Candace Barrington
Central Connecticut State University, English, Faculty Member
- Law, English Literature, Medieval Literature, Legal History, Law and Literature, Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, and 13 moreMedieval English Literature, Medievalism, Middle English, Chaucer, Medieval Rhetoric, Gower, American Medievalism, English, Popular Culture, Medieval Law, Contemporary Medievalism, Popular Chaucer, and Medieval Studiesedit
Special issue of Chaucer Review, edited with Emily Steiner
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_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... more
_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.
_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.
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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... more
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_.
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_.
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Encompassing perspectives beyond what Braj B. Kachru terms the “Inner Circle” of Anglophone hegemony, this collection of essays presents a vivid and distinct opportunity to appreciate how Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales adapts to life... more
Encompassing perspectives beyond what Braj B. Kachru terms the “Inner Circle” of Anglophone hegemony, this collection of essays presents a vivid and distinct opportunity to appreciate how Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales adapts to life across disparate languages (Persian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Danish, Spanish, Turkish, American Sign Language, and internal varieties of London English) while also moving across cultures (Shiite Iran, Brazilian Gauchoria, Tokyo academia, rural Denmark, Mexican universities, Ottoman Turkey, US Deaf culture, and London's multiethnic East End communities). The term compaignye, a quintessentially Chaucerian keyword absorbed into Middle English through Anglo‐French, suggests an intimate multitude of people sharing a common interest or purpose. To this end, our textual compaignye incorporates contributors who are academics in the traditional sense as well as authors and artists who operate alongside normative structures of the academy. Many of the compaignye's so‐called “nonacademics” have garnered prestigious awards for their creative work, and “amateur” cultural artifacts reveal that a deep love of Chaucerian material characterizes both academic and nonacademic endeavors. Such a compaignye, with its many forms of expertise, can expand our knowledge by creating “a vibrant resonance,” as Carolyn Dinshaw explains, between “amateur [popular] medievalism and professional [academic] medievalism.” As the fields of comparative literary analysis, translation theory, and medievalism studies increasingly move away from models of textual “fidelity” that reinforce static distinctions between an “original” and a “derivative,” we offer this cluster of essays as an example of the benefits gained by pluralizing the modes through which we understand processes of linguistic transfer and cultural adaptation.
Through the comparative study of non-Anglophone translations of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales,we can achieve the progressive goals of Emily Apter’s “translational transnationalism” and Edward Said’s “cosmopolitan humanism.”... more
Through the comparative study of non-Anglophone translations of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The
Canterbury Tales,we can achieve the progressive goals of Emily Apter’s “translational transnationalism”
and Edward Said’s “cosmopolitan humanism.” Both translation and humanism were intrinsic to
Chaucer’s initial composition of the Tales, and in turn, both shaped Chaucer’s later reception, often in
ways that did a disservice to his reputation and his verse. In this essay, Candace Barrington argues that
comparative translation provides a means whereby new modes of translation, like Apter’s, can promote
a different version of humanism, like Said’s; she demonstrates this process in a brief philological study of
Nazmi A˘gıl’s Turkish translation of The Squire’s Tale. While we can see the infusion of Turkish values
and perspectives in the new text, we can also see that the Turkish reveals new insights into Chaucer’s
subtle and nuanced use of language.
Canterbury Tales,we can achieve the progressive goals of Emily Apter’s “translational transnationalism”
and Edward Said’s “cosmopolitan humanism.” Both translation and humanism were intrinsic to
Chaucer’s initial composition of the Tales, and in turn, both shaped Chaucer’s later reception, often in
ways that did a disservice to his reputation and his verse. In this essay, Candace Barrington argues that
comparative translation provides a means whereby new modes of translation, like Apter’s, can promote
a different version of humanism, like Said’s; she demonstrates this process in a brief philological study of
Nazmi A˘gıl’s Turkish translation of The Squire’s Tale. While we can see the infusion of Turkish values
and perspectives in the new text, we can also see that the Turkish reveals new insights into Chaucer’s
subtle and nuanced use of language.
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In medieval England, legal writing can be divided into six forms, ranging from the practical to the literary: statutes; academic treatises; collections of records and documents; fictional depictions of processes and documents; didactic... more
In medieval England, legal writing can be divided into six forms, ranging from the practical to the literary: statutes; academic treatises; collections of records and documents; fictional depictions of processes and documents; didactic commentaries; and literature infused with legal forms of thought. All six forms of legal writing share, to varying degrees, three overriding affinities: they reference a specialized trilingual vocabulary, manipulate fixed frameworks and prescribed formulae, and employ narrators representing another’s interest.
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The Second Nun, her prologue, and her tale might be the quietest pilgrim and narrative in the Canterbury Tales, yet they rank among the most religiously powerful. Her piety, never questioned or mocked, is learned rather than rote, and her... more
The Second Nun, her prologue, and her tale might be the quietest pilgrim and narrative in the Canterbury Tales, yet they rank among the most religiously powerful. Her piety, never questioned or mocked, is learned rather than rote, and her tale begs no more reward than her audience’s unconditional Christian faith. In the General Prologue, we are told little about the Second Nun. We know she joins the pilgrimage as the Prioress’s “chapeleyne” (1.163-64), or private secretary. This bit of information tells us that she would have been literate in Latin as well as vernacular languages and that she would have been responsible for reading manuscripts and exchanging letters for the Prioress. Her ability to perform these duties is confirmed by her prologue and tale, which are primary translations of Latin and Italian sources honoring the Virgin Mary and recounting the life of a third-century Christian martyr, Saint Cecilia of Rome. Her tale, the life a Roman woman more skilled in rational arguments than her male interlocutors, compares crucially to the tales of the Nun’s two traveling companions: the Prioress’s story of a boy martyr relies on emotion and sentimentality, and the Nun’s Priest’s beast fable makes comic nonsense of classical argumentation. And while both the Prioress and her Priest frequently interject themselves into the storytelling process, the Nun presents herself as a transparent vessel—a minor amanuensis—through which the story of St. Cecilia passes, untarnished from one language to another. Now, on the road to Canterbury, she happens to have that translation at hand, ready to edify her fellow travelers.
In special issue, After Eco: Novel Medievalisms, edited by Bruce Holsinger and Stephanie Trigg, this essay uncovers the deceptive footnote, buttressed by multiple elements establishing the novel as built on verifiable historical evidence,... more
In special issue, After Eco: Novel Medievalisms, edited by Bruce Holsinger and Stephanie Trigg, this essay uncovers the deceptive footnote, buttressed by multiple elements establishing the novel as built on verifiable historical evidence, making readers to think they have been made privy to a conspiracy that remained uncovered for 500 years when, in fact, they have been duped into believing in a conspiracy that never existed. Yet, because the novel's fictional archive hides under the cloak of near-fidelity—Louvain Cathedral rather than Louvain University, soon-after rather than soon-before the Great War, William Exmewe the fourteenth-century anti-clerical heretic (and secret saboteur) rather than William Exmewe the sixteenth-century orthodox heretic—readers have been ready to concede that the novel's crucial letter might have been discovered in "a French [sic] cathedral in 1927." The fictional Louvain Cathedral and its alleged ecclesiastical archives allow the novel and its readers to pretend they have encountered a past untainted by any intervening political agendas.
Book Collection edited by Kathleen Kelly and Tison Pugh.
For this review essay in a special issue on Thinking Across Tongues (edited by Jonathan Hsy, Mary Kate Hurley, and Andrew Kraebel), I reconsider Emily Apter’s Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013) and her... more
For this review essay in a special issue on Thinking Across Tongues (edited by Jonathan Hsy, Mary Kate Hurley, and Andrew Kraebel), I reconsider Emily Apter’s Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013) and her arguments about ethical translations from the perspective of a medievalist that allows me not only to see that the translational moves she advocates flourished in late-medieval England but also to understand why her preferred translational mode seems (but maybe really is not) scarce today. I reach this latter understanding by reframing her argument with a medieval theory of literary transmission across time, space, and languages—translatio studii. Because this theory considers trajectories of transmission rather than dichotomies of faithful/unfaithful, foreign/domestic, or good/bad, translatio studii helps us reconsider the merits and limits of Apter’s protocols. Once we then situate within this medieval framework three recent translations that apply Apter’s preferred translational practices—translations by by José Francisco Botelho, Anne Carson, and David Hadbawnik—we can more clearly identify the current limits and the eventual promises of Apter’s argument.
"Global Medievalism and Translation" draws on the multiple denotations embedded in the Latin term, translatio—to transport from one time period to another, to carry from one place to another, to move from language to another—in order to... more
"Global Medievalism and Translation" draws on the multiple denotations embedded in the Latin term, translatio—to transport from one time period to another, to carry from one place to another, to move from language to another—in order to examine how the European medieval past has been used as a prism for interpreting, shaping, and binding cultures outside the Western European nation-states. I consider three modes of global medievalism: temporal, spatial, and linguistic. Temporal global medievalism occurs when modern European cultures use medievalism as a way to understand coeval non-Western cultures. Spatial global medievalism occurs when (former) settler colonies reclaim medieval literature and material culture, thereby allowing regions outside Western Europe to imagine themselves natural inheritors of the medieval past. Linguistic global medievalism occurs when non-Western cultures appropriate medieval texts for their own purposes, thereby moving from being the target of medievalism to being the transmitter and beneficiary of medievalism.
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In his Confessio Amantis, John Gower repeatedly worries over the role of intentionality when determining either moral or legal culpability. As he should. For in late-medieval English common law, intention remained a territory of great... more
In his Confessio Amantis, John Gower repeatedly worries over the role of intentionality when determining either moral or legal culpability. As he should. For in late-medieval English common law, intention remained a territory of great suspicion, not because intention could not be known, but because to retreat to intention was to land in a world where accidents blurred guilt and chance eliminated redress. Conversely, for the Church, the confessional and its attendant manuals were concerned with ferreting out intention in the process of assessing sin and correcting the soul. By structuring his 33,000-line poem according to the architectonics of the Christian penitential manual while also infusing it with the performative discourse of England’s multi-faceted judicial system, Gower juxtaposes these two attitudes towards intention. This friction between the two attitudes is readily apparent in the Confessio’s “Tale of Paris and Helen,” the exemplary narrative meant to elucidate Sacrilege, a subdivision of the poem’s fifth vice, Avarice, as the confessor Genius shrives the failed lover, Amans. As I explore in this paper, this complex tale of trespasses and retributions—legal and otherwise—provides multiple, and sometimes paradoxical, understanding of intentionality, and this complexity increases when it is returned to the Confessio’s framework.
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Though the tri-lingual poems collected in the Trentham manuscript (British Library’s MS Additional 59495) by John Gower, late-medieval English poet and man-of-law, are generally viewed as a mish-mash of verse exhibiting no coherent,... more
Though the tri-lingual poems collected in the Trentham manuscript (British Library’s MS Additional 59495) by John Gower, late-medieval English poet and man-of-law, are generally viewed as a mish-mash of verse exhibiting no coherent, unifying thread except to please Henry IV, I argue in this paper that the verse is united by a repertoire of rhetorical gestures associated with the practice of English common law and canon law. Because Gower was affiliated with the legal professions, these gestures would have come naturally to him. That said, I am not claiming we should expect to find in the manuscript’s poems legal arguments that would have been presented in a court hearing or recorded in legal documents. I suggest, instead, that legal discourses provided Gower with a role and set of rhetorical gestures impossible to suppress when he addressed weighty matters. These gestures include distinguishing between territories associated with lay and ecclesiastical jurisdictions; infusing vocabulary associated with legal discourses in late-medieval varieties of English, French, and Latin; and using the forms of common-law pleadings to structure the English and French poems, while structuring the Latin poems according to the principles of canon-law argumentation. Thus, the Trentham manuscript makes manifest the often invisible assumptions dividing the legal systems operative in England at the end of the middle ages. At the same time, the Trentham poems create a nearly invisible, spectral advocate meditating on the ways England's various jurisdictions with their established procedures and precedents provide a means for warranting the Lancastrian claim's validity without ever condoning the questionable invasion and deposition.
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The pdf of the essay contains formatting errors NOT in the final, published version. Please refer to the final, published version for quotations. This essay obliquely recalls the mirroring structure of ‘Unfinished Business,’ Patience... more
The pdf of the essay contains formatting errors NOT in the final, published version. Please refer to the final, published version for quotations.
This essay obliquely recalls the mirroring structure of ‘Unfinished Business,’ Patience Agbabi’s engagement with Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee in her one-round poetry slam, Telling Tales (Cannongate 2014). Our essay is organized by keywords common to both poems. Each section devotes a paragraph or two to Chaucer’s Melibee and then turns to Agbabi’s ‘Unfinished Business.’ By repeating essential keywords at the beginning and ending of each section (or linking a keyword at the end of one section to the beginning of another) our analysis suggests the recursive chain inherent in the poem’s mirroring structure, as well as in the poem’s reformulation of Chaucer’s prose tale.
This essay obliquely recalls the mirroring structure of ‘Unfinished Business,’ Patience Agbabi’s engagement with Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee in her one-round poetry slam, Telling Tales (Cannongate 2014). Our essay is organized by keywords common to both poems. Each section devotes a paragraph or two to Chaucer’s Melibee and then turns to Agbabi’s ‘Unfinished Business.’ By repeating essential keywords at the beginning and ending of each section (or linking a keyword at the end of one section to the beginning of another) our analysis suggests the recursive chain inherent in the poem’s mirroring structure, as well as in the poem’s reformulation of Chaucer’s prose tale.
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Ethan Allen Hitchcock, Civil War general and student of hermetic philosophy, included an interpretation of Chaucer's _Book of the Duchess_ in his 1865 study of early British literature. Rejecting the tradition that equated the poem's... more
Ethan Allen Hitchcock, Civil War general and student of hermetic philosophy, included an interpretation of Chaucer's _Book of the Duchess_ in his 1865 study of early British literature. Rejecting the tradition that equated the poem's characters with John of Gaunt, his deceased wife, Blanche, and his liege servant, Chaucer, Hitchcock instead presents the poem as cloaking Chaucer's heretical ideas on the spiritual world. In making this move, Hitchcock demonstrated how his decade-long interest in alchemy allowed him to read literature anew. In many ways, he was participating in a growing trend toward spiritualism in nineteenth-century America, a movement which gained momentum with the devastation brought by the Civil War. His inability to register the Black Knight's grief as a consequence of the death of a human loved one anticipates not only Reconstruction-era America's fascination with the cult of death, but also with twentieth-century academic debates about the best way to read Chaucer's dream visions.
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[For a pdf of this review, email me your request.] In his first monograph since the acclaimed Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (1994), Steven Justice forces readers to grapple with two of literary criticism's most fundamental... more
[For a pdf of this review, email me your request.]
In his first monograph since the acclaimed Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (1994), Steven Justice forces readers to grapple with two of literary criticism's most fundamental questions: (1) Where does literary criticism find its most legitimate evidence? and (2) How can that evidence lead to a better understanding of the text at hand? He issues his challenge through a multi-layered reading of Adam Usk's Chronicle, choosing the text because he finds Usk performing those same interpretive moves that literary critics now take pride in flaunting. Adam Usk's Secret transforms a search for one ostensible secret into a personal challenge—for both the author and his audience—as he explores and dismisses many of literary criticism's answer to those fundamental questions. In doing so, Justice challenges answers that, not incidentally, he and his colleagues in Medieval Studies have relied on for the past half century.
Justice and Usk seem a ripe combination for such a challenge. Readers, primed by Justice's reputation and the book's tantalizing title, will likely approach Adam Usk's Secret expecting insightful, even revolutionary, readings of the Chronicle's secrets.
This expectation is thwarted.
In his first monograph since the acclaimed Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (1994), Steven Justice forces readers to grapple with two of literary criticism's most fundamental questions: (1) Where does literary criticism find its most legitimate evidence? and (2) How can that evidence lead to a better understanding of the text at hand? He issues his challenge through a multi-layered reading of Adam Usk's Chronicle, choosing the text because he finds Usk performing those same interpretive moves that literary critics now take pride in flaunting. Adam Usk's Secret transforms a search for one ostensible secret into a personal challenge—for both the author and his audience—as he explores and dismisses many of literary criticism's answer to those fundamental questions. In doing so, Justice challenges answers that, not incidentally, he and his colleagues in Medieval Studies have relied on for the past half century.
Justice and Usk seem a ripe combination for such a challenge. Readers, primed by Justice's reputation and the book's tantalizing title, will likely approach Adam Usk's Secret expecting insightful, even revolutionary, readings of the Chronicle's secrets.
This expectation is thwarted.
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In many ways, my review header would seem to contain everything you need to know about the Annotated Chaucer Bibliography. Mark Allen (the long-time bibliographer for the annual journal Studies in the Age of Chaucer [SAC]) and Stephanie... more
In many ways, my review header would seem to contain everything you need to know about the Annotated Chaucer Bibliography. Mark Allen (the long-time bibliographer for the annual journal Studies in the Age of Chaucer [SAC]) and Stephanie Amsel (his worthy successor) continue the sequence of volumes compiled by a century’s worth of distinguished Chaucer bibliographers—Eleanor Prescott Hammond, Dudley D. Griffith, Willard E. Martin, Lorrayne Y. Baird, Hildegard Schnuttgen, and Bege K. Bowers. In order to continue this bibliographic tradition, Allen and Amsel coordinate a group of scholars responsible for sifting through reams of scholarship, for finding and reading pertinent examples, and (as has been the practice since 1986, when the bibliography became affiliated with the SAC, the journal sponsored by the New Chaucer Society) for writing annotations. Not apparent in the title is the bibliography’s second life, a searchable online version. Housed at an easily navigated, open-access website at the University of Texas--San Antonio, the Online Chaucer Bibliography provides a reliable resource for scholars and students alike. That final fact raises an important question not easily extracted from the header: if these entries are freely available online, then why the need for a printed volume?
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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... more
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 ...
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Publication View. 52204132. Jussen, ed, Ordering Medieval Society (CandaceBarrington) (2002). Candace Barrington. Abstract. Candace Barrington, Central Connecticut State University, cbarrington01@snet.net. Publication details. ...
Chaucer and Shakespeare, the global literary icons, play a major role in the digital world. This cross-disciplinary symposium puts the legacies of Chaucer and Shakespeare in conversation with each other. Speakers will explore the... more
Chaucer and Shakespeare, the global literary icons, play a major role in the digital world. This cross-disciplinary symposium puts the legacies of Chaucer and Shakespeare in conversation with each other. Speakers will explore the intersections and connections between the afterlives of Chaucer and Shakespeare in world cultures.
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My short contribution to the plenary panel, Race and Inclusion: Facing Chaucer Studies, Past and Future.
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This paper asks readers to join me on a thought experiment as I consider where we place the limits on what appears to the right of the colon in “Chaucer and:” Along the way, I will (1) briefly review how this question has been answered... more
This paper asks readers to join me on a thought experiment as I consider where we place the limits on what appears to the right of the colon in “Chaucer and:” Along the way, I will (1) briefly review how this question has been answered before, (2) provide some background on how I came to revisit this question, (3) consider how Chaucer addresses the issue in “The Squire’s Tale,” and (4) finally, offer my tentative answer.