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This article highlights the accomplishments of a nineteenth-century American editor of Chaucer’s works, Arthur Gilman. It describes the nature of those accomplishments and situates them in respect to the Chaucer editorial activity of the time and to Gilman’s background. When Gilman’s Chaucer edition appeared in 1879, it was unprecedented in several ways, and for fifteen years it was the best mostly complete Chaucer ever produced. In particular, the edition, the first newly edited collection of Chaucer’s verse published by an American press, was also the first to make use of the outpouring of Chaucer Society materials that had appeared in the ten years leading up to it, resulting in an edition with a sounder text and more coherent, up-to-date introductory apparatus than any other available at the time. This achievement was all the more impressive given that the man who managed it was a largely self-taught student of medieval literature.

This essay argues that both sides of the continuing debate about whether Lydgate’s Troy Book is more interested in political legitimation or admonition have not understood the form of the poem. It ...

After characterizing the two general approaches to literary value most often taken in Anglo-American treatments of the topic as either ontological (which emphasize what literary value is ) or genealogical (which emphasize how literary value is made ), this article defines and elucidates an alternative, complementary, pragmatic approach. This approach—taking as its basis the evident, pervasive valuing of literature that occurs both inside and outside the academy and drawing on the actor-network-theory of Bruno Latour—argues that acts of ascribing value are necessary for any social recognition of the literary, and that these acts occur distributed across a network of human and nonhuman valuing agents that extends indefinitely in time and space. It contends that literary value, in pragmatic practice, emerges through activities of mediation among these agents and explains how this view does not preclude ontological or genealogical accounts of value but is not reducible to them. The article next explores the implications of the characteristic looseness in an agent’s ascription of literary value, a characteristic that results in literary value often both manifestly pendant on, and in competition with, value of other kinds. In its conclusion, the article suggests how its approach to literary value may function as a shared conceptual platform for the diverse range of projects that today occur under the umbrella term of literary study, thereby helping to restore some conceptual coherence to the field.

This article explores the relation between Chaucer's socioeconomic location as lay controller of customs and the dazzling metapoetics of the House of Fame. It emphasizes the social ambiguity of Chaucer's movement out of court to the customs house and hence what he would have to gain, in an intertwined socioeconomic and aesthetic sense, from the dissemination of this poem. It argues that the latter—in addition to its skeptical and comic engagement with poetic tradition—represents Chaucer's experimental attempt to shift the parameters of the literary field of late medieval English court poetry to better advantage someone in his then rather peculiar, liminal position.

It has often been observed about these and similar lines in Lydgate’s corpus how singularly focused they are on Chaucer’s stylistic and rhetorical accomplishments, to the exclusion of all other qualities.2 Thomas Hoccleve’s roughly contemporary eulogies of Chaucer—composed around 1411—are comparatively less hyperbolic in respect to this quality and include, for example, a nod to Chaucer as “heir in philosophie / To Aristotle.”3 Many