English

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the current use of topic maps in the library field, how they might be integrated into the ILS structure and some of the inherent challenges in trying to transform MARC data. Design/methodology/approach – A review of available literature was conducted as well as e-mail interviews with researchers

_American Chaucers_ examines Chaucer’s popular reception in the United States—with a brief glance at his earliest colonial readers.  As is well known, “popular” Chaucer bears little resemblance to “academic” Chaucer.  The works are invariably modernized, usually bowdlerized, and often rendered into prose.  In America, acquaintance with Chaucer and his poetry becomes another commodity, a distinguishing social marker, distributed among the burgeoning middle class.  And as a commodity, its status as a literary text becomes less important.  Not only do Americans read Chaucer’s works through extra-linguistic media, such as illustrations, enactments, plays, operas, and film, but they freely transform his name and works into vessels for conveying peculiarly modern American values. 

_American Chaucers_ is the first study to examine exclusively American appropriate of Chaucer for non-academic audiences.
Introduces materials not published on before:  Katharine Gordon Brinley's one-woman performances, MacKaye’s “The Canterbury Pilgrims” (as play, pageant, and opera), Wheaton College pageants, and James Norman Hall's _Flying with Chaucer."  The book is not just a medievalism survey, but a careful examination of the cultural and social influences in Americans’ uses of Chaucer.

Scholars have long been aware of the looming presence of law in medieval English literature, from Christ as a litigious redemptor to Chaucer's deal-making Host in _The Canterbury Tales_. Most scholarly work on the subject has been confined either to tracking down representations of legal practices in texts or to examining formal questions relating to legal discourse. In a groundbreaking departure, _The Letter of the Law_ suggests that law and literature should be understood as parallel forms of discourse-at times complementary, at times antagonistic, but always mutually illuminating.

Emily Steiner and I maintain that medievalists are uniquely placed to make valuable new contributions to the subject of law and literature, in part because of the inherently interdisciplinary nature of the study of medieval law, inseparable as it was from political theory and theology. The editors bring together medievalists from all over North America to explore the development of vernacular English literature within the context of legal discourse, practice, and conflict.

Treating texts as varied as Chaucer's _Knight's Tale_, the fifteenth-century Robin Hood ballads, and William Thorpe's account of his own heresy trial, the nine never-before-published essays in this volume reveal the intersections of legal and documentary culture with vernacular literary production. They establish that law and English literature were intimately bound up in processes of institutional, linguistic, and social change, and they explain how the specific conditions of medieval law and literature offer useful models in studying later periods. An appendix contains a translation by Andrew Galloway of _History or Narration Concerning the Manner and Form of the Miraculous Parliament at Westminster in the Year 1386_.

“individuals must continually rewrite their foundational mythologies,” producing a kind of “counter-nationhood” (p. 511). Keller's focus is on the three main characters of Chaucer's masterpiece: Troilus, whose emotional Trojan transparency is a disastrous model for ...