Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras

Nancy Bradley Warren is professor of English at Texas A&M University. She is the author of a number of books, including The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).

"Chaucerians will find Chaucer and Religious Controversies a fascinating read and a valuable corrective to our understanding of post-medieval reception of medieval writing." —Speculum"This careful and creative work of scholarship is an important contribution to the study of Chaucer's legacy." —Choice"Nancy Bradley Warren's study . . . singles out a series of moments in the history of Chaucer's reception, using responses to various of his works as points of entry into investigation of forms of piety or of religious dissent." —The Times Literary Supplement"In her latest book, Nancy Bradley Warren—who in her previous publications has already shed so much light on the complex relays among literature, religion, gender, politics, authority, and historical periodization across the late medieval / early modern divide—focuses her considerable powers of insight on the works of Chaucer, taking them as both a meditation upon and catalyst or "touchstone" of these relays. In a dazzling set of chapters that span Chaucer's own time and place through the religious conflicts in early modern Britain to colonial New England, Warren demonstrates the myriad ways in which Chaucer's works have served as a labile signifier underlying contested constructions of the mutually implicated categories of orthodox and heterodox, masculine and feminine, and nation and canon." —Robert Meyer-Lee, Agnes Scott College"This study traces the history of Chaucer reception in the context of Christian controversies spanning four centuries, from the time of Chaucer up to the English Augustan Age and the Puritan project in America. It tells a compelling story that—to the best of my knowledge—has until now remained largely untold." —Jennifer Sisk, University of Vermont

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction1. Female Spirituality and Religious Controversy in the Canterbury Tales2. Chaucer, the Chaucerian Tradition, and Female Monastic Readers3. Competing Chaucers: The Development of Religious Traditions of Reception4. "Let Chaucer also look to himself": Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Canon Formation in Seventeenth-Century England5. "Flying from the Depravities of Europe, to the American Strand": Chaucer and the Chaucerian Tradition in Early America