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.”

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)”
  • Koichi Kano (Meiji University) “Translating Untranslatable Expressions: Oaths, Swearing, and Exclamations”
  • 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

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).

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.

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!

My thanks to Koichi Kano for sharing his photos.