Tag: caroline bergvall

Alisoun Sings!

Caroline Bergvall continues her exciting and longstanding engagement with Chaucer’s Middle English and tales with her latest publications, Alisoun Sings.

If, like us, you’re a fan of Bergvall’s work, you’ll also want to take note of her project, “Conference of the Birds (Attar).” Though the title might ring a bell, this collaborative project is based on a poem by the medieval Persian poet, Attar of Nishapur. For more on the resonances between Chaucer’s ouevre and Attar’s Mantiq-Ut-Tayr, see Alireza Mahdipour’s article, “The Translator Writes Back,” in Chaucer’s Global Compaignye: Reading The Canterbury Tales in Translation, special issue of the Global Circulation Project at Literatuare Compass 15.6 (2018).

Papal visit and other items of interest

by JONATHAN HSY

Left: Papal visit swag on sale at George Washington University. Right: Screenshot of Carolin Bergvall's recordings at PennSound
Left: Papal visit swag currently on sale at George Washington University. Right: Screenshot of Caroline Bergvall’s recordings at PennSound (September 24, 2015).

As I sit in my office this morning writing this blog post, the Pope is addressing a joint session of the US Congress on the other side of town (follow the live-streaming of the speech here). After concluding this visit, the Pope will continue on a busy itinerary through Philadelphia and New York.

To mark this occasion, check out Caroline Bergvall’s Chaucerian/BBC mashup about a previous (2006) papal visit: “The Summer Tale (Deus Hic, 1).” Both the text and a voice recording can be accessed at PennSound.

(For more information on the papal visit and DC-area sites relevant for papal history and Franciscan culture, see my blog post at In The Middle.)

Other topical items of interest:

A blog posting about medievalist responses to the global refugee crisis, with a nod to Chaucer pedagogy (with a passing reference to Bergvall’s work Drift, which evocatively refracts the current refugee crisis by way of the Old English poem The Seafarer).

In The Middle is promoting a special discount for two important books on medievalism (recently published by Boydell & Brewer)!