Month: April 2022

The Polyglot Miller’s Tale Returns!

2014 Polyglot Reading, NCS Congress, Reykjavik, Iceland

It’s that time again! We’re rounding up participants for the “Polyglot Miller’s Tale Reading” at the 2022 NCS Congress in Durham, UK.

After some shuffling to accommodate more participants, we’re happy to announce that the reading is now scheduled for Wednesday, 13 July, 7:30p to 8:30p.

Currently, we have volunteers to read in French, Italian, German, Polish, Arabic, Hebrew, Dutch, and (be still my heart!) Lithuanian. We’d still love to add more languages, such as Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Malayalam, Frisian, Romanian, Norwegian, Serbian, Icelandic, Spanish, Turkish, Afrikaans, Portuguese, Finnish, Estonian, Greek, Russian, Ewe, Farsi, Czech, Taiwainese, and any other language into which the tale has been translated. (For help finding a translation, contact us or refer to our list of translations; if you know of others, please let us know.)

Depending on the total number of volunteers, participants will be asked to read around 50-60 lines apiece.

If you’d like to be part of the fun, please email us (GlobalChaucers at gmail dot com) with this info:

  1. which language(s) you’d like to read in;
  2. if you possess a copy of The Miller’s Tale in that language (if you don’t, we likely can send a copy to you); and
  3. if you consent to being recorded (both audio/video).

In mid-May, we will send your line assignments (and a copy of your lines, if requested).

We appreciate your patience as we pull together what promises to be a lively event.  

Jos Charles’ feeld and its Chaucerian “anteseedynt”

By Candace Barrington

April 13, 2022

This past weekend (8-9 April) I attended the glorious Sewanee Medieval Colloquium organized in exquisite fashion by Stephanie Batkie at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Among the colloquium’s many highlights, getting to meet and talk to Jos Charles was at the top for me.

I became aware of Jos Charles and her verse when feeld appeared in 2018. As I describe in a forthcoming article, I immediately purchased the book but let it languish on my desk as other projects took precedence. When I finally read it a few months later, I was astonished by its powerful engagement with Middle English semiotics and semantics as a way to allow readers to understand one trans woman’s experience.

Jos Charles’s invitation to gain new knowledge “out of olde bokes” (PF 24) is worth accepting.

Lost Chaucer: Now Found

By Candace Barrington

March 30, 2022

This story is not global. And for that matter, it’s not very Chaucerian. And yet, it’s a good story about the ways Chaucer’s name and his Wife of Bath were used to promote cultural projects that had almost nothing to do with either Chaucer or his Tales.

In 2016, I published an essay in Chaucer on Screen, a collection edited by Tison Pugh and Kathleen Kelly. Titled “Lost Chaucer: Natalie Wood’s ‘The Deadly Riddle’ and the Golden Age of American Television,” the essay describes my search for a television episode cryptically referenced in a Natalie Wood biography as a “now-lost” 1955 film, The Wife of Bath, starring Ms Wood. My essay documents the few ephemera and paratexts I could locate, and it records my efforts to imaginatively recreate the film’s contents.

In December 2021, I received a surprise email from Jeff Joseph, a semi-retired motion picture archivist. Lately he has been restoring old television material, and he had recently completed work on “The Deadly Riddle.” The restored episode can now be watched online: https://youtu.be/iH6Yd0qlD3w .

When I shared the link with Gil Gigliotti, my colleague who initially alerted me to the toss-off line in Wood’s biography, I forewarned him that “the newspaper promos and ads were all so wrong.” He reminded me that ads aren’t supposed to be summaries, though noting that he did “find the ad with the hag picture effective (if way misleading). The voiceover ad needs a ‘spoiler alert’!”

So if you have time to spare and want to see how Chaucer was mangled in the 1950s, check out “The Deadly Riddle.”