Project MUSE®: Studies in the Age of Chaucer - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Studies in the Age of Chaucer.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1979) through current issueLatest Articles: Studies in the Age of ChaucerTWOProject MUSE®Studies in the Age of Chaucer1949-07550190-2407Latest articles in Studies in the Age of Chaucer. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Going Home
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977374
<p></p>
In one of the many movements toward closure at the end of Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer addresses a section of his audience:Chaucer’s redirection of young listeners and readers away from the amorous narrative in which he has worked so hard over 8,000 lines to engage our attention has been much discussed, like the similar moment of Retraction at the end of the Canterbury Tales. These are notoriously difficult tonal shifts to negotiate. In the Tales, Chaucer addresses his readers, but the tone is predominantly one of personal penitence: “Wherfore I biseke you mekely, for the mercy of God, that ye preye for me that Crist have mercy on me and foryeve me my giltes” (Ret, 1083): “I beseech you that you might pray for
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallGoing Home2025-12-12text/htmlen-USGoing Home2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®1130162026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Collecting Chaucer
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977375
<p></p>
It is an extraordinary honor to deliver the biennial Chaucer lecture at the Huntington Library, home of the Ellesmere Chaucer, and of one of the most famous collections in the world. Today, I’m going to be exploring two contrasting ways of approaching collecting: as something deadening and as something generative. The lecture is divided into four parts: Part I explores theories of collecting; Part II thinks about the Ellesmere Chaucer and its place here; Part III is text-based, and considers Chaucer himself as a collector, and Part IV is a meditation on my own experience of collecting and exhibiting Chaucer earlier this year.In his essay “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Collecting,” Walter Benjamin meditates on
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallCollecting Chaucer2025-12-12text/htmlen-USCollecting Chaucer2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®1387912026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Dwelling in The Miller’s Tale: Ark, Archive, Stage
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977376
<p></p>
At the very end of The Miller’s Tale, the hall in the carpenter’s house receives the town. Oxford neighbors “smale and grete” (MilT, 3826), or from across the social spectrum, flock into the house.1 They stare at John, the carpenter and homeowner, who has fallen from the rafters and broken his arm. When Nicholas, the boarder, and Alisoun, John’s wife, explain that John suspended tubs up in the rafters so the three of them could be saved from a second Flood, the neighbors “kiken” and “cape” (3841)—or peer and stare—up into the roof. They laugh. The whole town judges that the carpenter is crazy. Everyone laughs.In bringing in the neighbors, who share the story with the whole town, Chaucer returns to questions about
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallDwelling in The Miller’s Tale: Ark, Archive, Stage2025-12-12text/htmlen-USDwelling in The Miller’s Tale: Ark, Archive, Stage2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®1999092026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Janus at the Portal: Time and Magic in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977377
<p></p>
Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale is a favorite among critics and scholars because it presents wide-ranging thematic ores potentially rich for mining. An expansive view of medieval life and literature lies within the text, such as gender and marriage relations (which have dominated much of the conversation historically), class systems in society, truth and honor, Anglo-French entanglements, the meaning of gentilesse, and language and genre, to name only a few.1 A primary vein has also focused on the magic in the tale, and on the clerk of Orléans and his role in enacting transformations or illusions.2 He is a crucial character in driving the story forward, and the narrator’s exposition on his astrological
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallJanus at the Portal: Time and Magic in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale2025-12-12text/htmlen-USJanus at the Portal: Time and Magic in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®2173462026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Medieval Ruin Consciousness: Saint Erkenwald and the Politics of Decay
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977378
<p></p>
The heavinesse of Stone did so oppress me that I was close to Extinction, and I fancied that I could see in the Engraver’s lines the sides of Demons, crumbled Walls, and half-humane Creatures rising from the Dust. There was some thing that waited for me there, already in Ruines.In 1980, the Scottish band Simple Minds issued a new record, Empires and Dance. The album’s cover featured a photograph by German artist Michael Reutz that is evocative of the power of ruins. In the foreground of the picture sits the bust of some military officer in front of a clay wall. Lit up, the bust forms a contrast with the wall behind; yet both wall and bust demonstrate decay. Plants push out randomly from within the clay structure
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallMedieval Ruin Consciousness: Saint Erkenwald and the Politics of Decay2025-12-12text/htmlen-USMedieval Ruin Consciousness: Saint Erkenwald and the Politics of Decay2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®1431592026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Reading a Philosophical Florilegium in London in the 1380s: Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love and the Parvi flores (Auctoritates Aristotelis)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977379
<p></p>
Some major paradigms that frame our understanding of later medieval culture—the expansion of literacy, a shift from intensive to extensive reading practices, the increasing systematization of knowledge—have been shaped by the evidence of materials produced in institutions of advanced learning, especially the universities.1 Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier’s magisterial multiauthor history of reading in Europe, for example, focuses almost exclusively on the role of scholastic reading practices in shaping wider late medieval literate culture.2 But even though the evidence for these emergent cultural patterns is drawn from the materials produced in elite institutions of learning, historians of medieval philosophy
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallReading a Philosophical Florilegium in London in the 1380s: Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love and the Parvi flores (Auctoritates Aristotelis)2025-12-12text/htmlen-USReading a Philosophical Florilegium in London in the 1380s: Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love and the Parvi flores (Auctoritates Aristotelis)2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®1860042026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12“The bokes duelle”: John Gower, Futurity, and the Development of the Late Medieval Archive
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977380
<p></p>
In the prologue to the Confessio Amantis, John Gower imagined that future readers would encounter his writings “tyme comende after this” (Prol.11).1 Archival developments in his own time would do much to realize this aspiration. Over the course of Gower’s writing life, a generation of English archivists steadily intensified cataloguing efforts, reorganized written materials, and built new storage rooms to serve the needs of expanding administrative bureaucracies. As Gower predicted that the texts of his generation would “beleve to the worldes eere,” persisting even “whan we ben dede and elleswhere,” the institutions that would collect his works were changing in the precise ways that would make this endurance
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmall“The bokes duelle”: John Gower, Futurity, and the Development of the Late Medieval Archive2025-12-12text/htmlen-US“The bokes duelle”: John Gower, Futurity, and the Development of the Late Medieval Archive2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®1647782026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Going Places Not Undocumented: Obedience, Jurisdiction, and “Ordyr” in The Book of Margery Kempe
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977381
<p></p>
Since the time the Vatican first allowed access to the medieval registers of the Apostolic Penitentiary in 1983, scholars have been discovering a wealth of petitions made by penitents from across Christendom. Such petitions were formal requests that, as Kirsi Salonen has helpfully explained, fall under “four different types of grace”: absolutions, dispensations, licenses, and official declarations.1 Exploring the Vatican Secret Archives in the summer of 2008 in order to prepare a second edition of Pope Pius II’s Penitentiary Registers for the Repertorium poenitentiariae Germanicum, the historian of medieval canon law Wolfgang P. Müller happened upon a petition by a certain “Margarita Kempa” from the diocese of
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallGoing Places Not Undocumented: Obedience, Jurisdiction, and “Ordyr” in The Book of Margery Kempe2025-12-12text/htmlen-USGoing Places Not Undocumented: Obedience, Jurisdiction, and “Ordyr” in The Book of Margery Kempe2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®1606192026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12COLLOQUIUM. Psychoanalysis, Transgender Studies, and Medieval Studies: Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977382
<p></p>
The following colloquium might seem to be gathered under a surprising rubric, a yoking together of three topics—transgender studies, psychoanalysis, and medieval studies—that are not in obvious relation to each other. Transgender medieval studies is a vibrant, relatively young field of scholarly inquiry. Psychoanalytic medievalism had a significant efflorescence that has subsided, though its insights have been absorbed and transformed with persistent effects upon our understanding of medieval literature.1 More broadly, psychoanalysis as both theory and practice has a long history of hostility to the claims of transgender individuals and has as often as not been an obstacle to the flourishing of transgender lives.2
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallCOLLOQUIUM. Psychoanalysis, Transgender Studies, and Medieval Studies: Introduction2025-12-12text/htmlen-USCOLLOQUIUM. Psychoanalysis, Transgender Studies, and Medieval Studies: Introduction2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®535982026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Lacan and the Medieval Gender Metaphor
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977383
<p></p>
I come to psychoanalysis from trans medieval studies because my primary concern has become the question of language’s relation to the establishment of sexual difference. An essential question for transgender studies is the question of gender as a concept. Can we rely on the assumption that there is a “gender” to be found in medieval society and culture? I argue that if there is a medieval concept of “gender,” it articulates itself through Latin grammar. Grammar is the standard point of reference for conceptualizing differences between femininity, masculinity, and their others. This leads to the metaphorical use of a grammatical category (grammatical gender) to stand in for categories of people: the metaphor of
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallLacan and the Medieval Gender Metaphor2025-12-12text/htmlen-USLacan and the Medieval Gender Metaphor2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®338852026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Skin Deep: The Medieval Werewolf and Trans Embodiment
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977384
<p></p>
Two of the most frequently discussed werewolf narratives of medieval Europe are also two of the most divergent in their representation of embodiment. In Marie de France’s Bisclavret, a knight reveals to his wife that he is a werewolf, and his wife then plots to steal his clothes and trap him in wolf form. He becomes the king’s pet and is restored to human form after his wife is forced to return his clothes, although his closed-door transformation leaves many questions of form and identity still unanswered.1 The werewolf body and its metamorphosis in Bisclavret are ambiguous and unexplained, a fusion that makes it impossible to completely distinguish animal from human. By contrast, in Gerald of Wales’s Topographia
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallSkin Deep: The Medieval Werewolf and Trans Embodiment2025-12-12text/htmlen-USSkin Deep: The Medieval Werewolf and Trans Embodiment2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®330032026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12“For silence relieves anxiety”: The Name of the Father in the Roman de Silence
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977385
<p></p>
Jacques lacan’s concept of the “Name of the Father” appears in his seminar “The Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real” and in his lectures on the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. This theory positions the Father, often with a capital “F,” as that upon which the subject depends in order to be formed as a subject at all. Lacan puns in French on the ways in which the word for name (nom) and the word for no (non) are homophones; the Father enables the subject’s existence but also refuses and rejects the subject.1 This language also evokes the standard line “in nomine patris,” which appears as part of the phrase “in nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti” at the conclusion of a Christian prayer in Latin.
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmall“For silence relieves anxiety”: The Name of the Father in the Roman de Silence2025-12-12text/htmlen-US“For silence relieves anxiety”: The Name of the Father in the Roman de Silence2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®483682026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Phallic Giants and Absent Elf-Queens: Transmasculine Fantasies in Chaucer’s The Tale of Sir Thopas
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977386
<p></p>
Psychoanalysis persists in a vexed relationship to trans studies, contributing to current harmful discourses that categorize trans bodies and fantasies as pathological.1 In her reconfiguration of psychoanalysis as the “worst kind” of chaser that fetishizes trans bodies, McKenzie Wark forcefully condemns the field as “[f]eeding off [trans women], taking up [their] time and resources, and offering nothing in exchange.”2 It is vital to acknowledge the methodological blind spots of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. These approaches often inadvertently reduce trans lives to mere allegories of gender fluidity or pathology. However, the medieval offers a space to investigate fantasy and desire from a trans
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallPhallic Giants and Absent Elf-Queens: Transmasculine Fantasies in Chaucer’s The Tale of Sir Thopas2025-12-12text/htmlen-USPhallic Giants and Absent Elf-Queens: Transmasculine Fantasies in Chaucer’s The Tale of Sir Thopas2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®422182026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Women, and What Makes Them
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977387
<p></p>
. . . the monstrousness of selfhood is intimately embedded within the question of female autobiography.Lizzy Grant’s stage name is a cringing, awkward moniker: “Lana,” presumably, from Lana Turner, and “Del Rey,” a California-inflected Spanglishism meaning “of the king.” The name enacts a dispossession, in which the body and soul of the singer are delivered over to another––a king who haunts many of her songs, which brood in resentful desire. In “Off to the Races,” her first album’s apogeic exhibition of frenzied desire, the form of abject self-becoming she has in mind casts her as the phantasmatic Lolita invented by Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel: “light of your life, fire of your loins / tell me you
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallWomen, and What Makes Them2025-12-12text/htmlen-USWomen, and What Makes Them2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®539312026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Chaucer’s Ethical Philosophy by Laura Ashe (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977388
<p></p>
Laura Ashe’s Chaucer’s Ethical Philosophy is a dazzling and invigorating return to theoretical medievalist scholarship. Her argument, that Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetry grapples with the ethical problems posed by recognition, is well conceived, well supported, and well-executed, with heady turns to modern and medieval philosophy. Across its five chapters, the book considers Hegel, Levinas, and Wittgenstein, as well as Aquinas, Boethius, and Augustine. Through close readings of Machaut, Dante, and Boccaccio, Ashe situates some of Chaucer’s most contested works, including The Knight’s Tale, Troilus and Criseyde, and The Book of the Duchess, alongside engagements with The Clerk’s Tale, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallChaucer’s Ethical Philosophy by Laura Ashe (review)2025-12-12text/htmlen-USChaucer’s Ethical Philosophy by Laura Ashe (review)2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®99142026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Patience ed. by Helen Barr (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977389
<p></p>
This pocket-sized edition of Patience aims to solve a serious problem for teachers of Middle English: how can we help students to access the works of the Gawain-poet, so rich and lively, but at the same time so linguistically difficult? While Simon Armitage’s poetic translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl have been publishing successes, Patience, ideally suited to the classroom with its short-story length and exciting narrative, has not had the same treatment. But Broadview published Kevin Gustafson’s edition and translation of Cleanness in 2010, and this Patience edition now completes the set.The edition includes a substantial introduction and a set of appendices that do an excellent job of
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallPatience ed. by Helen Barr (review)2025-12-12text/htmlen-USPatience ed. by Helen Barr (review)2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®116132026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12The Oxford Chaucer ed. by Christopher Cannon and James Simpson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977390
<p></p>
“We are convinced,” write Christopher Cannon and James Simpson, that the new Oxford edition offers “the best available text of Chaucer’s works.” Their ambition matches the importance of the occasion: this is one of the first scholarly editions of Chaucer’s complete poetry and prose published since the Riverside almost forty years ago, with text and gloss prepared by two leading scholars who have shaped major developments in late medieval studies. Our brief review won’t do justice to the capaciousness of the work, which runs to 1,500 pages across two print volumes, with a digital version available through Oxford Scholarly Editions Online. Instead, we focus on this edition’s most distinctive features, with the goal
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallThe Oxford Chaucer ed. by Christopher Cannon and James Simpson (review)2025-12-12text/htmlen-USThe Oxford Chaucer ed. by Christopher Cannon and James Simpson (review)2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®157442026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12English Literature and the Crusades: Anxieties of Holy War, 1291–1453 by Marcel Elias (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977391
<p></p>
Marcel Elias’s 2024 study English Literature and the Crusades embodies a powerful intervention in two interrelated and overlapping fields. While primarily posititioned as a contribution to the field of crusade literature, his study also contributes significantly to the study of popular medieval romance, offering up numerous insights into the importance of the genre as part of what has been termed “recovery literature.” Growing out of ongoing research that has appeared over the past decade or so in journal articles, chapters, and conference presentations, English Literature and the Crusades clearly positions Elias as one of the leading voices in the current second wave of crusade literature scholarship. The book
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallEnglish Literature and the Crusades: Anxieties of Holy War, 1291–1453 by Marcel Elias (review)2025-12-12text/htmlen-USEnglish Literature and the Crusades: Anxieties of Holy War, 1291–1453 by Marcel Elias (review)2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®88862026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Fantastic Histories: Medieval Fairy Narratives and the Limits of Wonder by Victoria Flood (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977392
<p></p>
The lovely cover of Victoria Flood’s book features a manuscript image showing Mélusine, the fairy-mother founder of the house of Lusignan, marrying Count Raymondin. The image reflects the central interest of the book, which is not just any fairy narratives but, rather, narratives relating to the fairy mother type of which Mélusine is a supreme example. Two chapters of the study take up Mélusine narratives specifically, but the broader content is suggested in the title’s combination of fantasy, history, narrative, and wonder. This is not a theme-spotting book. It is not a simple enumeration of fairy mother narratives. It is a careful, often challenging consideration of the kind of historiographical, narratological
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallFantastic Histories: Medieval Fairy Narratives and the Limits of Wonder by Victoria Flood (review)2025-12-12text/htmlen-USFantastic Histories: Medieval Fairy Narratives and the Limits of Wonder by Victoria Flood (review)2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®119202026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Recipes and Book Culture in England, 1350–1600 ed. by Carrie Griffin and Hannah Ryley (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977393
<p></p>
Recipes are all the rage. In recent decades, the study of recipe literature has been experiencing a veritable boom, with recipes produced in late medieval and early modern England receiving the most scholarly attention. This surge of interest in all-things-recipes has been coming from multiple methodological directions and engaging with recipes from a range of genres (e.g., pharmacy, alchemy, cooking, book-making, and other crafts, just to name a few) and written in varied codicological contexts and languages. Recipes and Book Culture in England, 1350–1600, co-edited by Carrie Griffin and Hannah Ryley, is one of the latest publications to emerge within the “recipes turn” (9). While some might wonder if the study of
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallRecipes and Book Culture in England, 1350–1600 ed. by Carrie Griffin and Hannah Ryley (review)2025-12-12text/htmlen-USRecipes and Book Culture in England, 1350–1600 ed. by Carrie Griffin and Hannah Ryley (review)2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®122872026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Looking at Medieval Books: Learning to See by Ralph Hanna (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977394
<p></p>
Looking at Medieval Books represents the third in a series of instructional books penned by Ralph Hanna and published through the Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies series (Liverpool University Press). Like Introducing English Medieval Book History (2013) and Editing Medieval Texts (2015) before it, Looking at Medieval Books develops on Hanna’s time teaching graduate students about medieval manuscripts. In particular, this book (perhaps more so than either of the previous) responds to a gap that Hanna (along with the late Jeremy Griffiths) perceived in available resources: “an experiential exercise” (8) that walks students through “the order by which one examines (and re-examines) a book” (9), rather than a guide to
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallLooking at Medieval Books: Learning to See by Ralph Hanna (review)2025-12-12text/htmlen-USLooking at Medieval Books: Learning to See by Ralph Hanna (review)2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®165442026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Reimagining the Past in the Borderlands of Medieval England and Wales by Georgia Henley (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977395
<p></p>
The dual objective of the Oxford Textual Perspectives series—to contribute to the field of English literary studies in new and innovative ways on the one hand, and to be accessible to the nonspecialist on the other—is a tall order.1 It is, however, excellently fulfilled by Georgia Henley’s monograph. Her focus is on the border zone between England and Wales— known as the March of Wales—its culture, identity, and literary production. Henley defines Marcher as “a third category of identity that was influenced by Welsh, English, and other cultures, and adopted different aspects of those identities to suit different contexts (such as the Galfridian past), as befits a border culture” (34). The book thus contributes to
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallReimagining the Past in the Borderlands of Medieval England and Wales by Georgia Henley (review)2025-12-12text/htmlen-USReimagining the Past in the Borderlands of Medieval England and Wales by Georgia Henley (review)2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®297202026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12White before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages by Wan-Chuan Kao (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977396
<p></p>
While the association of European racism with the Atlantic slave trade and modern colonization might seem to make the European Middle Ages irrelevant to questions of race, the opposite is the case: questions of race are complexly and tellingly bound up with the medieval. Notoriously, racists have long characterized medieval northern Europe as both the origin and the apex of white supremacy. Consider the Germanic heroism hailed by philologists from Grímur Thorkelin to J. R. R. Tolkien. But, in recent decades, a radical and much-welcome shift has occurred, as anti-racist medievalists have directed a critical eye toward the whiteness of both their discipline (itself grounded in white supremacy) and its subject. While
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallWhite before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages by Wan-Chuan Kao (review)2025-12-12text/htmlen-USWhite before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages by Wan-Chuan Kao (review)2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®163662026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Impossible Recovery: Julian of Norwich and the Phenomenology of Well-Being by Hannah Lucas (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977397
<p></p>
This is the most exhilarating book in medieval studies I’ve read in some time. It continues the recent recovery, to use a word of rich significance in Lucas’s book, of Julian as an important medieval and modern theologian, and presents her here as a significant phenomenologist with substantial challenges to contemporary phenomenology. This is not just an important engagement with several contemporary theoretical concerns (disability studies, medical humanities, phenomenology), nor an important reading of Julian’s Showings, but a project that couldn’t be done without all of those together. It’s a model of how to think theoretically with, in, and about the Middle Ages.Lucas builds on the recent emergence of Julian
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallImpossible Recovery: Julian of Norwich and the Phenomenology of Well-Being by Hannah Lucas (review)2025-12-12text/htmlen-USImpossible Recovery: Julian of Norwich and the Phenomenology of Well-Being by Hannah Lucas (review)2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®168902026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Female Devotion and Textile Imagery in Medieval English Literature by Anna McKay (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977398
<p></p>
Medieval Christian thought had frequent recourse to the figurative potential of clothing. Often extrapolating on biblical precursors, or on classical philosophy, early theologians exploited the made and worn status of fabric in order to convey spiritual concepts linked to the body and, most frequently, to the incarnated body of their man-god, Jesus. Found in biblical commentaries of Origen, Augustine of Hippo, and Gregory the Great, such writings set up an expansive tradition that made its way into texts that straddled, and even outlived, the medieval period. It is within this sprawling tradition that Anna McKay establishes her subject, carving out the role that women played, or had attributed to them, in cloth
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallFemale Devotion and Textile Imagery in Medieval English Literature by Anna McKay (review)2025-12-12text/htmlen-USFemale Devotion and Textile Imagery in Medieval English Literature by Anna McKay (review)2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®124752026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Instrumentality: On Technical Objects and Orientations in the Later Middle Ages by J. Allan Mitchell (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977399
<p></p>
The book figures decisively in Mitchell’s study as an instrument of thought, both as a record and as a sorting of information. Somewhat ironically, Instrumentality lacks the search tool of a bibliography. No doubt the press and not the author made this choice, yet the absence of the navigational help made me think about the strangeness as well as the usefulness of instruments. More of that later.Mitchell argues that contemporary critiques of instrumentality have much to learn from medieval discussions of the “tools of life” (instrumenta vitae) (7). Granted, the different economy of advanced capitalism’s “ruthless metrics” (vii) motivates today’s pejorative meaning, but Mitchell’s long view aims to rebalance
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallInstrumentality: On Technical Objects and Orientations in the Later Middle Ages by J. Allan Mitchell (review)2025-12-12text/htmlen-USInstrumentality: On Technical Objects and Orientations in the Later Middle Ages by J. Allan Mitchell (review)2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®141022026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Monstrous Fantasies: England’s Crusading Imaginary and the Romance of Recovery, 1300–1500 by Leila K. Norako (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977400
<p></p>
Leila K. Norako’s Monstrous Fantasies identifies a subgenre of late Middle English romance that indulges a desire for Latin Christian supremacy with England at the helm. Norako ventures into well-trodden scholarly ground that has for decades shown the Islamophobic underpinnings of this literary landscape—such as in the work of Dorothee Metlitzki, Jacqueline de Weever, Geraldine Heng, Suzanne Akbari, and many more—not to revise or contest this critical history, but to insist on its continued importance and to offer new frameworks for expanding and deepening how students and scholars may engage the ideological work of late Middle English romance. Throughout its robust introduction, five chapters, and coda, Monstrous
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallMonstrous Fantasies: England’s Crusading Imaginary and the Romance of Recovery, 1300–1500 by Leila K. Norako (review)2025-12-12text/htmlen-USMonstrous Fantasies: England’s Crusading Imaginary and the Romance of Recovery, 1300–1500 by Leila K. Norako (review)2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®124502026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition: From Chaucer to Spenser by R. D. Perry (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977401
<p></p>
R. D. Perry’s elegant book offers an ambitious and novel take on the formation of literary traditions by drawing attention to the intimate coteries—not authors, but coteries—that stand at their founts. In so doing, Coterie Poetics intervenes against the enduring legacy of T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which has continued, since 1919, to invite scholars to focus on individual authorial utterances as the basic building blocks of literary tradition. But authors write for audiences, and audiences are the ones who actually define traditions. The coterie occupies a unique and previously unexamined role within this process.Scholarship has tended to treat literary coteries and literary traditions
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallCoterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition: From Chaucer to Spenser by R. D. Perry (review)2025-12-12text/htmlen-USCoterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition: From Chaucer to Spenser by R. D. Perry (review)2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®123882026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Resistance to Love in Medieval English Romance: Negotiating Consent, Gender, and Desire by Hannah Piercy (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977402
<p></p>
Piercy’s innovative and wide-ranging study of characters within romance who resist love proposals promotes conversation between two burgeoning fields of inquiry into medieval culture: queer and trans studies, and research on the sexual politics of consent. As is obvious, and not only to the cynical, characters who declare their love in medieval romance are sometimes motivated by the desire for sex as much as by their romantic impulses. However, Piercy makes a convincing case that for the most part, Middle English romances promoted (what we would term) hetero-cis-normative love-and-marriage narratives whose resolutions discouraged queer desire, adultery, and alliances between persons of differing status or
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallResistance to Love in Medieval English Romance: Negotiating Consent, Gender, and Desire by Hannah Piercy (review)2025-12-12text/htmlen-USResistance to Love in Medieval English Romance: Negotiating Consent, Gender, and Desire by Hannah Piercy (review)2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®123052026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Medieval Manuscripts, Readers and Texts: Essays in Honour of Kathryn Kerby-Fulton by Misty Schieberle, ed. by AManda Bohne (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977403
<p></p>
It is always interesting to look through the list of publications of the honoree in festschrifts because you can see mapped out there the path that the scholarly life has taken and the sometimes very diverse threads that make up an intellectual identity. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton may be best known to us for her work on Piers Plowman and other devotional literature, the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, and medieval manuscripts, but we find threaded through her career a keen interest in dance (especially ballet), women’s literature and women’s studies, and the Middle Ages in Ireland in this very impressive list of publications (we learn, in the notes to one essay, that she also has a passion for William Blake). We see too how
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallMedieval Manuscripts, Readers and Texts: Essays in Honour of Kathryn Kerby-Fulton by Misty Schieberle, ed. by AManda Bohne (review)2025-12-12text/htmlen-USMedieval Manuscripts, Readers and Texts: Essays in Honour of Kathryn Kerby-Fulton by Misty Schieberle, ed. by AManda Bohne (review)2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®114672026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Tropes of Engagement: Chaucer’s Italian Poetics of Intertextuality by Leah Schwebel (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977404
<p></p>
Leah Schwebel’s Tropes of Engagement: Chaucer’s Italian Poetics of Intertextuality bravely tackles one of the evergreen conundrums of Chaucer studies: why does Chaucer, who namechecks everyone from Homer to Petrarch, not identify the author who arguably most shaped him? It would be hard to overstate Giovanni Boccaccio’s influence upon Chaucer. There are the direct, but independent, translations (e.g., Troilus and Il filostrato, The Knight’s Tale and the Teseida); the indirect generic modelings (e.g., the encyclopedic biographies of The Monk’s Tale and De casibus virorum illustrium, the ambitious story contest underpinning the entire enterprise of the Canterbury Tales and the Decameron); the suggestive parallels
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallTropes of Engagement: Chaucer’s Italian Poetics of Intertextuality by Leah Schwebel (review)2025-12-12text/htmlen-USTropes of Engagement: Chaucer’s Italian Poetics of Intertextuality by Leah Schwebel (review)2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®157262026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Feminist Medievalisms: Embodiment and Vulnerability in Literature and Film by Usha Vishnuvajjala (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977405
<p></p>
Feminist Medievalisms is an ambitious book in which Usha Vishnuvajjala identifies gaps in medievalism studies to date and proposes an alternative mode of medievalism to fill them: the “feminist medievalism” of her title. As Vishnuvajjala observes, medievalism studies typically focus “on representations of institutional history, martial culture, or men’s writing, and on post-medieval engagements that are produced or enacted primarily by men” (1). When women appear in such scholarship, they frequently do so as victims of “misogyny and violence,” or as “exceptionally powerful women” who can beat the boys at their own game (1). Departing from such paradigms, Vishnuvajjala formulates a concept of feminist medievalism
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallFeminist Medievalisms: Embodiment and Vulnerability in Literature and Film by Usha Vishnuvajjala (review)2025-12-12text/htmlen-USFeminist Medievalisms: Embodiment and Vulnerability in Literature and Film by Usha Vishnuvajjala (review)2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®119792026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12The Language of Heresy in Late Medieval English Literature by Erin K. Wagner (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977406
<p></p>
The Language of Heresy has two main purposes: first, to explore how medieval discourses centering on heresy participated in a broader process of marginalizing identities; second, and consequently, to show how writers on both sides in religious controversy did not hesitate to use this marginalizing language against one another. Each of the book’s four main chapters is devoted to a particular identity: jangler, witch, <Jew>, and <Saracen>, with the angle brackets here used sensitively to acknowledge the inflammatory and problematic qualities of the terms under discussion. Throughout the book, there is a profound concern with “the larger context of access and authority” (88), with mediation and distortion in
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallThe Language of Heresy in Late Medieval English Literature by Erin K. Wagner (review)2025-12-12text/htmlen-USThe Language of Heresy in Late Medieval English Literature by Erin K. Wagner (review)2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®110932026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12The Making of Felony Procedure in Middle English Literature by Elise Wang (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977407
<p></p>
Middle English law-and-literature scholarship often moves unidirectionally: from law to literature. Such scholarship typically reads how literary texts relied on, experimented with, and reimagined the legal vocabularies they absorbed, or it conceptualizes literary texts as practical expressions of juridical theories. But Elise Wang’s The Making of Felony Procedure in Middle English Literature shows that medieval ideas about felony developed alongside and within literary texts. As Wang incisively puts it, felony was “a category made real by the force of law but whose boundaries were drawn by narrative, penitential, and poetic understandings of guilt, proof, and punishment” (3–4).To demonstrate the inextricable
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallThe Making of Felony Procedure in Middle English Literature by Elise Wang (review)2025-12-12text/htmlen-USThe Making of Felony Procedure in Middle English Literature by Elise Wang (review)2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®111592026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past by Hannah Weaver (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977408
<p></p>
Weaver’s Experimental Histories proposes interpolation as both a method of textual (and sometimes mental) composition in insular medieval history writing, and as a critical object. The book focuses on historiographical texts added in the midst of other texts. It is a novel approach to sidestep the binaries of scribes and authors, of originals and continuations, of source texts and translations, and of truth and fiction that have occupied studies of history writing. Above all, Weaver is interested in the multiple temporalities that interpolation can expose, with consequences, she argues, for historiographical narrative authority, for an ethics of reading, and for the ways that narrative and time can be textually
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallExperimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past by Hannah Weaver (review)2025-12-12text/htmlen-USExperimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past by Hannah Weaver (review)2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®80112026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12Medievalisms in a Global Age ed. by Angela Jane Weisl and Robert Squillace (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977409
<p></p>
Joining the recent body of work exploring the multifaceted, surprising, and sometimes strained relationship between medievalism and “global culture,” this rich collection of nineteen compact and readable essays offers a mirrorball (a mosaic shaped as a globe) of thought-provoking contemporary examples. Such a large number of essays demands a shaping principle, and the editors, Angela Jane Weisl and Robert Squillace, have chosen a spatial motif, dividing the volume into two roughly equal sections: the first ten essays represent “Local Spaces”—as the title suggests, these are medievalisms from a range of localities around the globe—while the remaining nine, gathered under the heading “Global Geographies,” explore
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallMedievalisms in a Global Age ed. by Angela Jane Weisl and Robert Squillace (review)2025-12-12text/htmlen-USMedievalisms in a Global Age ed. by Angela Jane Weisl and Robert Squillace (review)2025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®122012026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12An Annotated Chaucer Bibliography, 2023
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410
<p></p>
Regular contributors:Mark Allen, University of Texas at San AntonioStephanie Amsel, Southern Methodist University (Texas)Tim Arner, Grinnell College (Iowa)Debra Best, California State University at Dominguez HillsThomas H. Blake, Austin College (Texas)Agnès Blandeau, Université de Nantes (France)Margaret Connolly, University of St. Andrews (Scotland)Stefania D’Agata D’Ottavi, Università per Stranieri di Siena (Italy)Jamie C. Fumo, Florida State UniversityJames B. Harr III, North Carolina State UniversityDouglas W. Hayes, Lakehead UniversityAna Sáez Hidalgo, Universidad de Valladolid (Spain)Yoshinobu Kudo, Ishikawa Prefectural Nursing University (Japan)Daniel M. Murtaugh, Florida Atlantic UniversityThomas J.
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977410">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/416/image/coversmallAn Annotated Chaucer Bibliography, 20232025-12-12text/htmlen-USAn Annotated Chaucer Bibliography, 20232025-12-122025TWOProject MUSE®4481222026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-12