzing the underlying reality which gave rise to stories and descriptions of various medieval monsters. For example, in the Clerk’s Tale, Chaucer refers to the “Chichevache,” a mythological, human-faced cow monster reputed to feed on “good women” (line 1188). His description of the monster as being thin and starved suggests a paucity of “good women” at the time. It is this peeling back of the layers of description to unearth the underlying meaning that I find most fascinating about medieval monsters in general and, more specifically, Chaucer’s characters in the Canterbury Tales.

The process of researching this project taught me that research and learning must be more than mere fact gathering. Rather, it should be an exercise in understanding and analysis of a new and different imaginative world, that of medieval England. I enjoyed the freedom afforded by the fact that this was an independent research project. The absence of strict rules guiding my fact gathering allowed me go off on tangents and read and research things that interested me just for the sake of interest. Indeed, I read and researched for information and understanding, rather than mere facts to fill a paper or support an idea. This project taught me that a little freedom can go a long way in inspiring high school students to work closely and carefully with challenging material.

Brendan Fitzgerald attends Regis High School in New York, New York.

“To Have of Sondry Tongues Ful Knowyng:” Spanish, Middle English, and Me

by Christa T. Cottone (Christa_cottone.alumni.@shu.edu)

“What’s the first word that comes to mind when you hear The Canterbury Tales?” my professor asked at the start of my Chaucer class. If my professor posed that question today, almost four years later, I would say, “Cool.” But, that day, I said, “Boring.” My next thought was “scary”—the class was going to read the Tales in Middle English. When reading this new language I had to temporarily forget Spanish grammar and pronunciation rules, rules that had taken me eight years to memorize. An alarm rang in my head when I read a noun ending in cioun or when I voiced an initial h. At the same time, however, I felt comfortable when objects preceded verbs and nouns preceded adjectives. Spanish and Middle English had collided.

That Spanish–Middle English collision taught me to respect linguistic differences, though my brain urged me to seek similarities. Now, as an editor, I readily adapt to the writing style displayed in each piece I analyze. Whether I am reading El Mío Cid or the Tales, I deconstruct each line of text, label its parts of speech, and translate it into standard present-day English. Perhaps the writing follows an unconventional pattern, but I commit myself to understanding its own distinctive design.

Perseverance, then, has been the most important takeaway from my study of Spanish and of Middle English. When I substitute teach, I hear the same complaint from students of all ages: “We don’t like [insert foreign language here] because it’s too hard.” I admit to my students that I, too, uttered such a statement in middle school. Had that fear stopped me, I might have avoided taking a Chaucer class, writing an almost-130-page master’s thesis, and becoming a teacher. So, when my students speak of foreign language, I reply, “You may not like [insert foreign language AGAIN] now, but you might later.” All students and professionals encounter subject matter that appears irrelevant because they have deemed that matter difficult, boring, or both. My job is to find the creativity and persistence to help these readers power through their initial knee-jerk reactions.

As an office manager, an editor, and a substitute teacher, I have employed Spanish more frequently than I have Middle English. However, my implementation of Middle English speaks to the relationship I developed with the language. “Boring” became “useful.” In January 2015, I taught Spanish to middle schoolers. I explained the informal/formal you dichotomy, /usted, to eighth graders, sharing that English had once possessed a similar layer of complexity in its second-person pronouns. I exposed my students to English’s development, just as the Tales had exposed me to French’s influence on English.

The Tales have also remained in my consciousness in other ways. In February 2017, I attended an exhibition of saints’ relics. Staring at a piece of St. Thomas à Beckett’s bone, I said to my father, “Thomas à Beckett was the Archbishop of Canterbury, and I learned that in my Chaucer class.” Like the Tales’ pilgrims, I journeyed to a sacred place—a church—while reflecting on stories. Those narratives, though solemn, served the same purpose as the stories in the Tales: connection. I connected to saints and witnessed history, while Chaucer’s pilgrims have connected to readers and shaped history. Whether linguistically or culturally, Middle English has opened my mind to the many different ways we can “translate” between our experiences and those of other people and cultures.

Christa T. Cottone is a portfolio management assistant at a publishing house in New Jersey.

A Community of Grieving Readers: The Book of the Duchess

by Kisha Tracy (ktracy3@fitchburgstate.edu) 

I have great wonder, be this light,
How that I lyve, for day ne nyght
I may nat slepe wel nygh noght;
I have to many an ydel thought
Purely for defaute of slep
That, by my trouthe, I take no kep
Of nothing, how hyt cometh or gooth,
Ne me nys nothing leef nor looth. (Book of the Duchess 1-8)

I did not encounter Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess until graduate school. The first time I read these beginning lines I remember thinking, Yes, I know that feeling. How Chaucer depicts the sleeplessness, the haze of insomnia, the creation inherent in “ydel thought,” and yet the confusion in taking “no kep/Of nothing”: what better poetry to capture the vagaries of too many sleepless nights? It was difficult not to be drawn to so human a narrator. While we were certainly solid acquaintances before, Chaucer and I now became friends.

Chaucer wrote the Book of the Duchess, according to accepted scholarship, after 1369 as a tribute to John of Gaunt’s late wife Blanche.[9] The poem is a dream vision centering on the interaction between the dreamer/narrator and the Black Knight, who is grieving for his lady White. Scholars disagree about the ending of the poem and whether or not it provides consolation for the bereaved literary figure or the historical widower.

The most powerful aspect of the Book of the Duchess is its intimate understanding of grief. The poem is a complicated study of devastating loss. Carolyn Dinshaw traces the “growing emotional involvement” in Chaucer’s narrators during the course of the narratives, particularly in Troilus and Criseyde, but which is also applicable to the Duchess.[10] David Wallace, also speaking of Troilus, remarks, “He, this Chaucerian ‘I’, becomes subjectively over-invested in the plight of his protagonists.”[11] Indeed, the Book of the Duchess narrator alludes to his own grief before encountering the Black Knight in his dream vision. Dinshaw writes, “The dream-vision setting…encourages us to read these characters as parts of the narrator’s own mind…we can understand the Black Knight and the dreamer in the Book of the Duchess as figures who work through a grief like the narrator’s own.”[12] This double experience of grief builds on each other in order not just to depict or represent but to investigate the effects of loss.

At the narrator’s behest, the Knight tries to articulate the origin of his grief. He finally reaches the moment that he directly expresses his desire never to let his lost lady White leave his mind:

…”That, by my trouthe, y nolde noght
For al thys world out of my thoght
Leve my lady; noo, trewely!” (1109-1111)

“Repentaunce? Nay, fy!” quod he,
“Shulde y now repente me
To love? Nay, certes, than were I wel
Wers than was Achitofel,
Or Anthenor, so have I joye,
The traytor that betraysed Troye,
Or the false Genelloun,
He that purchased the tresoun
Of Rowland and of Olyver.
Nay, while I am alyve her,
I nyl foryete hir never moo.” (1115-25)

The Knight argues that if he forgets his beloved, it would make him the direst sinner in the world, even such as the famous traitors Achitophel, Antenor, or Ganelon. He clings to this belief, even though it is clearly the memories of his lost love that cause him so much pain. He would rather retain his memory of White than alleviate his own sorrow.

The Knight’s choice is a moment in which we can expand upon Dinshaw’s observation that the Knight works through grief similar to that of the narrator’s by adding here the reader as well. Earlier in Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, she writes that “[l]iterary production takes place on bodies.”[13] In this case, it takes place not just on bodies, but deep in the emotions and the mind. Chaucer portrays the true heart of grief, embodied by his character’s choice to retain his beloved in his memory and imagination rather than seek solace in forgetfulness. The human mind over time tries to protect itself by dimming painful memories, but the Knight resists this process, finding it a betrayal of their love.

The Knight’s choice, witnessed by the dreamer/narrator, unites readers across the centuries who themselves have experienced grief. Chaucer’s medieval text encapsulates a timeless human struggle, which is perhaps where we find the true consolation embedded in the poem.

Kisha Tracy is Associate Professor of English Studies at Fitchburg State University.

Starting Points for Further Exploration

Biddick, Kathleen. The Shock of Medievalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Towards a More Progressive Medieval Studies (and a More Humane Humanities).” In the Middle. http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2016/04/towards-more-progressive-medieval.html. Accessed 11 June 2017.

International Society for the Study of Medievalism. http://medievalism.net/.

@LeVostreGC. “Chaucer Doth Tweet.” Twitter.

Seaman, Myra, Eileen Joy, and Nicola Masciandaro. Dark Chaucer: An Assortment. Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2012.

Strohm, Paul. Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury. New York: Penguin Books, 2015.

TEAMS Consortium for Teaching Medieval Studies. “Special Issue on Teaching Feeling.” The Once and Future Classroom XIII (2016).

Creative Performances

“And never-the-lesse [thou] hast set thy wit—
Although that in thy hed ful lyte is—
To make bookys, songes, dytees,
In ryme or elles in cadence,
As thou best canst…”
(House of Fame 620-24)

When considering the nature of Chaucer’s artistry, we might do well to keep in mind the solution to the writerly problems experienced by the narrator in The House of Fame. Within his dream vision, the narrator is plucked into the sky by a beautiful and rather snarky golden eagle, who informs him that Jove has sent the eagle to help the narrator find some “tydynges” that will presumably provide him with new fodder for writing. The narrator encounters a veritable motherlode of material—a whirling house through which tidings of all kinds circulate freely. Although the poem abruptly ends, the narrator clearly seems delighted by this new resource: as soon as he sees a group of pilgrims, for example, he runs toward them even though he knows their bags are “ful of lyes” (2129).

Many modern-day conceptualizations of creativity emphasize an artist’s ability to transform internal experiences into outward communication. By contrast, Chaucer’s narrator treasures the opportunity to transcend his solitary life and to be exposed to as many voices as possible. The idea of creative work in dialogue with others’ words and ideas emerges in Chaucer’s work as a translator, in his tale-tellers’ appropriation of narratives from other sources, and in his invocation of source texts in prologues to the Clerk’s Tale, The Parliament of Fowls, and other works.

This flexible and open-ended approach to artistry is exemplified by the contributors to this section. As translators, editors, designers, and poets, they express themselves via conversation with ideas and characters found in Chaucer and in other medieval texts. Other exciting contemporary examples of this phenomenon include Patience Agbabi’s brilliant collection of poetry Telling Tales (Canongate Books, 2015), John Findon’s 2017 opera The Tale of Januarie, and Kim Zarins’ young adult novel Sometimes We Tell the Truth (Simon Pulse, 2016). How might reading Chaucer or other medieval texts help you shape your own stories?

Translating Piers Plowman’s Landscapes and Soundscapes

by Peter Sutton (peter@petersutton.edu)

The alliterative poem known as Piers Plowman is a richly textured dream vision created in the last decades of the fourteenth century. Its presumed writer, William Langland, was probably about ten years older than Chaucer, and Piers Plowman seems to have been his life’s work. He constantly revised it, and it exists in several versions ranging from 2500 to 7500 lines.

All begin with the narrator seeing a vision on the Malvern Hills:

In a somer seson whan soft was the sonne
I shope me in shroudes as I a shepe were…

Or in my translation, which I published with McFarland in 2014:

One summer season when the sun was still soft,
I set off like a sheep in a shaggy woolen smock…
And one morning in May on the Malvern Hills
I witnessed a wonder which I warrant was magic…
And high in the east, looking up at the sun,
Saw a tower on a toft, built sturdy and true;
To the west, further down, were a dale and a dungeon
With deep, dark ditches that I gazed on with dread. (Prologue 1-2, 5-6, 13-16)

The Hills are a narrow ridge about seven miles long that rises up to the west of the River Severn, between the broad, flat, largely arable river valley and the rolling countryside of Herefordshire with its red earth, sheep and cattle, orchards, woods, and hedgerows, beyond which, on a clear day, looms the dark mass of the Welsh mountains.

I have the good fortune to live on the Hills a mile from Little Malvern Priory, where Langland was probably educated; the quire still stands, commemorating the poet in a trinity of modern stained glass windows. I often walk up to the “toft” where a Norman fortification once stood, and look down toward farmhouses in westerly morning shadow which retain the vestiges of a moat.

In the so-called “autobiographical” section of the poem, the narrator also speaks of earning his living later as a chantry clerk in London, and since I grew up there I share both Langland’s reference points. When working on the translation, however, I also “heard” voices from other parts of England, from Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, and even from Australia and the United States. These belong to the fifty characters in the poem with abstract names such as Falsehood and Guile, Reason and Conscience, but Langland’s genius is that they are fully rounded individuals and are recognizable as our contemporaries, falsifying weights and measures, cheating the poor, and taking money for worthless legal advice and medical treatment.

This variety of characterization informs the readings of an abridged version of the translation which I have given at conferences and festivals in the UK and the US, where audiences are invariably astonished by the contemporary relevance of the poem:

The grounding of grammar is greeted with stares
And no schoolchild I see can construct a letter
Or a satisfactory stanza of verse…
(Passus XV lines 371-3)

They are also attracted by the humor:

“Hang you,” I said, “you ill-mannered Age…”
“Oh, sure,” he said, and assailed me again,
Clouting my ears to hamper my hearing,
Mauling my mouth to pull out my molars,
And ensuring I shuffled, shackled with gout.
(Passus XX lines 188, 191-194)

And by the imagery: not just concepts such as God in heaven and the devil in a dungeon, or the faith, hope and charity of Saint Paul, but also homelier images such as Envy looking “like a leek left too long in the sun” and Covetousness having cheeks that “sagged and swung like pendulous purses”.

In addition, they are struck by the driving rhythm of the alliteration, which I have preserved. It forced me, like any writer of formal poetry, to search and search again for the appropriate word, paradoxically enriching rather than restricting the choice of lexis. A non-alliterating line now sounds limp, listless, lazy and lackluster, and I have started writing alliterative poetry of my own—about subjects including the Malvern Hills. Perhaps reading Piers Plowman or other medieval works could prompt you to translate your own dream-visions and surroundings into poetry.

Peter Sutton is an author, translator, lecturer, and actor who regularly gives talks and readings based on his translation of “Piers Plowman.” 

Crafting an Edition: From Manuscript to Print

by Nicole Smith

One aspect of reading a medieval text that may not come to mind is the form in which we read. Today, most students read Middle English texts in printed or digital form: they experience the work as an edition, which is to say that they may read a text that both includes introductory matter and normalizes the medieval characters “thorn” and “yogh” to “th” and “y” or “gh.”[14] But this form is very different from that which was available to readers over 500 years ago when scribes wrote on parchment in a writing style that included abbreviations, known as paleographic suspensions and notae, and images to aid in the understanding of the text. The shift from medieval manuscript to a contemporary edition is what scholars call textual editing, and that is my subject.

Editing Middle English texts is a creative process that seeks, ultimately, to recover the words and phrasing first issued by the author when he or she penned the work. Moreover, there are several kinds of editions that an editor may wish to produce. For instance, a diplomatic edition allows readers to experience a single manuscript by reproducing all orthographic information on the page from spelling, punctuation, and line breaks to capitalization, rubrication (words appearing in red), and marginalia (notes made in the margin). Parallel-text editions present two or more versions of the text side by side for comparison of the differences (called variants) between the manuscript witnesses. In our digital age, the hyper-text edition presents even larger amounts of information through the use of pop-ups, text boxes, and search options available only via the internet. Where the hyper-text edition provides the raw data of each manuscript so that readers may draw their own conclusions about the text and the changes it undergoes from one manuscript witness to the next, a critical edition of a text is produced by an expert in the field who has consulted all extant manuscripts in which the work appears in order to determine a “base-text,” the version in manuscript that will be produced in print and against which all remaining manuscripts will be read. Editors of critical editions choose base texts for a variety of reasons: an older manuscript might present the work in the form closest to what the author intended or another manuscript might have fewer errors introduced by the scribe. Sometimes it is unclear which manuscript is the obvious choice. Whichever text the editor chooses, he or she will include a statement of editorial policy that outlines the rationale for why such a decision was made. The editor of a critical edition will furthermore provide substantial commentary on all manuscripts, their language and variants, explanatory and textual notes, and a glossary.

After determining the base-text, the editor then proceeds to “collate” the rest of the extant manuscripts. Collation means to note all “substantive” differences—the differences that produce a change in meaning of the work, as opposed to changes in spelling or words that mean the same thing across dialects—in the “apparatus,” a part of the edition that lists these variants, their corresponding line numbers, and the words and phrases as they appear at the same point in the other manuscript witnesses. When an editor finds that the base-text presents incorrect readings, the detective work begins. Perhaps the scribe miscopied, forgot, or duplicated a word or phrase from the exemplar from which he was copying. Such errors have names in the discipline of textual studies: “eye skip” provides the reason for which a scribe omits a line because the one following begins in the same fashion; “dittography” is an error of addition where the scribe repeats a word unintentionally (“that that” when the original reading is “that”); and sometimes a scribe will commit an error of transposition, known as “metathesis,” when he reverses letters or words or longer phrases. In these cases, it becomes the editor’s responsibility to diagnose the problem (if the scribe miscopied, then mechanical error was at work) and correct the reading by either using the other witnesses as support for a particular correction or by imagining what the author may have intended given other evidence. Such changes in the text are known as “editorial emendations.” They are noted in the text by particular punctuation described in the editorial policy (perhaps [brackets] or `other marks¢). Reasons for emendations are given in the “commentary” section of the edition.

Critical editions, therefore, are very much the creative works of contemporary scholars who seek to produce a “best” text using what he or she considers the most authoritative text (known as the “base text”). In considering the date and region of production, along with the variants that appear within the text, the editor gathers information that contributes to the larger puzzle of placing the manuscript and, by extension, the work in a larger cultural and social framework.

Nicole Smith is Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of English at the University of North Texas.

A Trip to La Mancha: Inhabiting Literature Through Games

by Christopher W. Totten (ctotten@pfbstudios.com)

Among the most popular and influential medieval texts were chivalric romances—adventure stories starring a knight-errant with an emphasis on love and courtly manners. These tales often featured heroic knightly quests, magic, and marvels.[15] They also provided writers with the chance to place well-worn stories into new contexts. Within the Knight’s Tale, for example, Geoffrey Chaucer weaves medieval chivalric culture into a story set in ancient Greece. Similarly, Miguel de Cervantes’s seventeenth-century novel Don Quixote juxtaposes the tropes of chivalric romances with Inquisition-era Spanish society. Romance provides opportunities for adventuresome writers as well as for restless and ambitious characters.

Games have the same power to recontextualize literary texts through various means, as Lee Sheldon indicates above in his discussion of modular storytelling in videogame design. For their part, strategy games such as Avalon Hill’s Dune[16], based on Frank Herbert’s novel of the same name, and King Post’s Moby Dick, or The Card Game[17], based on Melville’s novel, use the literary worlds of their subject matter to devise game systems. Games like Whysoever’s DICK[18], another Moby-Dick game, or Do Better Games’s Bring Your Own Book use actual lines from texts as responses to questions. This allows lines from a text to be taken out of context and analyzed individually rather than being subsumed in the larger narrative context. This recontextualization changes an individual’s relationship to the work, giving him or her the chance to “play” literature.

La Mancha, a party card game I am currently developing, uses mechanisms from both Don Quixote and DICK to deconstruct the text of late-medieval chivalric romances such as Amadis of Gaul and Tirant lo Blanch. In La Mancha, players are a hidalgo imagining themselves as a knight errant on a quest for fame and glory. Main components include a deck of encounters—fill-in-the-blank statements of things seen on the quest—and chivalry cards—cards with text from various chivalric sources. Players win treasures by responding to encounters with chivalry cards and use the treasures to perform feats of romantic knighthood. By utilizing individual lines and subjects of chivalric texts out of context of the stories, the game highlights their fantastic and often surreal elements and forces players to indulge in the fantasies of Cervantes’s ingenious gentleman.

As the designer, my goals for this game include giving players a system that results in emergent storytelling—stories not based on a linear plot but on the actions taken during gameplay—and allowing players to explore chivalric texts by using them to build these stories. As of this writing, the game is in the early prototype stage. Prototyping is a stage of game development where the designer plays an early edition of the game made with easily disposable or changeable materials: note cards with pencil-written text, pieces taken from other games, and so forth. For both digital and non-digital games, prototyping is an important stage in establishing that a game is playable and entertaining before you invest time, money, and work into developing it further. After the game is deemed to be viable during prototyping, the developer moves the game forward towards a marketable product.

As someone who creates a lot of games, both digital and non-digitally, I regard literature games like La Mancha as a distinctive challenge. Unlike many games, which rely on quickly-prototypeable gameplay mechanics, much of the “experience” from party-game style games, particularly card-based word games, comes from how players can manipulate text through game pieces. In a game with little-to-no narrative context like Apples to Apples,[19] words can be largely made up by designers. For La Mancha, creating a worthwhile game experience involves searching through texts and finding passages which are not only brief (i.e. able to fit on a standard game card), but could create interesting combinations. These passages should also be indicative of chivalric tales, so that players get the feeling that by answering questions about giants and armies, they are taking on a knightly role.

For choosing lines of texts, digital versions of each story were invaluable. Don Quixote itself provided a wealth of material, but lines of text from other works were used in order to create the required numbers of cards. Amadis of Gaul (1304) and Tirant lo Blanch (1490) are mentioned by Don Quixote himself as influences for his own chivalric quest and I referred to them for additional card content.

The element of make-believe is vital in this game and can help build knowledge and skills in the real world. In history curricula, games like The Oregon Trail (1971)[20] have been shown to help students understand complex topics[21]. Games like Dune or Moby-Dick, or The Card Game, in which players enact events like those seen in their respective novels without reenacting the plot, help players understand the world that characters live in. In the case of La Mancha, the rules require players to use words from chivalric texts to transform mundane statements for in-game benefit just as Alonso Quijano transforms his mundane world with chivalry for the benefit of those around him. Given its plenitude of speakers and narratives, The Canterbury Tales might prove a similarly rich source for adaptation on the part of card game designers.

Christopher Totten is a game designer and the founder of Pie for Breakfast Studios.

 Chaucer with a Beat

a video contribution by Baba Brinkman

Baba Brinkman is a New York-based rap artist, playwright, and former tree planter.

Starting Points for Further Exploration:

 Agbabi, Patience. Telling Tales. Edinburgh, UK: Canongate Books, 2014.

The Canterbury Tales. TV miniseries in six episodes. British Broadcasting Company, 2003.

Hill, Richard, John Hawkins, and Neville Coghill. The Canterbury Tales: Original Broadway Version. Music Theatre International, 1969.

Holsinger, Bruce. A Burnable Book: A Novel. New York: William Morrow, 2014.

A Knight’s Tale. Dir. Brian Helgeland. Peformances by Heath Ledger, Rufus Sewell, Shannyn Sossamon, and Paul Bettany. Columbia Pictures, 2001.

The Refugee Tales: A Walk in Solidarity with Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Detainees. Outreach Project, Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group. http://refugeetales.org/about-refugee-tales/. Accessed 11 June 2017

Notes for All Selections:

[1] For an introduction to reading practices in the period see Orality and Literacy in the Middle Ages: Essays on a Conjunction and Its Consequences, eds. Mark Chinca and Christopher Young (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005).

[2] Siân Echard’s site “Chaucer: Manuscripts and Books on the Web” provides a very user-friendly list (including links) to digitized Chaucer manuscripts.

[3] Citations from The Canterbury Tales in translation throughout this chapter are taken from Gerard NeCastro, Chaucer: Chaucer in the Twenty-First Century. Web. 11 June 2017.

[4] See, for example, Stacy Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2016).

[5] Many issues related to the Bayeux Tapestry’s origins and ideology are controversial, including the common practice of calling it a “tapestry” rather than an “embroidery.” A useful starting point for understanding this complex work is Elizabeth Carson Pastan and Stephen D. White with Kate Gilbert, The Bayeux Tapestry and Its Contexts: A Reassessment by (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2014).

[6] Lee Patterson, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies,” Speculum 65 (1990): 87-108.

[7] To date, the only existing full-length study of Chaucer’s place in Victorian culture is Mabel Wilhelmina Downer’s unpublished dissertation, “Chaucer among the Victorians” (City University of New York, 1982).

[8] Readers seeking further information about this topic will find more complete analyses in my book Character Development and Storytelling for Games (New York: Cengage Learning PTR, 2004, 2nd ed. 2013).

[9] For an introduction to this text, see Jamie C. Fumo, Making Chaucer’s “Book of the Duchess:” Textuality and Reception (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015).

[10] Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1989), 41.

[11] David Wallace, “Changing emotions in Troilus: the crucial year,” in Love, History and Emotion in Chaucer and Shakespeare, eds. Andrew James Johnston, Russell West-Pavlov, and Elisabeth Kempf (Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 2016), e-book.

[12] Dinshaw, 68.

[13] Dinshaw, 4.

[14] For an introduction to medieval textual studies, Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007); and Harvard University’s Middle English Teaching Resources Online (METRO) on Editions and Editing (http://metro.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k15189&pageid=icb.page269833).

[15] For an introduction to this genre and a rich array of resources, see the Database of Middle English Romance, University of York, http://www.middleenglishromance.org.uk/.

[16] Dune. Avalon Hill. 1979. Strategy board game.

[17] Moby-Dick, or The Card Game. King Post. 2014. Strategy card game.

[18] DICK: A Hilarious Moby-Dick Party Card Game. Whysoever. 2015. Party card game.

[19] Apples to Apples. Out of the Box Publishing. 1999. Word card game.

[20] The Oregon Trail. MECC. 1971. Educational computer game.

[21] Don Rawitsch, “Classic Game Postmortem: Oregon Trail.” (Presentation, Game Developers Conference, San Francisco, CA, February 27-March 3, 2017).