Geoffrey Chaucer was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for The Canterbury Tales. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer also gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son Lewis. He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament.
In medicine and biology, scatology or coprology is the study of faeces.
Walter William Skeat, was a British philologist and Anglican deacon. The pre-eminent British philologist of his time, he was instrumental in developing the English language as a higher education subject in the United Kingdom.
Boydell & Brewer is an academic press based in Martlesham, Suffolk, England, that specializes in publishing historical and critical works. In addition to British and general history, the company publishes three series devoted to studies, editions, and translations of material related to the Arthurian legend. There are also series that publish studies in medieval German and French literature, Spanish theatre, early English texts, musicology, and other subjects. Depending on the subject, its books are assigned to one of several imprints in Woodbridge, Cambridge (UK), or Rochester, New York, location of its principal North American office. Imprints include Boydell & Brewer, D.S. Brewer, Camden House, the Hispanic series Tamesis Books, the University of Rochester Press, James Currey, and York Medieval Press.
The Penn State University Press, also known as The Pennsylvania State University Press, was established in 1956 and is a non-profit publisher of scholarly books and journals. It is the independent publishing branch of the Pennsylvania State University and is a division of the Penn State University Library system. Penn State University Press publishes books and journals of interest to scholars and general audiences. As a part of a land-grant university with a mandate to serve the citizens of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, it also specializes in works about Penn State University, Pennsylvania, and the mid-Atlantic region. The areas of scholarship the Press is best known for are art history, medieval studies, Latin American studies, rhetoric and communication, religious studies, and Graphic Medicine. In 2016 the Press launched PSU Press Unlocked, an open access platform featuring over 70 books and journals. The Press acquired academic publisher Eisenbrauns, which specializes in ancient Near East and biblical studies, in November 2017. Eisenbrauns continues to publish as an imprint of the Press.
John Vincent Fleming is an American literary scholar and the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, at Princeton University.
Carolyn P. Collette is an American literary critic and a specialist in medieval literature, particularly Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. She is Professor Emerita of English Language and Literature at Mount Holyoke College, and a research associate at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York, in England.
Michael G. Cornelius is an American scholar specialising in early British literature and an author.
The Philological Quarterly is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering research on medieval European and modern literature and culture. It was established in 1922 by Hardin Craig. The inaugural issue of the journal was made available at sixty cents per copy and included articles on Chaucer, Henry Fielding, and Shakespeare, among others. Berthold Ullman served with three colleagues on the original board of associate editors. Bill Kupersmith guided the journal through disciplinary reorganizations and changing academic norms during his thirty-year service as editor of the journal.
Durant Waite Robertson Jr. was a scholar of medieval English literature and especially Geoffrey Chaucer. He taught at Princeton University from 1946 until his retirement in 1980 as the Murray Professor of English, and was "widely regarded as this [the twentieth] century's most influential Chaucer scholar".
Contact between Geoffrey Chaucer and the Italian humanists Petrarch or Boccaccio has been proposed by scholars for centuries. More recent scholarship tends to discount these earlier speculations because of lack of evidence. As Leonard Koff remarks, the story of their meeting is "a 'tydying' worthy of Chaucer himself".
David Roland Aers is a James B. Duke Professor of English, historical theology and religion at Duke University. He has published widely on literature, sacramental culture and ideology in medieval and Renaissance England.
Margaret Schlauch was a scholar of medieval studies at New York University and later, after she left the United States for political reasons in 1951, at the University of Warsaw, where she headed the departments of English and General Linguistics. Her work covered many topics but included focuses on Chaucer, Anglo-Saxon, and Old Norse literature.
Richard Utz is a German-born medievalist who has spent much of his career in North America. He specializes in medieval studies, and served as president of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism (2009–2020).
Henry Ansgar Kelly is distinguished research professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Alastair J. Minnis is a Northern Irish literary critic and historian of ideas who has written extensively about medieval literature, and contributed substantially to the study of late-medieval theology and philosophy. Having gained a first-class B.A. degree at the Queen's University of Belfast, he matriculated at Keble College, Oxford as a visiting graduate student, where he completed work on his Belfast Ph.D., having been mentored by M.B. Parkes and Beryl Smalley. Following appointments at the Queen's University of Belfast and Bristol University, he was appointed Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of York; also Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies and later Head of English & Related Literature. From 2003 to 2006, he was a Humanities Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University, Columbus, from where he moved to Yale University. In 2008, he was named Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English at Yale. He retired in 2018, and is now living in the Scottish Borders. Professor Minnis is a Fellow of the English Association, UK (2000), a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America (2001), and an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy (2016). From 2012 to 2014, he served as president of the New Chaucer Society. Currently, he is Vice-President of the John Gower Society. He was General Editor of the Cambridge University Press series Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature from 1987 to 2018, and holds an honorary master's degree from Yale (2007) and an honorary doctorate from the University of York (2018). The University of York also bestowed on him the honorific title of Emeritus Professor of Medieval Literature (2018).
Florilegium, the journal of the Canadian Society of Medievalists / Société canadienne des médiévistes, is a quarterly "international, peer-reviewed academic journal concerned with the study of late Antiquity and the Middle Ages".
Sebastian Sobecki is a medievalist specialising in English literature, history, and manuscript studies.
Robert Earl Kaske was an American professor of medieval literature. He spent most of his career at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he was the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, and where he founded one of the preeminent medieval studies graduate programs in North America. His published output included lengthy interpretations of Beowulf and of poems and passages by Dante and Chaucer, and frequently constituted leading studies. Kaske particularly enjoyed solving cruxes, with articles on problematic passages in works such as Pearl, Piers Plowman, the Divine Comedy, The Husband's Message, The Descent into Hell, and Beowulf.
Suzanne Conklin Akbari is a medievalist, recognised for her global and comparative approach to medieval literary history. She was a Professor in English and Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto from 1995 until 2019, when she joined the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
