Project MUSE®: The Chaucer Review - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/38
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in The Chaucer Review.daily12026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 34, no. 3 (2000) through current issueLatest Articles: The Chaucer ReviewTWOProject MUSE®The Chaucer Review1528-42040009-2002Latest articles in The Chaucer Review. Feed provided by Project MUSE®About This Issue
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985373
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This collection of articles on Chaucer and Rhetoric, which has been prepared as a special issue of The Chaucer Review, commences immediately after an essay included here as part of a current conversation about editorial practices when preparing a scholarly edition of Chaucer's texts. A. S. G. Edwards offered an assessment of the new Oxford Chaucer's editing methods in an article appearing in the October 2025 issue of this journal. The Oxford editors Christopher Cannon and James Simpson offer here their response.This special issue marks the centennial of John Matthews Manly's important 1926 article, "Chaucer and the Rhetoricians." Guest editors Joseph Turner and Martin Camargo have assembled a distinguished group of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/38/image/coversmallAbout This Issue2026-03-31text/htmlen-USAbout This Issue2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®63012026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Plain Speaking: A Response to A. S. G. Edwards, "Editing and The Oxford Chaucer"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985374
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We begin with a sigh: we had hoped that we would never have to write a response like this, and that our decision to edit Chaucer would not be seen as the temerity to edit Chaucer.1 We expected and welcomed critique but hoped that conversations about our edition—and others—might be governed by what Donald Davidson called a principle of charity whereby communication is only really possible when both parties begin with the presumption that the other makes sense.2 We are saddened by the acrimony that now faces us, but also realize we must both defend our work and ensure that seeing it clearly remains possible.We refer to the essay by A. S. G. Edwards, "Editing and The Oxford Chaucer," published in the October 2025
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/38/image/coversmallPlain Speaking: A Response to A. S. G. Edwards, "Editing and The Oxford Chaucer"2026-03-31text/htmlen-USPlain Speaking: A Response to A. S. G. Edwards, "Editing and The Oxford Chaucer"2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®462052026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Messy Chaucer
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985376
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In this article, I explore the theoretical grounds for a problem that I will call Chaucer's "messiness." A poet famous for architectural control of big narrative structures in a variety of genres—notably Troilus and Criseyde, the Knight's Tale, the Franklin's Tale, and the Parliament of Fowls—at times seems to lose that control, ignoring the consequences. By "messiness," I do not mean the local incongruities that can produce irresistible comedy in otherwise high-minded settings, such as Pandarus's scolding of Troilus for loss of bedroom courage (Tr, 3.1098–99), or the narrator's leave-taking of Palamon and Arcite mid-combat, up to their ankles in blood (KnT, I 1660–62). Nor, under "messiness," do I include the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/38/image/coversmallMessy Chaucer2026-03-31text/htmlen-USMessy Chaucer2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®1080832026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Chaucer's Rhetoric of Sound
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985377
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As a discipline everywhere concerned with speech, rhetoric might be said to take sound as its proper domain, so the phrase a "rhetoric of sound" is a tautology. But, as Aristotle had it, speech (dialektos) should be understood as distinct from both voice (phoné) and sound (psophos). Dialektos, he said, is "the articulation of voice by means of the tongue," whereas psophos can be produced "by other parts of the body." Aristotle's paradigmatic examples are not human, but rather the bee who "buzzes" (bombéō) and the cicada who "sings" (aeídō).1 The buzz and the song are psophos because they are "unscriptable," or what Aristotle elsewhere calls "inarticulate" (agrámmata).2 A rhetoric of the sound that language cannot
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/38/image/coversmallChaucer's Rhetoric of Sound2026-03-31text/htmlen-USChaucer's Rhetoric of Sound2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®828152026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31"O sely preest, o sely innocent!": The Rhetoric of Religious Feeling in Chaucer
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985378
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Chaucer is fascinated by the rhetoric of the emotions.1 His earliest known works reveal a preoccupation with the languages of fin' amors and Ovidianism; they use the different affective registers of these discourses to reflect on the discourses themselves and on the different perspectives and conceptual apparatuses that they bring with them. The Book of the Duchess, for instance, is a complex and contradictory web of emotive effects. Ovidian pathos (Ceyx and Alcyone) is set against the artful intensity of fin' amors ("y am sorwe and sorwe ys y" [597]), and both are in turn set against the Black Knight's long (tedious?) courtship narrative. Counterposed to these is the poem's final painful abbreviatio ("Is that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/38/image/coversmall"O sely preest, o sely innocent!": The Rhetoric of Religious Feeling in Chaucer2026-03-31text/htmlen-US"O sely preest, o sely innocent!": The Rhetoric of Religious Feeling in Chaucer2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®1340562026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Making and Unmaking: Maternal Rhetoric in Fragment VI of the Canterbury Tales
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985379
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To commemorate the hundredth anniversary of J. M. Manly's "Chaucer and the Rhetoricians," it is fitting that, in light of contemporary feminist scholarship, we expand the company of rhetoricians influencing the fourteenth-century poet to include women.1 While others in this special issue will focus on Chaucerian narratives that project women's oratory (such as the Legend of Good Women) and on reader responses often associated with women (such as affect), I lay out discursive moves in the Canterbury Tales that are based on or react to medieval principles for women's speech in order to display differing representations of maternal rhetoric.2 Chaucer pointed to the various ways that mothers (both secular and divine)
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/38/image/coversmallMaking and Unmaking: Maternal Rhetoric in Fragment VI of the Canterbury Tales2026-03-31text/htmlen-USMaking and Unmaking: Maternal Rhetoric in Fragment VI of the Canterbury Tales2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®1144962026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Rhetorical Rhythms of Troy: Chaucer, Guido delle Colonne, and the Ars dictaminis
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985380
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In the House of Fame, the narrator Geffrey gazes upon the statues of celebrated auctores who had recounted the fall of Troy, including Homer, Dares, Dictys, the elusive Lollius, and the "Englyssh Gaufride" (1470).1 Guido delle Colonne, the thirteenth-century Sicilian poet and judge, is one of these lionized figures, but his Latin prose history, Historia destructionis Troiae, is rarely considered an important source for Chaucer, despite its popularity, which is attested by approximately 250 manuscript witnesses.2 This neglect is particularly the case for Troilus and Criseyde, where one might expect Chaucer to draw on so well-known an authority on the Trojan War. Even in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, in which Guido
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/38/image/coversmallRhetorical Rhythms of Troy: Chaucer, Guido delle Colonne, and the Ars dictaminis2026-03-31text/htmlen-USRhetorical Rhythms of Troy: Chaucer, Guido delle Colonne, and the Ars dictaminis2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®1311432026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Character and Control in Troilus and Criseyde
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985381
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In his influential "Chaucer and the Rhetoricians," J. M. Manly claims that Chaucer's growth as an artist can be judged through the gradual "displacement of the older rhetorical [methods] by the new psychological methods."1 According to Manly, Chaucer's talent for characterization, in particular, developed when he abandoned the techniques of rhetoric: "Chaucer was endowed with the temperament, not of the rhetorician, but of the artist"; Manly defines "artistic temperament" as Chaucer's
growing recognition that for him at least the right way to amplify a story was not to expand it by rhetorical devices, but to conceive it in terms of the life which he had observed so closely, to imagine how each of the characters
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/38/image/coversmallCharacter and Control in Troilus and Criseyde2026-03-31text/htmlen-USCharacter and Control in Troilus and Criseyde2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®1091942026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Introduction: Chaucer and Rhetoric
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986371
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John Matthews Manly (1865–1940) is well known to students of Chaucer through the eight-volume Text of the Canterbury Tales (1940), a meticulous collation of variants from over eighty different manuscripts that he completed with Edith Rickert,1 and through Some New Light on Chaucer (1926), his study of possible historical models for Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims. The present collection marks the centennial of another influential publication by Manly: his seminal article "Chaucer and the Rhetoricians."2 Its origins apparently can be traced to a transatlantic voyage during which Manly perused the editions of medieval arts of poetry, such as Matthew of Vendôme's Ars versificatoria (Art of the Versifier, ca. 1175) and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/38/image/coversmallIntroduction: Chaucer and Rhetoric2026-03-31text/htmlen-USIntroduction: Chaucer and Rhetoric2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®616252026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31