Teaching Chaucer

This volume of original essays brings together contributions from both sides of the Atlantic to offer innovations in teaching and learning in Chaucer Studies from scholars and practitioners with hands-on experience of engaging students. Students of Chaucer are often unfamiliar with poetry that is textually, linguistically and culturally different from contemporary material. The projects explored in this study encourage active, often collaborative learning designed to enhance critical thinking and independent research skills. The kinds of learning experiences described here confront, often simultaneously, issues about language, manuscript evidence, the reception of texts, performance and orality, history, and cultural images and contexts - from both medieval and contemporary perspectives. Contributors mediate philosophy and pragmatics to reach out to all those teaching pre-twentieth-century texts for, above all, this book seeks to establish conversations: between students and teachers, students and their peers, and students and texts. Book jacket.

of Manchester, UK. She is also the author of Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (1998), The Generation of Identity in Late Medieval Hagiography (2000) and Studying Chaucer: Approaches to the Canterbury Tales (2000), as well as numerous articles. She co-edits the Manchester Medieval Literatures series and has a poetry collection forthcoming from Cinnamon Press.

LOUISE SYLVESTER is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Central England, Birmingham, UK. She is also the author of Studies in the Lexical Field of Expectation (1994), co-author of Middle English Word Studies: A Word and Author Index (2000) and co-editor of Lexis and Texts in Early English: Studies Presented to Professor Jane A. Roberts (2001). Her current project is on medieval romance.