Can an outrageously immoral man or a scandalous woman teach morality or lead people to virtue? Does personal fallibility devalue one's words and deeds? Is it possible to separate the private from the public, to segregate individual failing from official function? Chaucer addressed these perennial issues through two problematic authority figures, the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath. The Pardoner dares to assume official roles to which he has no legal claim and for which he is quite unsuited. We are faced with the shocking consequences of the belief, standard for the time, that immorality is not necessarily a bar to effective ministry. Even more subversively, the Wife of Bath, who represents one of the most despised stereotypes in medieval literature, the sexually rapacious widow, dispenses wisdom of the highest order. This innovative book places these "fallible authors" within the full intellectual context that gave them meaning. Alastair Minnis magisterially examines the impact of Aristotelian thought on preaching theory, the controversial practice of granting indulgences, religious and medical categorizations of deviant bodies, theological attempts to rationalize sex within marriage, Wycliffite doctrine that made authority dependent on individual grace and raised the specter of Donatism, and heretical speculation concerning the possibility of female teachers. Chaucer's Pardoner and Wife of Bath are revealed as interconnected aspects of a single radical experiment wherein the relationship between objective authority and subjective fallibility is confronted as never before.

The Chaucer Bibliography series aims to provide annotated bibliographies for all of Chaucer's work. This book summarizes 20th-century commentaries on Chaucer's "Pardoner's Prologue" and "Tale."

Promissory Notes on the Treasury of Merits is a volume of 12 essays by a distinguished team of international scholars dealing with the place of indulgences in the religious life of Europe between roughly 1250 and the outbreak of the Reformation. Some of the articles offer regional analyses, stretching from Spain to the Netherlands, from England to Bohemia and Italy. Others deal with the theology and theological and practical controversies provoked by indulgences, or with thematic issues like the place of indulgences in fifteenth-century crusades, in pilgrimage, and the early exploitation of print in their distribution. The complementary nature of the articles builds into a fuller picture of the central, but hitherto neglected, role which indulgences had in late medieval European religious life.

The series is performing an important service by providing fully annotated editions of Tudor humanists and playwrights in the original Tudor English, with glossaries and listing of textual variants and doubtful readings. COMPARATIVE DRAMA `A first-rate edition that substantially advances the cause of scholarship.' COMPARATIVE DRAMA First complete and fully annotated collection of John Heywood's plays in the original language. It makes possible a reevaluation ofhis remarkable achievement as actor-playwright and an appreciation of his lively contribution to the English language. In all their experimental variety the comedies are seen to have the stamp of an idiosyncratic, theatricalintelligence coupled with a surprising seriousness and Heywood emerges as a resourceful apologist for traditional Catholic doctrine in a time of Reformation. In arguing for a new chronology, the editors suggest that Henry VIII'sservant and entertainer was capable of refreshing irreverence and political daring. Contents: Witty and Witles, Johan Johan, The Pardoner and theFrere, The Foure PP, A Play of Love, The Play of the Wether. Notes.Appendices: Verses from a lost Play of Reason, Translation of . RICHARD AXTON is a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, and University lecturer in English. PETER HAPPÉis the former Principal of Barton PeverilSixth-Form College.

This is the first major collection of essays to look at the literature of the entire Tudor period, from the reign of Henry VII to death of Elizabeth I. It pays particularly attention to the years before 1580. Those decades saw, amongst other things, the establishment of print culture and growth of a reading public; the various phases of the English Reformation and process of political centralization that enabled and accompanied them; the increasing emulation of Continental and classical literatures under the influence of humanism; the self-conscious emergence of English as a literary language and determined creation of a native literary canon; the beginnings of English empire and the consolidation of a sense of nationhood. However, study of Tudor literature prior to 1580 is not only of worth as a context, or foundation, for an Elizabethan 'golden age'. As this much-needed volume will show, it is also of artistic, intellectual, and cultural merit in its own right. Written by experts from Europe, North America, and the United Kingdom, the forty-five chapters in The Oxford Handbook to Tudor Literature recover some of the distinctive voices of sixteenth-century writing, its energy, variety, and inventiveness. As well as essays on well-known writers, such as Philip Sidney or Thomas Wyatt, the volume contains the first extensive treatment in print of some of the Tudor era's most original voices.