London Chaucer Conference 2015: All The Tweets #Chaucer2015

All the tweets (in chronological order) from the Biennial London Chaucer Conference, held at Senate House Library, 10-11 July 2015. [Note: this captures only tweets using the official confernece hashtag #Chaucer2015]

Social Media as a Teaching Tool

Twitter's popular hashtag, #thatawkwardmomentwhen gains another contribution when Criseyde tweets, "I just realized that my uncle is setting me up with the King's son... "

Of course, Criseyde, the ill-fated lover who makes a cover appearance in Chaucer's poem, Troilus and Criseyde, doesn't have her own Twitter account. She and others from Chaucer's Medieval writings must rely on the students in an upper-level class at Shenandoah University to say what they would if they could in a social media experiment being tried out by instructor Bryon Grigsby.

Grigsby, who is also the vice president of academic affairs at the Virginia institution, is one of multiple instructors in campuses who have dived into the deep end to test out the use of social media as a teaching tool to support student learning without knowing the outcome.

At Georgetown University, Professor Betsy Sigman is using Google+ in her courses at the McDonough School of Business. There she's trying out the social networking platform to help students keep up with current events on data, the topic of the course she's teaching.

Click here to read this article from Campus Technology

Chaucerian professor makes a pilgrimage to Romania

University of Colorado's Thomas Napierkowski cuts an impressive figure that is every inch an English professor. He is tall and thin, completely bald, and sports a rather impressive mustache. He even jokes about his age, claiming that he had conversations with poet Geoffrey Chaucer 500 years ago.

Napierkowski was accepted as a Fulbright Specialist in December. According to the U.S. State Department, the Fulbright Specialist program "sends U.S. faculty and professionals to serve as expert consultants on curriculum, faculty development, institutional planning, and related subjects at overseas academic institutions for a period of two to six weeks."

These appointments are limited. A Specialist is only allowed two in his career. Napierkowski said, "If you teach for 50 years, you can only have two appointments." He is in his first five-year appointment.

This is not simply a spur-of-the-moment honor, though. Napierkowski said, "It's sort of an interesting – and arduous – process." The process begins with an application with multiple essays. Those essays are peer-reviewed by other Fulbright Scholars, and even if you pass that review, a final board has to pass you as well. Once a scholar is on the Specialist list, their name and dossier are available to foreign universities for assistance in their American literature programs.

Click here to read this article from The Scribe

The Canterbury Tales gets reinvented as a graphic novel

In The Canterbury Tales, American illustrator Seymour Chwast reimagines Chaucer’s poetic survey of medieval England. And, true to Chaucer's vision, each character featured in the original gets a chance to tell their highly visual story, from the Cook to the Wife of Bath.

As anyone who’s had to struggle through reading the original in Middle English (how many ways do you really need to spell eye, anyways?) can attest to, slogging your way through Chaucer’s ode to the life medieval can be a chore. Thankfully, all dialogue and description here are rendered in modern-day English, although in a somewhat pared-down version.

Click here to read this book review from Straight.com

Scholar discovers 16th-century love poem written by an Englishwoman

A previously unknown poem dating from the mid-1500s has been discovered pasted into a rare edition of works by Geoffrey Chaucer. The erotic-love poem seems to have been by a Roman Catholic woman and sent to a Protestant scholar who was the tutor to Edward VI.

The poem was discovered by medieval scholar Elaine Treharne during a guest lecture at West Virginia University last summer .

She took several students to the Rare Book Room on the University’s main library where Treharne happened to open a 1561 edition of works by Geoffrey Chaucer that includes The Canterbury Tales. As Treharne opened it, she saw a Latin poem pasted in the back of the book.

The name in the front pages of the book and at the base of the poem is Elizabeth Dacre. And Treharne’s translation of the poem revealed another name – the person for whom the poem was written: Anthony Cooke, tutor to King Edward VI, son of King Henry VIII.

So Treharne searched for Elizabeth, from the U.S. and in England, and came up with a surprising story.

Click here to read this article from Early Modern England

Mary Malloy taps medieval world for murder most foul

Like Chaucer's Wife of Bath, Mary Malloy is an adventurous woman. She has hiked across England in the footsteps of the "Canterbury Tales" character and voyaged north to Spitsbergen, Norway, and in the South Seas.

A professor of maritime history at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole who also teaches museum studies at Harvard University, she balances her academic career with a lighter pursuit: writing mysteries.

Her newest, Paradise Walk (Leapfrog Press, 286 pages, $15.95), finds historian Lizzie Manning tracing the path of Chaucer's bawdy Wife of Bath. In the vein of Dan Brown's blockbuster, "The Da Vinci Code," "Paradise Walk" entwines fiction and history.

What begins for Lizzie as a research commission to find evidence of Alison the Weaver, who may have inspired Chaucer's character, becomes a quest riddled with intrigue and danger. Woven into this mystery with textile clues are the legends of King Arthur, the relics of St. Thomas Becket and King Henry VIII's brutal dissolution of the monasteries.

Click here to read this article from Cape Cod Online

New website: Late Medieval English Scribes

Researchers from the universities of York, Oxford and Sheffield have created a new website that aims to identifying the scribes who made the first copies of works by major authors of the 14th and early 15th centuries, including Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland.

Late Medieval English Scribes is an online catalogue of all scribal hands (identified or unidentified) which appear in the manuscripts of the English writings of five major Middle English authors: Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, John Trevisa, William Langland and Thomas Hoccleve. The site already displays over four hundred images of manuscript pages and nearly 17000 images of medieval lettering.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

You've Read 'The Canterbury Tales.' Prepare to Play the Board Game

A dozen years ago, Alf Seegert was into playing solo video games, and his wife-to-be was feeling left out. "Can't we play something together?" she asked Mr. Seegert, who works today as an assistant professor/lecturer in the University of Utah's English department.

That conversation led Mr. Seegert to The Settlers of Catan, a board game that the couple has been playing as a Saturday-night ritual with friends ever since. He became so enamored of games of that genre, which are known as German-style or Eurogames, that 10 years ago he decided to try making some of his own. He joined the Board Game Designers Guild of Utah, a group of like-minded geeks who test drive one another's creations and offer advice and camaraderie.

Click here to read this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education

In literary pursuit, he follows trails of animal DNA

Tim Stinson isn’t a scientist. But that hasn’t stopped him from working with DNA.

The English literature professor at N.C. State University is hoping to use the nucleic acid to better trace the history of ancient manuscripts. So far, he has tested the DNA on five ancient pages, each made more than 500 years ago on animal skin parchment.

The project started as Stinson was tracking the history of an ancient poem. In medieval times, scribes frequently changed the work they were copying, translating it in to their own dialect, improving the meter or just removing sections they didn’t like. The result is that many modern versions are not exactly as they were originally written. “There are 85 manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales. None are by Chaucer. None are identical. Which is correct?” says Stinson.

Click here to read this article from the Triangle Business Journal

Brantley Bryant brings medieval history to life

An up and coming celebrity walks among the Sonoma State University staff. Portions of literature professor Brantley Bryant's wildly popular blog, "Geoffrey Chaucer hath a Blog," has recently been published as part of the book series "The New Middle Ages" to widespread critical acclaim.

Bryant is an assistant literature professor in the English Department and the Written English Proficiency Test (WEPT) Coordinator. Since he arrived at SSU in 2007, Bryant has taught 11 different English courses in both the graduate and undergraduate programs. He is the chair of the Academic Freedom Subcommittee, has four degrees under his belt, has written a number of academic articles and recently became a published author.

Click here to read this article from the Sonoma State Star

Early 19th-century edition of Chaucer’s works uncovered

A previously unknown early 19th-century edition of The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer has been identified by University of Otago senior lecturer in English Dr Simone Celine Marshall, with important ramifications internationally for the study of medieval literature.

Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1320-1400) is frequently regarded as the father of English literature, having written an extensive amount of English poetry, most famously The Canterbury Tales. Living prior to the invention of the printing press, it has been difficult to establish exactly which poems are his, and for many centuries a great number were wrongly attributed to him.

Click here to read the full article from Medievalists.net

Medievalist awarded Guggenheim Fellowship to research Chaucer

Sarah Stanbury, English professor at the College of the Holy Cross, has recently been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a prestigious annual award that funds travel and research needs. Stanbury, who joined the Holy Cross faculty in 1992, was one of 180 recipients selected from a pool of nearly 3,000 applicants, and will begin her fellowship in January 2011..

Stanbury won for her proposed manuscript, titled Creole Things in Chaucer’s World, which investigates the significance of manmade objects in the writing of Geoffrey Chaucer and by some of his 15th-century successors. In order to complete her research, Stanbury plans to travel to London, Prague and parts of Italy.

According to Stanbury, the idea for her manuscript evolved from previous work she had done on the work of Chaucer, one of her areas of interest.

“My work on Chaucer lately emerged from a book that I wrote in 2008, called The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England,” says Stanbury, who will be on leave for three semesters, having also won a fellowship through Holy Cross. “That book talked about the way people in England wrote about religious objects, like the crucifix or statues of the Virgin Mary. I became interested in how ordinary household objects could be viewed. So this current research I am doing grew right out of my earlier work.”

Stanbury received tenure in 1996, serving as chair of the English department from 1997-99. The author of numerous articles and books, including The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (University of Pennsylvania Press, Middle Ages Series, 2008), Pearl (Medieval Institute Publications, 2001) and Seeing the Gawain-Poet: Description and the Act of Perception, (Middle Ages Series, 1991), Stanbury has also won the O’Leary Faculty Recognition Award. Stanbury earned her B.A. in literature at Bennington College and her Ph.D. in English at Duke University.

The Guggenheim Fellowship competition is in its 86th year and awards are given to a diverse group of applicants, from artists to scientists, based on a candidate’s accomplishments and the promise of their project

Source: Holy Cross

Disseminal Chaucer wins award

Peter W. Travis, the Henry Winkley Professor of Anglo-Saxon and English Language and Literature at Dartmouth College, is the winner the 2009 Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism, for his book Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009).

Given by the Robert Penn Warren Center at Western Kentucky University, the award will be presented April 16 during the annual Robert Penn Warren Symposium at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, KY.

Among 42 books submitted for this year’s contest, Travis’s work, nominated by the University of Notre Dame Press, was chosen for the breadth and depth of Travis’s scholarship, and the wit and originality of his writing, according to the jury.

“I'm quite overwhelmed by this honor,” says Travis. “While I spent many years working on Disseminal Chaucer, I never for a moment imagined that it would be singled out for any kind of award. I am especially pleased that the Warren-Brooks jury found that a rather specialized book on a medieval subject nevertheless succeeded in communicating with a modern readership."

Travis’s primary interests are medieval literature and contemporary critical theory. He recently developed and taught a course on contemporary masculinities called “The Masculine Mystique.” Disseminal Chaucer sees the Nun’s Priest’s tale as a kaleidoscopic parody of a broad range of medieval intellectual concerns— medieval theories of argument, ways of reading stories, sexual politics, and ways of reflecting upon the political and social world.

Travis captures the debates about the nature of rhetoric and literature that went on in Chaucer’s world, one juror commented, noticing how often the medieval rhetoricians Chaucer both loved and mocked in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale argue in ways that closely resemble recent developments in literary theory, from Stanley Fish to Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida.

Travis has been a member of the Dartmouth faculty since 1970. “It's a real pleasure to see a dedicated scholar-teacher recognized for an award that has had such an illustrious series of honorees,” says Katharine Conley, Associate Dean of the Faculty for the Arts and Humanities.

The award’s namesakes, Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, says Patricia McKee, acting chair of Dartmouth’s Department of English, “were notable twentieth-century literary critics whose highly influential method of reading literature, called the New Criticism, set the standard for textual explication. The members of the English Department are honored to have our colleague awarded this prize.”

The award, created in 1994, goes each year it to an outstanding work of literary scholarship or criticism that exemplifies in the broadest sense the spirit, scope and standards represented by the critical tradition established by Warren and Brooks.

Source: Dartmouth College

Canterbury Tales manuscript to be digitized

Experts from The University of Manchester's John Rylands Library are to spend four days at a beautiful seventeenth century mansion to capture its world famous Canterbury Tales manuscript on camera.

From today to March 25th, visitors to the National Trusts' Petworth House, Sussex, will be able to watch the team of four as they work with cutting edge equipment to record the early 15th century Chaucer manuscript in close detail.

It is part of a 18-month project - funded by JISC - which showcases The University of Manchester as one of the country's leading centres for digitisation of rare books, manuscripts and archives.

The Petworth edition of the famous stories was hand written between 1420 and 1450, just a few years after they were first conceived by Geoffrey Chaucer. The Tales relate a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims to create an ironic picture of 14th century English life. It is thought the manuscript has been at Petworth for at least four hundred years.

The Centre of Digital Excellence will support universities, colleges, libraries and museums which lack the resources to carry out the specialised work. Using images taken by a £22,000 camera, scholars will be able to study rare books, archival documents, artworks and museum artefacts in huge detail.

Mark Purcell, Libraries Curator for the National Trust said: "The Petworth Chaucer manuscript is one of the most important books in the possession of the Trust.

“It is believed to have been written in England ca.1420-1430, perhaps for the 3rd Earl of Northumberland (1421-1461) or for the 2nd Earl (1394-1455), who was married to Eleanor Neville, Chaucer’s grand-niece.

“Another possibility is that the manuscript was bequeathed in 1451 by Sir Thomas Cumberworth to his grand-niece, whose husband acted as agent for the 4th Earl of Northumberland.

"The text includes many forms of words peculiar to the West and North Midlands. It was written by a single hand, and there are many decorated initials."

Assistant Librarian Carol Burrows, from The University of Manchester, manages the project. She said: "We're very excited to be working with the National Trust to launch this project.

"No other organisation in the north of England specialises in the object-centred digitisation of heritage materials.

"As the set-up costs of such facilities are prohibitive for most institutions, many can't afford to carry out this sort of work.

"Over the eighteen months, we will be investigating whether a Centre for Heritage Digitisation, based within The University of Manchester, will work as a commercial concern.

"By locating the Centre within the University we will be able to draw on our exceptional body of skills and expertise."

Ben Showers, programme manager at JISC, said: " What makes this project so exciting is that not only will the John Rylands Library be working with other organisations to make available online some rare and important scholarly works.

“But they will also be exploring business models for the long term viability of digitisation.

“JISC's funding of this centre of excellence will help support smaller cultural organisations such as university or college archives and libraries

“It will make available precious resources that the organisations themselves may not have the skills, resources or simply the time, to put online."

The images will be made available on-line as part of the John Ryland’s Library’s Medieval Collection: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/library/eresources/imagecollections/university/medieval/

Source: University of Manchester