Seth Lerer Avalon Foundation Professor in Humanities and Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Stanford University
	Seth Lerer has taught and published widely on medieval and early modern English and European literatures. Among his eleven published books are Chaucer and His Readers; The Yale Companion to Chaucer; Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language; and the forthcoming Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History.

Almost from the time of his death in 1400, Geoffrey Chaucer has been venerated as the “father” of English poetry. His Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde were among the earliest works of literature to be printed in England, and his reputation as a narrative poet, lyricist, and social satirist has sustained his reputation for six centuries. Yet recent scholarship and criticism reveal a different Chaucer: a writer implicated in the politics of the late fourteenth century; someone engaged with the upheavals of religious dissent, social rebellion, and economic innovation. How, therefore, should we read and teach Chaucer today?

This seminar will seek to understand Chaucer as both an aesthetic and political writer. Its larger goal will be to probe the relationships among formalism and historicism, aesthetic judgment and political response, in the study of early English literature. It will devote much time to the texture of Chaucer’s Middle English and explore how he draws on the resources of a changing vernacular to present uniquely new narratives, humor, and characters. The seminar will also explore how his English was becoming, at the close of the fourteenth century, the medium of culture and commerce, and how such events as the Rising of 1381 were not just challenges to political but also to linguistic control in England.

Finally, we will explore Chaucer’s afterlife: how his texts were transmitted in manuscript and print and how he came to be reshaped by subsequent readers into a founding figure in vernacular literary history. There has been a “Chaucer” for all periods of English literature. Who is the Chaucer for the early twenty-first century?