Background: Literature
18 July 2008

Harvard Chaucer Page
Literary Subjects
Brief essays on popular drama, the Breton lay, English romance, love visions, lyric poetry, fabliaux, rhetoric and style.

Harvard Chaucer Page
Other Authors
Brief introductions to the authors Chaucer read and late medieval authors who read Chaucer: Langland, Gower, Boccaccio, Virgil, the Knight of Latour-Landry, Boethius, Ovid, Petrarch, Lydgate, Dante, Cato, and Andreas Capellanus.

David A. Gatwood, Bob Peckham
Literature of the French Middle Ages
A hot list of links for medieval French poetry and poets, including Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Guillaume de Machaut, Eustache Deschamps, and several fabliaux. Not very well organized, but probably indispensable. A version of this list hosted by the French embassy in Ottawa is better organized, but perhaps less current. See also the French literature shelf at the Labyrinth Library.

Darleen Pryds
Summary of the Romance of the Rose
Two and a half page summary of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's Roman de la rose, keyed to the chapter and page numbers of Frances Horgan's Oxford World's Classics translation. Also includes some study questions.

Otfried Lieberknecht
Dante Alighieri: A Guide to Online Resources
Online texts of Dante's Works (in Italian and translation); online publications; bibliographies; exhibitions & illustrations; reception in music; links; societies; conferences & announcements; work in progress; Dante scholars & students. Well-maintained, well-organized. Highly recommended.

David Finley
Boccaccio and Decameron: Guide to Websites
Well-annotated, well-organized hotlist, with frank recommendations and original limericks. See also Brown University's Decameron Web.

R. Allen Shoaf
Thomas Usk, The Testament of Love
"The importance of [the Testmanet] in English literary history can and should be measured from a variety of perspectives. Narrowly, it tells us something about politics and society in England in the 1380s. Also it records early, perhaps first, mentions of major contemporary works, especially Chaucer's Trolius and Criseyde. More broadly viewed, it is perforce a key document in the history of the development of English prose. And it is equally an important document in our assessment of the kinds of learning or scholarship that were attainable in the 1370s and 1380s in England...More broadly still, [the Testament] is witness to something like a newly emerging idea of the relationship between self, society, and writing that we experience repeatedly in other monuments of fourteenth-century English culture." In addition to the Middle English text presented here, Professor Shoaf has also provided a translation of the Testmament into modern English.

Stephen R. Reimer
The Canon of John Lydgate Project
An ongoing attempt to establish the canon of Chaucer's fifteenth-century imitator. Includes articles on the Canon Project and online editions.

Online Medieval & Classical Library
John Gower, Confessio amantis
A long frame poem, composed (1386-90) and revised (1393) while Chaucer was working on the Canterbury Tales, organized as a series of stories illustrating each of the seven deadly sins.

Lawrence Warner
The William Langland Home Page
Professional annoucements of interest to Langlandians; overviews of Langland's work and life; texts and images; online articles and book-reviews; information on political and social upheaval in the fourteenth century; references to, influences on, and contexs to Piers Plowman; Langland's poetics; Langland's lexicon; Langland's readers. Regularly updated.

David Wilson-Okamura
Outline of Piers Plowman
Outline of the B-text, in Rich Text Format (RTF). Can be imported into most word processors.

Anniina Jokinen
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Links to online resources: texts a reading guide (i.e., study questions), some criticism, images, audio clips, and student projects. With the notable exception of R. A. Shoaf's book The Poem as Green Girdle, there is as yet very little online Gawain criticism of substance.

Paul Deane
Forgotten Ground Regained: A Treasury of Alliterative and Accentual Poetry
Resources on alliterative poetry, particularly in English; includes an online translation (ongoing) of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and other works from Chaucer's period.

Paul Deane
The Pearl Poet: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
An online translation of SGGK, with essays and links to useful resources on the net. Part of the Forgotten Ground project, described above.

Please send comments to David Wilson-Okamura at david@virgil.org.