ENGLISH 330:  Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer (?1340-1400) performing for a courtly audience  (Cambridge Corpus Christi MS 61)

Spring 2007: Mondays, 1:30-4:15
Instructor: Arnie Sanders
Department of English, Goucher College

Recent site news:  1/3/08--The site is inactive for the next year.  The Chaucer seminar is next scheduled to run in Spring 2009.  I will be on sabbatical in Fall 2008, but I will be doing research in the region.  you can reach me with questions about the seminar at my office extension (x6515).

Medieval music in MSS: some images at aid study of the page layout of non-text manuscripts.

The Middle English Dictionary--the pre-eminent source of year-specific definitions of Middle English words is now available for free from the University of Michigan.  Don't bother with the OED when reading Middle English.  This is a far more complete set of definitions with far more Medieval examples because of the dictionary's focus.

Concordance to the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer--a concordance is a word list, a kind of author- or work-specific usage dictionary, which tells you exactly where an author uses specific words you may be studying as evidence for close reading analysis or semiotic coding as part of a structural binary.  If you can demonstrate that the word you are studying is used rarely, or only in certain circumstances, you may be able to show it had an unexpectedly specific connotation for Chaucer and his audience.

THE VULGATE LATIN BIBLE--this was the text which would have been known to Christians in Chaucer's time, with the exception of the "Lollard" followers of GC's contemporary John Wycliff, who translated portions of it into Middle English despite the threat of execution for this heretical act.  The Internet Sacred Texts Archive, which maintains this site, is a non-profit group promoting understanding of many religious traditions, and they offer reading texts from Eastern, Western, traditional and esoteric religions.

D.W. Robertson Jr., the patristic critic, vs. E. Talbot Donaldson, the New Critic.

Tale Presentation Schedule  For a guide to what I am looking for in tale presentations, click here.  For a guide to what I am looking for in annotated bibliography entries, skim some of those from the previous seminars' students (see menu below) and then click here.

        Click here for some quick links to the library's online journal subscriptions and printed essay collections that are likely to have articles relevant to Chaucer studies.  Astute students (is that redundant?) would be likely to choose articles or book chapters relevant to their GP pilgrims for this week, and to do so this weekend in order to get a head start on writing the annotation while the semester was fairly calm.  The "Class Requirements" link in the menu below contains further information about how to create an annotation, and the link to the "Annotated Chaucer Bibliographies from Previous Semesters" will let you browse six years of Chaucer seminar annotations.  If you would like to read and annotate an article or book chapter someone already has done, have at it!  As long as the annotation reflects your own thinking and critical approach, it is as valid as any other.  Be aware that annotations dated early in the semester might have been somewhat less high quality than those dated after students had received some graded feedback from me, and as always, in any class, there are some real stars whose insight and thoroughness you could emulate to achieve similar success.  Dare to be great!  See you Monday.

8/14/02  The Computing Proficiency in the English Major Exercises now are available online.  All English Majors who will graduate in 2006 and have not yet completed the Computing Proficiency in the Major Exercises should plan to do so this semester, either in early September before assignments mount up, during midsemester break, or in the December-January break.  Do not delay--it will hurt your scholarship and limit your writing to an audience of amateurs.  All other English majors, or sophomores contemplating majoring in English, should enroll in English 200 as soon as possible to complete this requirement for the major.

        For students planning to take English 330: Because we will be reading extensively in Middle English, you should begin teaching yourself how to read it.  The first difficulty to overcome is that the sound of English long vowels (ā, ē, ī, ō, and ū) changed in something linguists call the "Great Vowel Shift."  If you know French or any other Romance language, you'll be at an advantage because Middle English long vowels sounded like they do now in Modern French (and you should know the reason why! [1066]).  Consonant sounds also changed.  As Middle English blurred into Early Modern English, they stopped pronouncing the "silent" consonants that make English spelling so delightful (e.g., knight, known, variable, sight).  This caused the language to lose many of its Germanic sounds inherited from Anglo-Saxon or "Old English."  Both changes may have had a lot to do with human laziness, though other socio-political factors may have been involved.  Middle English is a much more "athletic" language to pronounce.  To get started, click here to go to Larry D. Benson's online site which contains sound files you can use to teach your ear to hear and your mouth to produce Middle English sounds.

        Many Middle English words have fallen out of use, and others have changed their meanings over time.  The Oxford English Dictionary (available at the Library via "All Electronic Databases") will show you words' oldest meanings first, and that will help you begin to understand how the language's meaning changed.  For a good example, try "harlot," which in Chaucer's day allowed him to say, of a Canterbury pilgrim, "he was a gentle harlot" and mean a compliment.  Develop your own "hard word list" as you learn new Middle English terms.  It's what every literate Elizabethan had to do when reading Chaucer, so you and Shakespeare are having the same trouble.

Summary Description

   The seminar will read Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in Middle English. We will consider Chaucers' works as representative of late-fourteenth-century England, and as a collection of aesthetic products which depend upon their genres' artistic conventions and their author's intentions. Sensitive readers will avoid both simple "naturalistic" readings which mistake tales for historical narratives and completely "formalist" readings which ignore the tales' relations with their historical context.  And we will have more fun doing what we're doing than any other seminar at Goucher College because we are headed for another world where we can read the "naughty bits" without the FCC's prohibition on profanity.  

since 2/5/07 reset.