ITM Readers: We're proud to bring to you this guest posting from a very important person!

Maken Melodye on #WhanThatAprilleDay16

by GEOFFREY CHAUCER [aka @LeVostreGC]

Goode Friendes and Readers of Yn The Middel, 

Yt doth fill my litel herte wyth gret happinesse to invyte yow to the thirde yeare of a moost blisful and plesinge celebracioun.

On the first daye of Aprille, lat us make tyme to take joye yn alle langages that are yclept ‘old,’ or ‘middel,’ or ‘auncient,’ or ‘archaic,’ or, alas, even ‘dead.’ 

Thys feest ys yclept ‘Whan That Aprille Day.’ For thys yeare yt ys: 'Whan That Aprille Day 16.' #WhanThatAprilleDay16

Ich do invyte yow to joyne me and manye othir goode folk yn a celebracioun across the entyre globe of the erthe. Yn thys celebracioun we shal reade of oold bokes yn sondrye oold tonges. We shal singe olde songes. We shal playe olde playes. Eny oold tonge will do, and eny maner of readinge. All are welcome. We shal make merrye yn the magical dreamscape of 'social media,' and eke, yf ye kan do yt, yn the material plane of the 'real worlde' as wel.

Ye maye, paraventure, wisshe to reade from the beginning of my Tales of Caunterburye, but ye maye also wisshe to reade of eny oothir boke or texte or scroll or manuscript that ye love. Ye maye even reade the poetrye of John Gower yf that ys yower thinge. 

What are sum wayes to celebrate Whan That Aprille Daye?

Gentil frendes, yf yt wolde plese yow to celebrate Whan That Aprille Daye 2016, ye koude do eny of the followinge. Be sure to use the hasshe-tagge #WhanThatAprilleDay16 on yower poostes of twytter and facebooke and blogge.

• Counte downe to Whan That Aprille Daye wyth postes and readinges.

• Maken a video of yowerself readinge (or singinge! or actinge!) and share yt on the grete webbe of the internette.

• Planne a partye at yower classroome or hous to celebrate oolde langages, and poost pictures to the ynternette.

• Read auncient langages to yower catte, and the catte shal be moost mirthful.

• Make sum maner of cake or pastrye wyth oold wordes upon yt, and feest upon yt wyth good folke and share pictures of yower festivitee. (And yet beware the catte that shal seke to ruin the icinge.)

• Yf ye be bold, ye maye wisshe to share yower readinge yn publique, yn a slam of poesye or a nighte of open mic. (Bringe the catte?)

• Yf ye worke wyth an organisatioun or scole, ye maye wisshe to plan sum maner of event, large or smal, to share writinge yn oold langages.

• And for maximum Aprillenesse, marke all tweetes and poostes wyth the hashtagge #WhanThatAprilleDay16 – remember the ‘Whan’ and ‘Aprille.’

What ys the poynte of Whan That Aprille Daye?

Ower mission ys to celebrate al the langages that have come bifor, and alle their joyes and sorrowes and richesse.

Ower mission ys to remynde folk of the beautye and grete lovelinesse of studyinge the wordes of the past. And eke ower mission ys to bringe to mynde the importaunce of supportinge the scolership and labour that doth bringe thes wordes to us. To remynde folk to support the techinge of paleographye and of archival werke and eek, ywis, the techinge of thes oold langages. To remynde folk of the gret blisse and joye of research libraryes and the gret wysdam and expertyse of the libraryans that care for them across the centuryes. To call to mynde the fundinge of the humanityes, the which ys lyke the light of the sonne on the plantes of learninge and knowledge. For wythout al of thes, the past wolde have no wordes for us. 

Ower mission ys also to have ynogh funne to last until next Whan That Aprille Daye. 

Note that thys event doth also coincide wyth Aprille Fooles Daye, the which ys fyne by cause we do love thes langages and alle who love are yn sum maner also fooles. 

Ich do hope wyth al myn herte that that sum of yow good folke will joyne me on thys April first for readinge and celebratinge and foolinge. Lat us maken melodye on #WhanThatAprilleDay16

Wyth muchel love and admiracioun

Le Vostre

GC

P.S. Some other links for hose who might be interested:

• Inaugural Whan That Aprille Day (in 2014): roundup at the Global Chaucers blog [with the General Prologue's opening lines in twelve modern languages]
  
• Middle English Texts Series (METS) countdown to Whan That Aprille Day in March 2014 [full twitter archive]
  
• Recitations in Old English, Latin, and Middle English by some of the bloggers at In The Middle on Whan That Aprille Day 2014 [listen online]

• A curated archive of tweets from Whan That Aprille Day 2015

Collective Nouns and Medievalist Collectivity: A Poem

by JONATHAN HSY

Briefly noted: If you haven't already, fill out MARY KATE's online survey about BABEL and "Creating Alternative Communities" (she's accepting responses until July 10). Check out KARL's recent posting as well!

I just got back from the amazing Gower-fest (i.e., Third International Congress of the John Gower Society) at the University of Rochester! Expect a blog posting about #JGS2014 very soon.

During the conference banquet, some of the conference participants were wondering if there's a collective noun for Gower scholars, and Brian Gastle joked that it should be called a "recension of Gowerians." On the last day of the conference I expanded Gastle's joke on twitter and Facebook and other people began submitting their own suggestions for other collective nouns for medievalists.

Culling from these discussions, I've composed this poem (taking my lead from KARL's earlier posting about medieval collective nouns):

Medievalist Collectives: A Collaborative Poem

A troop of Anglo-Saxonists
A roundtable of Arthurians
An orientation of cartographers
A compaignye of Chaucerians *
A gathering of codicologists
A circle of Dante scholars
A pageant of early drama scholars
An underappreciation of Early Middle English scholars
A garter of Gawain-Poets
A recension of Gowerians *
A rabble of grammarians
A tempest of Kempists *
A regiment of Hoccleveans *
A fair field of Langlandians
A reduction of Lydgateans *
A tournament of Malorians
A peregrination of Mandevilleans
A massacre of Martinists #gameofthrones
A Pandaemonium of Miltonists
A wonder of monster-theorists
A choir/quire of musicologists
A raze of Ockhamists
An orthography (ormography) of Ormulists *
A necklace of Pearl-Poets
An errant (errancy) of romance scholars *
A Swerve of Shakespeareans
A fellowship of Tolkienists
A torture of Websterians

* ALTERNATIVES: A parliament of Chaucerians; a pride (or romp) of Gowerians; a roaring of Kempists; a Series of Hoccleveans; a tedium of Lydgateans; a quadriga (or flamboyance) of Ormulists; a quest of romance scholars; a moot of Tolkienists. Collectively authored by H. Barbaccia, R. Barrett, @Exhuast_Fumes, A. Farber, C. Fitzgerald, B. Gastle, @GrammarRabble (note the GR tumblr feed and new blog!), J. Hsy, M.K. Hurley, A. Mittman, C. Perry, S. Rajendran, R. Rouse, C. Thomas, R. Utz, A. Walling, R. Wakeman, and M. Worley.


[EDITED July 6: adding Early Middle English scholars, Ormulists, romance scholars]

Chaucer in Wisconsin

by JONATHAN HSY

This posting (and the next) both deal with Chaucer reception. I had originally conceived of these posts as a single entry but I've decided to split them into two separate ones.

Transporting Troilus and Criseyde. On left, Francesca Abbate's Troy, Unincorporated (2012); on right, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1896), ed. William Morris and illus. Edward Burne-Jones.

If the previous post by Karl is any indication, it's now the time of year when many of us our planning our syllabi for the spring semester. I'm devising a new upper-division literature course called "Epic and Romance," and I'm seriously considering assigning this new book that has just been brought to my attention [h/t Lisa Cooper!]. Even if it turns out I can't manage to squeeze this onto the syllabus this time around, I have already made the book the first item on my own personal reading list.

Francesca Abbate's new book Troy, Unincorporated (University of Chicago Press, 2012) is a modern-day "refraction" of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. Set in the unincorporated town of Troy, Wisconsin, this series of lyric monologues re-imagines Chaucer's tale of love and betrayal.

I provide the complete blurb from the publisher's website (you can also flip through a preview on Google Books):

A meditation on the nature of betrayal, the constraints of identity, and the power of narrative, the lyric monologues in Troy, Unincorporated offer a retelling, or refraction, of Chaucer’s tragedy Troilus and Criseyde. The tale’s unrooted characters now find themselves adrift in the industrialized farmlands, strip malls, and half-tenanted “historic” downtowns of south-central Wisconsin, including the real, and literally unincorporated, town of Troy. Allusive and often humorous, they retain an affinity with Chaucer, especially in terms of their roles: Troilus, the good courtly lover, suffers from the weeps, or, in more modern terms, depression. Pandarus, the hard-working catalyst who brings the lovers together in Chaucer’s poem, is here a car mechanic. 

Chaucer’s narrator tells a story he didn’t author, claiming no power to change the course of events, and the narrator and characters in Troy, Unincorporated struggle against a similar predicament. Aware of themselves as literary constructs, they are paradoxically driven by the desire to be autonomous creatures—tale tellers rather than tales told. Thus, though Troy, Unincorporated follows Chaucer’s plot—Criseyde falls in love with Diomedes after leaving Troy to live with her father, who has broken his hip, and Troilus dies of a drug overdose—it moves beyond Troilus’s death to posit a possible fate for Criseyde on this “litel spot of erthe.”

Francesca Abbate is an English professor at Beloit College; read more about her experiences and the inspiration for her book here. This promises to be an exciting read, and I look forward to finding out how Abbate engages with the Chaucerian text. It intrigues me not just as a piece of Chauceriana, but as (in the words of Barbara Berman) "the work of an academic/artist making the old new, making contemporary experience into something alive, one would wish, for a very long time."

* My sincere apologies to any ITM readers who saw the original posting which erroneously misidentified the town in question as Troy, Michigan. (I attribute this mistake to a late-night conversation over Facebook: one of my colleagues was saying she wished the book were set in Troy, MI, instead - until I informed her that there is indeed a real unincorporated town in Wisconsin called "Troy" and that the author herself lives and works in Wisconsin.)