Tim William Machan

Tim Machan explores the nature of English present and past, and its role in shaping the identity of those who speak it. He pursues his object through episodes in its history around the globe, from Caxton to Churchill and from rural America to colonial Australia. This is a book for everyone interested in English and the role of language in society

And Why Should We Care?

What is English?

Alastair J. Minnis

Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae was among the most persistent and extensive influences on Chaucer’s writing. Its ideas appear in various works, including the Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde, while the so-called Boethian balades offer poetic renditions of small sections of the Consolation. Around 1380 Chaucer translated the whole of the Consolation into English, drawing not only on the Latin Vulgate Consolatio but also on Jean de Meun’s French translation (Li Livres de confort de philosophie) and on Nicholas Trevet’s Latin commentary on the Consolatio. Sources of the Boece will be particularly valuable for Chaucer studies, for it makes available for the first time copies of all Chaucer’s sources for his translation: newly edited, complete, facing-page texts of the Vulgate Consolatio and Meun’s translation, along with relevant extracts from the commentaries of Nicholas Trevet and Remigius of Auxerre and collations from the larger Latin and French traditions. The edition thus enables detailed, comparative studies of Chaucer’s use of his sources and provides additional material for assessing his understanding of Boethius’s ideas and how they figure in his other compositions. More generally, the very format of the edition will facilitate the study of translation in the Middle Ages, when writers worked not from standardized editions like the ones modern scholars consult but from variable and sometimes conflicting traditions. Chaucer’s procedures provide insights into medieval notions of textuality and vernacular authorship, issues that are perennial scholarly concerns.

Sources of the Boece

Jón Karl Helgason

This volume investigates the reception of a small historical fact with wide-ranging social, cultural and imaginative consequences. Inspired by Leif Eiriksson’s visit to Vinland in about the year 1000, novels, poetry, history, politics, arts and crafts, comics, films and video games have all come to reflect rising interest in the medieval Norse and their North American presence. Uniquely in reception studies, From Iceland to the Americas approaches this dynamic between Nordic history and its reception by bringing together international authorities on mythology, language, film and cultural studies, as well as on the literature that has dominated critical reception. Collectively, the chapters not only explore the connections among medieval Iceland and the modern Americas, but also probe why medieval contact has become a modern cultural touchstone.

Vinland and historical imagination

From Iceland to the Americas

Chaucer's Boece

Techniques of Translation

This engaging and wide-ranging history of language anxiety ranges from the Tower of Babel to the internet. It shows how worry about language results from and causes linguistic change, as well as fuelling perennial concerns about class, culture, identity, and social change.

Tim William Machan

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