This year’s graduate manuscripts workshop focused on how to approach teaching with manuscripts while centering access and equity. Participants were asked to consider how they can facilitate student engagement with medieval material culture no matter where they end up teaching. The facilitators, each of whom taught hour-long interactive sessions, demonstrated a wide range of pedagogical techniques and considerations designed to address a diverse audience in terms of background and experience. Vanessa Wilkie led an introductory session on the institutional history of the Huntington, giving participants the chance to explore the exhibition space. The topics of each session were as follows: letting a manuscript and its materiality guide your inquiry (Ma), working with indigenous communities to preserve and protect sacred knowledge and materials (D’Arcens), teaching with digital manuscripts and correcting the editorial record (Whearty), and using a single manuscript to open up the study of medieval books more generally (Brantley). Each session concluded with a synthesis of the pedagogical approach by the organizers, Andrews and Hurley, and the culminating event of the day was a reception and hour-long discussion of how to activate medieval material culture in a range of classrooms.
Facilitators were Jessica Brantley, Louise D’Arcens, Ruen-chuan Ma, Bridget Whearty, Vanessa Wilkie.
Organizers were Tarren Andrews and Gina M. Hurley.
Additional indispensable support was provided by Matthew Fisher, Alice Fulmer, Kate Ramsey and Vanessa Wilkie.
Sponsorship for this session was generously provided by the Huntington Library, University of California, Los Angeles (Alex Stern, Dean of the Humanities and the Department of English), University of California, Riverside (Archive, Museum, Manuscript, and Print Studies) and Yale University (the Center for Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, the Institute of Sacred Music, and the program in Medieval Studies).
Final reception at The Huntington Library and Gardens
by Candace Barrington
The global community of Chaucerians was well represented at the 2024 Congress. The gathering was an enormous undertaking magnificently organized by the local organizing committee led by Jen Jahner (Caltech) and colleagues from southern California colleges and universities. Kara Gaston (University of Toronto) oversaw the digital/hybrid aspects of the congress. Andrea Denny-Brown (University of California, Riverside) and Aditi Nafde (Newcastle University) co-chaired the program committee.
Before the Congress officially opened, Tarren Andrews (Yale University) and Gina Hurley (Yale University) designed and organized the Graduate Workshop at The Huntington Library.
Sif Ríkharðsdóttir (University of Iceland), New Chaucer Society Executive Director, and Wallace Cleaves (University of California, Riverside), President of the Tonva Taraxat Paxaava Conservancy, welcomed over 300 Chaucerians to the Congress. The Presidential Address by Stephanie Trigg (University of Melbourne), “Going Home,” explored the nature of returning “homward.” Her talk wove together subtle explications of passages from Troilus and Criseyde, our responsibilities as global citizens, as well as the Aboriginal Australians’ complex relationship to the concept of “Country.”
Reception in Westin Courtyard
View from balcony outside meeting area
The Westin Pasadena served as the primary site for sessions, lunches, and receptions.
Global Chaucer Panels and Papers
Many panels and individual papers were devoted to global topics. The panels included
Race, Performance, and Pedagogy in the Global Middle Ages. Organized by Bernardo Hinojosa (Stanford University)
George Shuffelton (Carleton College) “The Harp and the Banjo: Medieval/Blackface Minstrelsy”
Anthony Bale (Birbeck, University of London), “Thinking with the Medieval Renegade”
Robert W. Barrett, Jr. (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) “English Taverns, Chinese Teahouses: Staging Moral Instruction in Mankind and Qin Jianfu’s Easter Hall Elder”
Heather Blurton (University of California, Santa Barbara) “Performativity, Antisemitism, and the Apostrophic Style: Lydgate’s Praier to Seynt Robert“
Pacific Medieval Studies. Organized by Jonathan Hsy (George Washington University)
Lian Zhang (Zhejiang University) “Teaching Chaucer in China in the Republican Period (1912 – 1949)”
Dan Kline (University of Alaska, Anchorage) “Toward a North-Pacific Medievalism”
Access: A Hybrid Conversation. Organized by Lisa Lampert-Weissig (University of California, San Diego), Eva von Contzen (University of Freiburg), Candace Barrington (Central Connecticut State University), and Katie Little (University of Colorado at Boulder)
Ashby Kinch (University of New Hampshire) “Access Means Inclusion: Practices of Belonging the Graduate Education Sphere”
Züleyha Çetiner-Öktem (Ege University) “Access to Higher Ed in the Era of Lockdowns and Beoynd: A Türkiye Case Study”
Rick Godden (Louisiana State University) “Accessible Futures: On Failure, Inclusion, and the Not-Yet”
Allegra Swift (University of California, San Diego) “Open Access Publishing: Community over Commercialization”
Jose Francisco Botelho (unaffiliated Brazilian translator) “The Wife of Bath on the Brazilian Stage: Modern Translation Takes Chaucer on a Whole New Pilgrimage”
Lara Farina (West Virginia University) “RPKed: Preparing to Fight Program Loss”
California Medievalisms. Plenary roundtable organized by Wallace Cleaves (UC Riverside)
Alison Locke Perchuk (California State University, Channel Islands) “Temporal Fixing and Importing Pasts: The European Middle Ages and the Making of US California”
Wallace Cleaves “California as Lacunae and Palimpsest: Medieval Mythography and Indigenous Interlocutions”
Kimberly Morales Johnson (Secretary for the Gabrieleno Tongva San Gabriel Band of Mission Indians and Co-founder and Executive Director of the Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Conservancy) and Desireé Reneé Martinez (Registered Profewsional Archaeologist and Native American consultant for Cogstone Resource Management) “Preserving the Past and Presenting the Future: Indigenous Epistemologies of Continuance and Preservation”
Chaucer’s Black London. Organized by Dorothy Kim (Brandeis University)
Jonathan Hsy “Hoccleve’s Ethopians”
Cristi Whiskey (University of California, Los Angeles) “Before Lives of Enslavement: the Black Diaspora into the Trans-Saharan World”
The individual presentations included
Jonathan Fruoco (Université Paris Nanterre – CREA), “Bridging Worlds: A Mythocrial Exploration of The Conference of the Birds and The Parliament of Fowls in Cross-Cultural Translation”
Curtis Runstedler (University of Stuttgart) “Chaucer, ChatGPT, and the Quest of Middle English AI in the Classroom”
Sophia Yashih Liu (National Taiwan University) “Literature, Media, and Medievalism in the Non-Anglophone Classroom”
Yoshiyuki Nakao (Hiroshima University) “Chaucer’s Editing of Dido: Beyond the Gender Boundary to Human Complexity”
Ruen-Chuan Ma (Utah Valley University) “Books in ‘Ferne Halwes’ and ‘Sondry Londes’: Critical Provenances and the Evolving Object Legacies of Medieval Literary Manuscripts
Yun Ni (Peking University) “Translating Griselda: Literary Nominalism, (Anti-)Allegory, and (Anti-)Romance in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale
Michael Calabrese (California State University, Los Angeles) organized a fabulous workshop, “Chaucer and the Latine Voices of East LA: A Selection from The Canterbury Tales Recited in Middle English and Translated into Spanish by CSULA Students.” The students were Nina Seif, Nathan J. Corral, Christina Gomez, Katie R Luna, Nadieshda Martinez-Mendez, Joanna M Rodrigues, and Darlene Rueda-Garcia.
International participation at the Congress was facilitated by hybrid panels available in each session. Though limited, these dedicated panels sought to ensure that colleagues attending from a distance could be part of the conversations throughout.
The Huntington Library and Gardens
Ellesmere Manuscript opened to The Parson’s Tale
Awaiting Turner’s lecture at The Huntington
A visit to The Huntington Library and Gardens capped off the official congress. There, we viewed the Ellesmere Manuscripts–opened to The Parson’s Tale–and enjoyed the Biennial Lecture, “Collecting Chaucer,” by Marion Turner (Oxford University).
Image of Chaucer: Here and Now exhibit at the Bodleian, featuring Farsi text
The lecture included a section on the Bodleian Library’s recent exhibit, “Chaucer: Here and Now,” which featured the opening lines from Alireza Mahdipour’s Farsi translation as well as multiple examples of Chaucer’s global reception.
A gathering of Global Chaucerians
The event closed with a reception under the Huntington Rotunda.
Post-Congress Activities
Following the Congress’s official close, there were two excursions: one to the Getty Center, another to the Tongva Sites in Altadena and Los Angeles.
Also, in conjunction with the Caltech Center for Teaching, Learning, and Outreach, NCS sponsored a Workshop for local High School teachers: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales for Today’s 9-12 Classroom. Focusing on the opening lines of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, Elizabeth Allen presented strategies for presenting the text to students in both Middle English and Present-Day English translation; Candace Barrington described assignments for bilingual students using translations (Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Farsi, and Arabic); and Kim Zarins guided the teachers through ways to incorporate the process of reading and writing adaptations of the tales into the class. All participants were provided a copy of Zarins’ 2016 Young Adult novel, Sometimes We Tell the Truth. Thank you Kitty Cahalan for handling ALL the logistics!
On 5 March 2024, an interview between two Alirezas—Alireza Mahdipour (Chaucer’s Farsi translator) and Alireza Anushiravani (founder of the Iran Comparative Literature Society)—was broadcast as a webinar. Titled “Translation and Comparative Literature,” the interview introduced its audience to Mahdipour’s literary translations of English literature into Farsi before concentrating on his translation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (published by Cheshmeh Press in 2023). As the audience learned, although a translated (and retranslated) Shakespeare has been available to Farsi readers for more than a century ago, Mahdipour’s translation of the complete Canterbury Tales into Farsi is a first.
During the interview’s opening introduction, Mahdipour was asked about his age. He reports answering that “Chaucer and I are almost coeval, since it so happens that I was born in 1341 (according to Persian calendar, of course, which is 621 years behind or ahead of the Christian calendar, and you may be marveled to know that we are now in 1403!). This joke that I carry on seriously is of some significance: Chaucer’s time and situation somehow overlaps with that of ours and this helps us understand him sometimes better than some of his own contemporary fellow countrymen. Hermeneutically speaking, to understand the historical author we have to recreate the context of his text, which is lost to us (according to Schleiermacher) and/or we attempt to associate ourselves with his mind (according to Dilthey) or still, a more modern (actually postmodern) view, we may grasp some of the author’s ideas, intentions, and meanings only when they coincide or overlap with those of our own, and this happens in occasions when (according to the phenomenological approach of Heidegger and Gadamer), there is a ‘fusion of horizon’ between the author and the translator, since they establish a broader context within which they come to a shared understanding.”
Mahdipour goes on to explain that “In my argument I simplified all the above philosophical considerations by claiming that all these considerations are happily met with our present condition in Iran, as we are now in 1403! For example, in addition to having the Puritan discourse of England’s Commonwealth period, we are provided with medieval Summoners, who survived, or rather were revived, after their hibernation during Iran’s short period of modernization half a century ago.”
When asked about his decision to translate Chaucer’s verse into verse (rather than prose), he adamantly responded that a prose translation would ruin the merits of the book, as happened when an earlier prose translation appeared and was quickly disregarded. Because Chaucer’s achievement includes his use of rhyme and couplets—which are common devices in classic Persian narrative poetry—Mahdipour sees Chaucer as the perfect opportunity for a Persian translator with a poetic gift. Indeed, translating Chaucer was a pleasurable challenge for Mahdipour, since Persian prosody requires a strict rhythm and meter throughout the whole text, a feature achieved due to the flexibility of Persian syntax and its abundance of rhyming words. Thus, in addition to living in “coeval” times, Chaucer and his Farsi translator share the happy coincidence of writing in languages and poetic traditions sharing important qualities.
When asked about his intentions or motivations in choosing Chaucer, he referenced his article “The Translator Writes Back” published in Literature Compass (Vol. 15, Issue 6, 2018) and edited by Jonathan Hsy and Candace Barrington.
Jonathan Fruoco has kindly shared the video of his presentation for the 2022 International Congress of Medieval Studies. This case study provides examples from Fruoco’s forthcoming French translation of The Miller’s Tale to illustrate how he conveys Chaucer’s comically bawdy double entendres. Whatever his technique for retaining the joke, he always works to provide a recognizable textual space for his readers.
We look forward to announcing on these pages when Jonathan’s translation is published.
I’ve been sitting on this announcement for a few weeks so that I could make it on Nowruz, the Persian new year. I simply could not resist the proximity in 2024 of Nowruz, Ramadan, and “Whan-that-Aprill” Day.
Alireza Mahdipour’s 2023 translation of The Canterbury Tales
After many years of diligent translation following by years of patience, Alireza Mahdipour’s complete translation of The Canterbury Tales has been published by Cheshmeh, an Iranian publishing house known for its editions of both contemporary Iranian authors and translated global authors.
Without a doubt, Mahdipour’s massive undertaking is a milestone in Chaucer’s international reception.
In the opening lines of the General Prologue, Mahdipour evokes the wonders of spring’s arrival: “In the spring, the breath of the rain came down / to the dry soil of England and washed it until the / root was clean…./ Eid has come….” (my back translation using Google translate).
Mahdipour’s essay, “The Translator Writes Back,” was featured in a 2018 special issue of Literature Compass, Chaucer’s Global Compaignye. As Jonathan Hsy and I describe in our editors’ introduction, His essay reflects on translation’s potential to reveal affinities between Chaucerian mentalities and facets of contemporary Iranian culture. Rather than associating Iran with a pejorative sense of the term “medieval,” Mahdipour’s work attends to rich continuities in social and religious frameworks in Iranian culture that mitigate the apparently radical alterity of the past. In bridging the gap between Chaucer’s environment and contemporary Iranian cultural frameworks, Mahdipour eschews the impulse to produce a prose translation and crafts a poetic idiom that is simultaneously Chaucerian and Persian. Without overtly making a claim for shared sources, Mahdipour argues that similarities between medieval English culture and aspects of modern Persian society contribute to the vitality of his translation. The most significant parallels are found in the circumstances shared by Mahdipour’s and Chaucer’s pilgrim-narrator: both found themselves traveling in a group, free “from social, official, occupational, and even familial bonds, [and] eager for the freedom of speech and expression” otherwise denied them. As Mahdipour explains, Chaucerian sensibilities so dovetailed with Iranian ones that his audiences learned he was reciting a translation “only when we came to foreign elements such as ‘Caunterbury,’ ‘Tabard,’ and ‘Southwerk.’ ”
If you’ve been fortunate to visit the Bodleian Library’s “Chaucer: Here and Now” exhibit, you’d would have seen a copy on display with other translations.
My copy of the Mahdipour’s translation took a circuitous route to Connecticut. Because Alireza was unable to ship it directly to me from Iran, he enlisted the help of a former student, Raziyeh J, who now lives in Ottawa but was visiting Iran at the end of the year. She brought it back to Canada and then mailed it to me. Whew! Another fine Chaucerian pilgrimage!
I look forward to working with Raziyeh in the near future as she helps me understand what Mahdipour’s translation can teach us.
After the initial flurry of publicity announcing the Bodleian Library’s Chaucer: Here and Now exhibit, it seems fitting to remind those in and around Oxford this spring that the exhibit will remain up until 28 April 2024. Just right for your April pilgrimage itinerary!
For those of us unable to absorb the exhibit in person, the accompanying collection of essays is a treat. From among the many great essays, I draw your attention to Jonathan Hsy’s fabulous “Chaucerian Multilingualism Past and Present.” Besides being a fascinating read, Jonathan’s essay features images and analysis of Global Chaucers that have appeared on this site over the past decade.
The Early Book Society and Martha Driver have shared this message from Linne Mooney about the British Library closures.
I wanted to warn you that because of a cyber attack, the British Library site has been down for more than two weeks. When I spoke to staff in the MSS Reading Room a few days ago they said they didn’t know when they would be able to fetch manuscripts for readers again. They may institute a system of paper request slips as we used to use in the past, but at present there is no date for when that might happen. It was apparently a serious attack and may take months to clear the malware and re-load the system. So if you were planning to spend part of the Thanksgiving holiday in the British Library, it’s best to check to see whether you’ll be able to see any manuscripts.
A 16th-century portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer, Add MS 5141, f. 1r
The British Library has digitized its entire collection of pre-1600 manuscripts containing Chaucer’s works. The following is taken from the library’s online announcement.
The British Library holds the world’s largest surviving collection of Chaucer manuscripts, and this year we have reached a major milestone. Thanks to generous funding provided by The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Peck Stacpoole Foundation, and the American Trust for the British Library, we have completed the digitisation of all of our pre-1600 manuscripts containing Chaucer’s works, over 60 collection items in total. We have digitised not only complete copies of Chaucer’s poems, but also unique survivals, including fragmentary texts found in Middle English anthologies or inscribed in printed editions and incunabula.
You can download the full list of pre-1600 manuscripts containing Chaucer’s works here, together with accompanying links to the digitised versions on our Universal Viewer. There you can view the manuscripts in full, study them in detail, and download the images for your own use. Thanks to the IIIF-compatible viewer, you can also view these manuscripts side-by-side in digital form, allowing close comparison between the volumes, their texts, and scribal hands:
Though this production skips over The Clerk’s Tale, I already have my free ticket to watch this double reading of the Griselda story, first as told by Boccaccio (14th century) and then by Margaret Atwood (21st century). Tickets to the streamed, dramatic reading are free.
Theater of War Productions and Margaret Atwood return to the Toronto International Festival of Authors with an exciting new collaboration exploring power and control, domestic violence, and family dynamics by way of two versions of the same story, one written by Giovanni Boccaccio in 1348 during the bubonic plague and the other by Atwood in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. In Boccaccio’s version, a woman named Griselda remains in an abusive and controlling relationship, showing great patience and forbearance in the face of her husband’s sadism and cruelty. In Atwood’s version, Griselda takes matters in her own hands and, with the help of her sister, turns the tables on her husband.
This free, public event will feature a live, dramatic reading of the “Patient Griselda” story from Boccaccio’s Decameron by Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network, Fleishman is in Trouble), Maev Beaty (Beau is Afraid, Mouthpiece), and Araya Mengesha (Tiny Pretty Things, Nobody). Then, in response, Margaret Atwood will perform “Impatient Grisleda,” a story that is narrated to a group of humans in quarantine by an alien that looks like an octopus. The readings of both texts will be followed by immediate responses by community panelists and will culminate in a guided audience discussion, facilitated by Bryan Doerries (Artistic Director, Theater of War Productions).
Shakespeare Gardens at The Huntington, one of the featured venues for NCS 2024 Congress.
by Candace Barrington
We are excited to share news that the Program Committee for the 2024 Biennial Congress of the New Chaucer Society has posted its Call for Papers. In the Call for Papers you’ll find detailed descriptions of the the session formats being offered at the Congress.
Hybrid
Paper
Lightening Talk
Position Paper
Poster Expo
You’ll also find descriptions of the 65 sessions clustered around 10 Threads.
Ethics of Reading Chaucer, Then and Now
Logistical Chaucer
Surveillance
Viability: Access, Values, New Directions
Code(x)
Ecologies and Consumption
Materialities and Performance
The Quadrivium
Translation and Experimentation
Open Topics
Notice that submitting your proposal is a two-step process.
Complete the online Abstract Submission Form
Email your abstract to the session organizers
Complete submissions are due 22 September 2023.
The 2024 Congress will be held 15-18 July 2023 at The Westin, Pasadena, California. General information about costs can be found in the Call for Papers document. More detailed information will be forthcoming.
We believe the Call for Papers provides an exciting banquet of options. Among the many delights, several seem well suited for our global colleagues:
17. Tech Talks: Access and Accessibility in Medieval Classrooms
20. Rare Books for the Rest of Us
24. Re-evaluating the Manuscripts of Multilingual Medieval Wales
38. Teaching the Performative Middle Ages
48. Translation, Experimentation, and Pedagogy
52. Forms of Translatio studii et imperii
57. Pacific Medieval Studies
62. Teaching Chaucer at Hispanic-Serving Institutions
