Chaucerians do it with Pronounced E’S and other Risible Relics of a Campaign in the Medieval Trenches

Abstract

Author’s Note: what follows constitutes a kind of comic diary of my more than fifty years as a medievalist, first as a graduate student, subsequently as a faculty member. The entries, spread across several genres, record via good-natured (I hope) parody my encounters with texts, ideas, colleagues, and scholarly presentations in classrooms, libraries, and those overheated, overcrowded (or near-deserted), resonantly named meeting rooms in conference hotels engaged by medievalist associations and overrun by their members.