Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and promotes work that not only focuses on the whole array of subjects medievalists now pursue - in literature, theology, philosophy, social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science - but also work that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative and interdisciplinary studies of every kind, including but not limited to manuscript and book history, linguistics and literature, post-colonial and global studies, the digital humanities and media studies, performance studies, the history of affect and the emotion, the theory and history of sexuality, ecocriticism and environmental studies, theories of the lyric, of aesthetics, of the practices of devotion, and ideas ofmedievalism. When Geoffrey Chaucer is named the Father of English poetry, an inherent assumption about paternity is transmitted. Chaucer's fatherhood is presented as a means of poetic legitimization, a stable mode of authority that connects the medieval author with all the successive generations of Englishwriters. This book argues, however, that for Chaucer himself, paternity was a far more fraught ambition, one capable of devastating male identity as surely as it could enshrine it. Moving away from anachronistic assumptions about reproduction and authority, this book argues that Chaucer profoundlystruggled with his own desire to create something that would last past his own death. For Chaucer also believed that men were the humble, mortal playthings of an all too distant God. Medieval Christianity taught that the earth was but a temporary, sorrowful abode for corrupted men, and that the fallfrom grace was reborn within each generation of Adam's sons. Chaucer knew that God had set sharp limits upon man's ability to create with certainty, and to determine his own posterity. Yet, what could be more human than the longing to wrest some small authority from one's own mortal flesh? This book argues that this essential intellectual, ethical, andreligious crisis lies at the very heart of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Within this masterpiece of English literature, Chaucer boldly confronts the impossibility of his own aching wish to see his offspring, biological and poetic, last beyond his own death, to claim the authority simultaneouslypromised and denied by the very act of creation. | Father Chaucer by Samantha Katz Seal, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters