On Beyond Fifty

This issue marks the happy completion of fifty years of The Chaucer Review: A Journal of Medieval Studies and Literary Criticism. As we mark this milestone, the journal is now poised for its next half-century by changing over to a new schedule for each volume’s quarterly issues. Beginning with Volume 51, a year’s worth of The Chaucer Review will be issued in January, April, July, and October (the calendar year), instead of in July, October, January, and April (the academic year). To allow this change to begin, Volume 50 has been produced in two double issues, 50.1/2 (July 2015) and the present one, 50.3/4 (October 2015). The next issue, Volume 51, Issue 1, will be out in January 2016.

The first issue of The Chaucer Review appeared in Summer 1966 and was edited by Robert Worth Frank Jr. and Edmund Reiss. Bob Frank continued as its indefatigable editor until 2002 (Issue 36.4), and during his thirty-six-year tenure the journal acquired its well-earned status as a premier journal of medieval studies. As editors since 2002, we have striven to maintain the journal’s traditions and special place of service as a spur to scholarly advancement in the Chaucerian community.

We’ve taken care, when it has fallen to us, to steer The Chaucer Review through major milestones, namely its fortieth anniversary in 2006 and, now, its fiftieth. To commemorate the forty-year mark, an edited collection was published separately, Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches (Penn State UP, 2009), with new essays by John M. Bowers, Glenn Burger, Ardis Butterfield, Robert R. Edwards, Simon Horobin, Steven Justice, Laura Kendrick, Kathy Lavezzo, Seth Lerer, A. C. Spearing, and Karla Taylor. With unflagging support from Penn State University Press, the journal’s publisher since its inception, we anticipate another volume of essays to be released at the fifty-year mark in 2016: Chaucer: Visual Approaches, with contributions by Jessica Brantley, Joyce Coleman, Carolyn P. Collette, Alexandra Cook, Maidie Hilmo, Laura Kendrick, Ashby Kinch, Martha Rust, Sarah Stanbury, Kathryn R. Vulić, and ourselves.

Meanwhile, special sessions have been planned to mark the milestone at the International Congress of Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, in May 2016, and at the New Chaucer Society Meeting, Queen Mary University, London, in July 2016. We warmly invite you to join us at these sessions.

And with Chaucer Review 51.1 and onward, readers can expect to see the continuance of a tradition we’ve begun as editors: a now-and-again issue organized upon a special topic. Since 2005, the journal has released six special issues: (1) Chaucer and Aesthetics, 39.3 (Jan. 2005); (2) The Legacy of New Criticism: Revisiting the Work of E. Talbot Donaldson, 41.3 (Jan. 2007), edited with Bonnie Wheeler and Carolynn Van Dyke; (3) Time, Measure, and Value in Chaucer’s Art and Chaucer’s World, 43.4 (Apr. 2009), edited with Carolyn P. Collette and Nancy Mason Bradbury; (4) Studies in Middle English Poetry in Honor of C. David Benson, 46.1/2 (Apr. 2011), edited with Daniel Donoghue, James Simpson, and Nicholas Watson; (5) Medieval English Manuscripts: Form, Aesthetics, and the Literary Text, 47.4 (Apr. 2013), edited with Arthur Bahr and Alexandra Gillespie; and (6) Thinking Historically after Historicism: Essays in Memory of Lee Patterson, 48.4 (Apr. 2014), edited with Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington.

Another special issue will appear in The Chaucer Review 51.1 (Jan. 2016), addressing the topic of Women’s Literary Culture and Late Medieval English Writing. With guest editors Liz Herbert McAvoy and Diane Watt, it will include the following essays and authors: “Affective Reading: Chaucer, Women, and Romance” (Corinne Saunders); “Small Consolation? Goscelin of St. Bertin’s Liber confortatorius and the Middle English Pearl” (Diane Watt); “The Sea Ground and the London Street: The Ascetic Self in Julian of Norwich and Thomas Hoccleve” (Amy Appleford); “‘O der lady, be my help’: Women’s Visionary Writing and the Devotional Literary Canon” (Liz Herbert McAvoy); “Chaucer, the Chaucerian Tradition, and Female Monastic Readers” (Nancy Bradley Warren); and “‘The details of life and the pulsings of affect’: Virginia...