Overview
"A well-focused look at the variety of uses to which Chaucer's texts were put in the 16th and 17th centuries . . . will interest scholars who want to cross boundaries between medieval and Renaissance studies, and will appeal with special force to people who in fact work on both."--Lars Engle, University of Tulsa
This collection of essays surveys the diverse receptions and workings of Chaucer from the early 16th to the early 17th century. It emphasizes the many kinds of influence that Chaucer and his poems exerted on British letters and culture during these years and assesses how "Chaucer"--poet, works, and representations by others--became a cultural category that changed in Tudor and early Jacobean England, as the Reformation and increasing distance from Middle English made Chaucer representative of a lost medieval past.
Contents Introduction: Receiving Chaucer in Renaissance England, by Theresa M. Krier
Part I. Forming Canons
"Wrastling for this world": Wyatt and the Tudor Canonization of Chaucer, by John Watkins Authority and the Defense of Fiction: Renaissance Poetics and Chaucer's House of Fame, by Carol A. N. Martin Thomas Speght's Renaissance Chaucer and the solaas of sentence in Troilus and Criseyde, by Clare Kinney
Part II. Claims for Narrative Poetry: Chaucer and Spenser Narrative Reflections: Re-envisaging the Poet in The Canterbury Tales and The Faerie Queene, by Judith H. Anderson
"Sundrie Doubts": Vulnerable Understanding and Dubious Origins in Spenser's Continuation of the Squire's Tale, by Craig A. Berry Idolatrous Idylls: Protestant Iconoclasm, Spenser's Daphnaïda, and Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, by Glenn Steinberg
Part III. Gender and the Translation of Genre Room of One's Own for Decisions: Chaucer and The Faerie Queene, by A. Kent Hieatt The Aim Was Song: From Narrative to Lyric in The Parlement of Foules and Love's Labour's Lost, by Theresa M. Krier Jacobean Chaucer: The Two Noble Kinsmen and Other Chaucerian Plays, by Helen Cooper
Theresa M. Krier, associate professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, is the author of Gazing on Secret Sights: Spenser, Classical Imitation, and the Decorums of Vision and of essays on ancient, medieval, and Renaissance poetry.