New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession

The topic for this issue’s primary cluster was inspired by The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (2021) by Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan. The cluster presents four essays documenting the long-term influence of four medievalists: Aranye Fradenburg Joy, Clifford Flanigan, Joaquin Martínez Pizarro, and Derek Pearsall. This issue also includes of a recap of the longstanding undergraduate conference at Moravian University and short histories of three scholarly societies: the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, the John Gower Society, and the International Piers Plowman Society. We continue our two standard features with “How I teach…” contributions on Christina Fitzgerald’s edition of The York Corpus Christi Play (2018) and David Lawton’s edition of The Norton Chaucer (2019), and a “Conversations” response to the Medieval Studies and Secondary Education cluster in New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession’s Fall 2022 issue.

This essay showcases the pedagogic philosophy and legacy of UC Santa Barbara Professor Emerita Aranye Fradenburg Joy, a Chaucerian distinguished by her contributions to feminist, psychoanalytic and new historicist thought. The piece features an interview between Fradenburg Joy’s former PhD student, University of Iowa Professor Kathy Lavezzo, in which Fradenburg describes her approach to teaching as well as her experiences with a host of teaching instructors and mentors. In addition, Lavezzo shares and discusses some of the notes she took as a TA for Fradenburg’s Canterbury Tales class, and recalls, with UC Berkeley Professor Maura Nolan, Fradenburg’s teaching style and its considerable impact on them as students, teachers and researchers. Ultimately, this piece registers intellectual gifts handed down by not only an important Chaucerian, but also a genealogy of professors who have passed to the next generation valuable knowledge on teaching a paradigmatic medieval work.

Jean Kane, professor of English at Vassar College, examines the influence of C. Clifford Flanigan, late Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University and Kane’s former mentor. Reflecting on his unexpected death in 1993, which brought into question her own pedagogy in the face of grief, Kane offers a personal insight into her classroom as she attempts to bridge the gap between instructor and student when dealing with loss.

This essay describes the pedagogic style and teaching philosophy of Joaquín Martínez Pizarro, a scholar distinguished by his translations (from Latin) and literary interpretations of important, somewhat under-recognized early medieval texts, his discovery of emergent narrative styles in literary history, and his identification of “firsts” within the trajectory of early medieval literature. The article focuses on Professor Martínez Pizarro’s dedication to his students and accompanying beliefs that guided his career: teaching is vital to the scholarly project; language instruction extends the subtle craft of translation; and a medievalist worth their salt does not adhere slavishly to constraints of genre or periodization but explores generic overlaps while reading and teaching outside the medieval canon. For both writers, Professor Martínez Pizarro’s impact has been profound and ongoing. Showing a scholar of remarkable breadth and literary passion bequeathing some of what he knows, this essay makes a larger argument for the necessity of medieval studies to a healthy humanities curriculum.

The scholarly legacy of the late Derek Pearsall is well documented in his publication history, yet his importance as a teacher has not received the same degree of attention. This personal essay reconsiders the idea of a teaching archive by exploring the impact of a teacher thirty years after the conclusion of a class, upon a student who did not go on to become a medievalist. Through an appreciation of Derek's conversational approach to pedagogy, the author champions the dialogical relations at the heart of education which hold particular value during a time of social and professional disengagement.

Elizabeth Robertson, professor at the University of Glasgow, reflects on the creation of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship. Robertson identifies the beginnings of the society with The Medieval Feminist Newsletter, Third Wave Feminism, the renewed interest at universities in theory and feminism, and the need many scholars felt to study women of the Middle Ages. With this account of the society, its work, and the paths of the many people involved in the project, Robertson illustrates how the society remains relevant in our current social and political environment.

R. F. Yeager is the current president of the John Gower Society and the professor emeritus at the University of West Florida. This essay covers the history of the Society, exploring its long and extensive foundation from its early formation all the way to the present day. The John Gower Society ultimately is dedicated to the study of the fourteenth-century poet John Gower and promote scholarship in various forms of pedagogy

Louise M Bishop, Associate Professor emerita at the University of Oregon, reflects on the history of the International Piers Plowman Society, and its developments and major figures in the research of Langland’s poem. Bishop honors a long list of contributors to Landland’s legacy: scholars that edited Piers Plowman’s different texts, wrote about the subject, organized conferences, and even a website (Piers Plowman Electronic Archive), allowing for the expansion and diversification of academic discussion.

The authors reflect on fifteen undergraduate conferences featuring over 1200 student papers.  Several patterns have stood out: the vibrancy of interest in medieval and early modern studies, the extent to which students’ topical interests reflect trends within the disciplines, and the challenges to medieval and early modern studies resulting from changes in both administrative and student cultures.

This essay describes the author’s varied ways of teaching Chaucer in Middle English using translation and the OED to keep language at the forefront of literary study.

This essay responds to the cluster “Medieval Studies and Secondary Education” by suggesting that we shift our attention away from our understandable, but often unproductive, anxieties about the obsolescence of Medieval Studies within school curricula and towards the promotion of the professional health and intellectual pleasure of the exhausted and harried secondary school teacher. In addition to lauding the efforts of medievalists to enhance and expand the appeal and relevance of our disciplines through immersive activities and the provincialization of Europe, this response explores and evaluates the feasibility of proposals to offer online and in-person summer seminars on medieval topics, to augment easily accessible online resources for teaching the Middle Ages, and to develop mentorship structures within universities and professional societies that connect prospective and practicing teachers with medievalists in educator preparation programs.