At a pivotal moment in Maria Edgeworth’s 1805 novella “The Modern Griselda,” a party gathers for a reading of “The Clerk’s Tale” at the home of the eponymous character and her husband. In response to Griselda’s vehement indignation at her medieval counterpart’s example, one member of the party comments that perhaps, “if Chaucer had lived in our…[Read more]

The canso attributed to Bietris de Roman participates in conventions that readily accommodate the language of desire within the exchange of political and social fidelity, offering another means by which to reconcile female authorship with a female object of courtly devotion.

Readers are often left baffled by the bizarre retribution Marie de France’s werewolf protagonist inflicts upon his treacherous wife: why bite off her nose, specifically? Though critics have offered a range of interpretations for the wife’s punishment in Marie’s lai, approaching the significance of noselessness from a dog’s perspective may deepe…[Read more]

Readers are often left baffled by the bizarre retribution Marie de France’s werewolf protagonist inflicts upon his treacherous wife: why bite off her nose, specifically? Though critics have offered a range of interpretations for the wife’s punishment in Marie’s lai, approaching the significance of noselessness from a dog’s perspective may deepe…[Read more]

Though the deep and abiding concern with honor that Arveragus and Aurelius evince in the Franklin’sTale have been explored in detail, Doreen’s own preoccupation with honor—no less significant in the tale’s exposition of trouthe—has not received much critical attention. Indeed, the question of Dorigen’s honor is often preempted by analysis…[Read more]

The essays in this interdisciplinary volume explore language, broadly construed, as part of the continued interrogation of the boundaries of human and nonhuman animals in the Middle Ages. Uniting a diverse set of emerging and established scholars, Animal Languages questions the assumed medieval distinction between humans and other animals. The…[Read more]

The essays in this interdisciplinary volume explore language, broadly construed, as part of the continued interrogation of the boundaries of human and nonhuman animals in the Middle Ages. Uniting a diverse set of emerging and established scholars, Animal Languages questions the assumed medieval distinction between humans and other animals. The…[Read more]