The Animated Canterbury Tales

In the event that you have time over Christmas break that you want to spend experiencing Chaucer, then look no further than this award winning series. Airing in the late 1990's, this stop-motion series captures the tales of Chaucer in visually entertaining episodes of around 30 minutes each, complete with the narration of our friend Chaucer Pilgrim. Although not completely loyal to the text, this miniseries captures the hilarity and bawdiness of the Canterbury Pilgrims and gives it new life through visual representation. I thought that it was highly entertaining, even though it wasn't that helpful for my paper.
There are three episodes available on YouTube. I've attached the first one. Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3zUoNG_P_0&list=PLFM2U6J6u5w2Ye9L5lGx7kknNZYlj0no8

Pilgrim, Audience, God: David Williams on the audience of The Canterbury Tales

This chapter of David Williams’ The Canterbury Tales: A Literary Pilgrimage presents a new way of understanding how Chaucer interacts with his audience. Williams argues that Chaucer creates “a complicated set of analogous audiences…to associate us, as audience, at various times, with one or another of these fictional audiences” (24). That is, Chaucer gives us the tools to “transcend fiction through fiction.” Williams describes this narrative construction as “cosmological,” and even goes on to argue that each pilgrim tells a tale that has a nuclei (perhaps more simply the “moral” of a tale?) that is received by several different audiences: other pilgrims, Chaucer poet, even God. This creates a narrative at an existential level and an opportunity for us as the reader-audience to “recognize ourselves by analogy as the ultimate level of a whole series of flawed authors,” which then begs the question of what our tale is. Williams asserts a “didactic Chaucer” that draws in us as his audience to participate as pilgrims. I’m not sure I’m wholly convinced of his argument, but it was the first of its kind that I have come across and gave me a new lens of trying to understand the function of storytelling in The Canterbury Tales.

Making Trouble: Postmodern Theory With/In Chaucer Studies

In this essay, Faye Walker analyzes the boundaries between medieval studies and poststructuralism, two areas that her experience has deemed largely incompatible in pedagogy. The primary difficult lies in attempting to take “apart the nineteenth-century construction of "medieval studies" and trying to imagine both a pre-nineteenth century model and a postmodern "shape" (for lack of a more descriptive word of a loosely structured body of material) for medieval studies.” She calls out the false dichotomy of poststructuralism and medieval studies, and through an exhaustive amount of academic research posits that both forms of literary study can be helpful in understanding the other. I was a bit surprised with this article, mainly because I didn’t realize that there was such a distinction between these two areas of study. Although the article didn’t end up being helpful for my paper, it was an interesting read and gave me something to think about. Also, Jill Mann (the editor of our version of the Canterbury Tales) is briefly quoted as one of the many scholars Walker refers to in this article.
http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?sid=4faf2dc9-62b3-467d-a695-913f1e2974b8%40sessionmgr114&vid=0&hid=118&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=f5h&AN=9610233851

Devotional Iconography in the N-Town Marian Plays by Theresa Coletti

This article (from Doug’s collection) by Theresa Coletti looks at the content and staging of the N-Town Marian plays in light of the religious iconography of the Middle Ages in order to better understand the cultural function of these plays. Coletti explores the staging of the N-Town plays as it interacts with medieval iconographic art and argues that iconographic presentation in the N-Town plays is justified by “forms of late medieval spirituality” (267), which I found to be a really interesting tracking of the relationship between the N-Town plays and the society from which these plays were born. Her overall argument is that medieval drama is inseparable from the devotional background that produced them, and the interaction of the two introduces a crossing of artistic sensibilities and iconographic representations that has transformed from painting and liturgy to dramatic interpretation.

Paul Zumthor on Pilgrimage Narratives

            I found this essay by Paul Zumthor absolutely fascinating. Zumthor looks at the unifying characteristics of a diverse array of medieval narrative, and how these narratives interact with their audiences rhetorically. He dissects the societal value of pilgrimage and explores why pilgrimage was so popular, not as a spiritual expression or amode of tourism but as a form of narrative in the middle ages. He notes a medieval “fascination…of a special order, the understanding of which is an experience of otherness, for better or for worse” (812), and creates a link between the medieval audiences curiosity for the “other” and the reality of a physical and distancing spatial order. This fascination is drives the production of what Zumthor believes is a “double account, narrative and descriptive” (812) of every pilgrimage tale, and often one quality subverts the other depending on the tone of a text. For example, the Canterbury Tales is a rich collection of narratives from various speakers, but the description of the actual pilgrimage is rather sparse. The narrative side of the tale takes precedence over the descriptive side. Zumthor’s article has a lot of really interesting ways of understanding travel narratives (he even has a little something to say on science-fiction as a travel narrative!), and I would highly recommend reading it—even if, dare I say, just for fun.

Zumthor, Paul, and Catherine Peebles. “The Medieval Travel Narrative”. New Literary History 25.4 (1994): 809–824. Web.

Like a Virgin: Mary and her Doubters in the N-Town Cycle

This article by Cindy L Carlson is found in Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages. It talks about "the connections between Mary's virginal body and the social body of which she is an anomalous part, with special reference to the N-town cycle." It highlights the social problems that arise concerning the visibility of Mary's pregnancy in contrast to the invisibility of her virginity. Carlson makes the argument that Mary's virginity and the community are connected inherently, that Mary's virginity both threatens the cohesion of the society she lives in while also providing a model for the society to recover its purity and wholeness.

It talks a lot about Mary's doubters, particularly Joseph himself, and also the political system and trials that they get caught up in. From there, she discusses how the pageants that concern Mary are as political as they are spiritual.

Tales of Pathos

There is an essay in the Cambridge Companion to Chaucer (available at our library) that I have found really useful. It is written by Robert Worth Frank Jr, titled "The Canterbury Tales III: pathos". It focuses on the tales of the Man of Law, the Second Nun, the Clerk, the Physician, the Prioress, and the Monk. He lumps these tales together under the heading of "tales of pathos," meaning any tale that aims to create in the reader a strong emotional response.

While Frank does discuss the fourteenth-century reader's feelings towards these tales, he focuses also on how the modern reader interacts with them differently. He states that these tales "make greater demands on a modern reader's historical sense and imaginative sympathies," and also that they are crucial to understanding the minds and emotions of people in the fourteenth century/Chaucer's readers.

He also looks at literature and works present during the fourteenth century that followed the same patterns as these tales of pathos: Meditations on the Life of Christ, the Golden Legend, and also the various tales that Chaucer adapted to write some of the tales listed above.

If anyone is writing their paper on any of these tales or discussing the evolving reactions to the Canterbury Tales, this article could be really helpful.

"Pathos may seem alien because it works with extremes. It willingly tramples over probability if need be to portray these extremes -- of goodness, of evil, of suffering, of faith, of innocence. From this pushing to extremes arises its abstract character."