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This volume will be a critical anthology of primary texts whose main audience was children and/or adolescents in the medieval period. Texts will include theoretical and interpretative introductions and commentary.

Klines examines the Chaucer's Physician's Tale, which its father character Virginius's final encounter with its daughter character Virginia is stripped of its veneer of theological propriety and seen in terms of Elaine Scarry's definition of a political situation. He argues that Scarry's definition of political situation carries the hallmarks of torture: interrogation (by the torturer-father) and accession to his terms (by the victim-daughter) followed by summary execution. Moreover, he believes that The Physician's Tale, sacrificial violence justifies the subjectivity of the father, assails the subjectivity of the daughter, and organizes their relationship. Viewed in Scarry's terms, conventional readings of Virgnia's \"sacrifice\" at her father's hand in Chaucer's Physician's Tale sanction what is little more than interrogation followed by theologically rationalized murder. Furthermore, he argues that although Virginius fails to recognize \"the incontestable legitimacy\" of Virginia's existence, in Scarry's terms, Virginia opposes her father's violence with the tools available to her. Virginia's words and actions show that her father's sacrificial gesture is actually a socially convenient murder.

CHAUCER'S CANTERBURY TALES is structured like a role playing game (RPG): it features characters who, within the Frame Tale, engage in a quest, “combat” one another at times, and negotiate an array of challenges under the watchful eye of a referee who has set specific rules for success and a prize for winning the game he has proffered. In Chaucer's General Prologue, the opening section of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer the Pilgrim Narrator describes a group of “about” twenty nine pilgrims who have assembled at the Tabard Inn to walk from Southwark, London, to Canterbury to visit the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket, and the Tabard's gregarious Host, Harry Bailley, creates a tale telling game to pass the time during the trip to Canterbury and back. The Host proposes, if they accede to his judgement, that each pilgrim tells two tales on the way to Canterbury and two back:And which of yow that bereth hym best of alle,That is to seyn, that telleth in this caasTales of best sentence and moost solaas,Shal have a soper at oure aller costHeere in this place, sittynge by this post,Whan that we come agayn fro caunterbury.In other words, whoever tells the story of “best sentence [meaning] and moost solaas [pleasure]” wins a free dinner on the Host when the pilgrim party returns to the Tabard Inn. Of course, this presents important questions for the reader: How are we to understand “sentence” and “solaas” as their nuances develop across multiple tales? What would it mean to “win” the tale telling contest, and how would you decide? Because Chaucer never completed The Canterbury Tales, we have no definitive answer, but I thought creating a pedagogical mechanism to do so might make for an interesting class.The classroom presents a wonderful opportunity to approach this challenge every time we teach a Chaucer course, and the framework I describe here can be adapted for other literary or historical courses. I outline in this essay the first in a series of pedagogical experiments I have offered in my Chaucer classes at the University of Alaska Anchorage that allows each class to try to answer the question of which tale offers the “best sentence and moost solaas.”

Kline discusses his attempts and techniques at teaching medieval women's literature to contemporary students. He distills his students insights and extends those findings into a discussion of using the Internet to teach medieval women. The Internet often sparks an interest in student research where traditional methods fail.

This volume will be a critical anthology of primary texts whose main audience was children and/or adolescents in the medieval period. Texts will include theoretical and interpretative introductions and commentary.

From the outset of the \"Siege of Thebes,\" John Lydgate struggles mightily to situate his own work within the poetic tradition established by Geoffrey Chaucer. The Prologue to the \"Siege\" consciously imitates, none too well, both the structure and style of Chaucer's \"General Prologue,\" while the Monk of Bury embeds himself within the narrative frame of the \"Canterbury Tales.\"

The Jesus and the Doctors plays, one of which appears in all four extant English cycles and the Coventry Weaver's Pageant, have received little critical attention. In a comparative examination of the plays, it is argued that they present distinct, subtly nuanced portrayals of Jesus.