Chaucer and Trauma

Trauma is an inescapable condition of Chaucer’s works. From the ravaging of Troy and the abandonment of Dido to the devastating aftereffects of sexual assault, Chaucer portrayed the most unsettling, searing aspects of human experience. While the term “trauma” was not part of Chaucer’s vocabulary, the author was assuredly aware of its causes and consequences, its victims and symptoms.

This timely volume explores depictions of violence, victimhood, and overwhelming grief or loss in Chaucer’s most ambitious texts, Troilus and Criseyde and the Canterbury Tales. The authors examine layers of deep emotional suffering in Chaucer’s works, as well as those forces that perpetrate injustices against human beings. The essays scrutinize Chaucer’s narratives through close textual analysis and modern theoretical approaches, offering original perspectives and treating subjects relevant to contemporary concerns—rape, domestic violence, slavery, forced consent, family separation, natural catastrophe, pandemic, and more. Written by leading voices in the field, Chaucer and Trauma is designed to introduce readers of Chaucer to a topic of intense present interest.

Along with the volume editors, the contributors include Sarah Baechle, David K. Coley, Suzanne M. Edwards, Carissa M. Harris, Matthew W. Irvin, Kate Koppelman, Samuel F. McMillan, and Lynn Staley.

“At a moment when support for study of the past is slipping away at many American institutions, Chaucer and Trauma feels especially timely. In particular, it highlights how relevant Chaucer study is to the challenges we face today, including climate change, global pandemic, and military occupation, as refugees, mortals, and heirs to unjust systems.”—Wendy Matlock, Kansas State University

“Chaucer and Trauma demonstrates Geoffrey Chaucer’s sensitivity to both trauma and those traumatized, a timely reorientation of his reputation as someone who inflicted trauma. By extending the applicability of trauma studies to the late-medieval period, this groundbreaking collection helps us listen to survivors of trauma, then and now.”—Candace Barrington, coeditor of Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature

Susanna Fein is Professor of English Emerita at Kent State University. Her most recent book is The Owl and the Nightingale and the English Poems of Oxford, Jesus College, MS 29 (II).

David Raybin is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Eastern Illinois University.

Together, Fein and Raybin are the coeditors of Chaucer: Visual Approaches and Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches, both published by Penn State University Press, and joint editors of The Chaucer Review .

Gender Studies

Literary Studies

           English

           Medieval

Medieval and Early Modern Studies