"New Books across the Disciplines" is a bibliographic resource that facili- tates a cross-disciplinary survey of recent publications. Its scope ranges from late antiquity to the seventeenth century. Coverage is comprehensive for the large majority of North American and British publishers. Other European titles are included whenever received. Books are classified under variable topical headings and listed alphabetically by author's name. Entries include complete bibliographical data and annotations. Unless designated for paper- back editions, prices given are for cloth editions. For paperback reprint edi- tions, original publication dates are given in parentheses. With few excep- tions, books appearing here have been published within the previous two years. Many will be listed here before they are ordered and shelved by libraries.

New Books across the Disciplines

https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7882&context=etd

Passionate eloquence: rhetoric and emotion in Medieval English poetry

The specific Boccaccian analogues for Chaucer Franklin’s Tale have received detailed critical treatment. Scholars consider Menedon’s story in the Filocolo the likely source, and even though there is no absolute critical consensus that Chaucer knew the Decameron, the version of the story in that collection (10, 5) has nonetheless fruitfully been compared to Chaucer’s tale. Over the past twenty years, in fact, the complex relations between Boccaccio and Chaucer have been receiving ever expanding and dynamic treatment, without critics compelling themselves to determine whether Chaucer actually read the Decameron and employed it as a source.1 I want to further these inquiries by engag-

Chaucer's Dorigen and Boccaccio's Female Voices

The Clerk's Tale and the Forces of Habit

Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxenford remarks on two separate occasions that he learned the story of Griselda from “Petrak” (IV 31, 1147), a statement corroborated by Chaucer’s subsequent close reliance on Petrarch for the body of his tale.1 Yet the looming silence of Boccaccio’s original version of this work, along with Chaucer’s history of repeatedly refusing to credit Boccaccio with anything, borrowed or not, makes the poet’s protestations here suspicious. Nevertheless, scholars have scoured the Clerk’s Tale for signs of the presence of Decameron X.10, but with little to show for their efforts: textual evidence of Boccaccio’s original story remains regarded by even the most optimistic critics as slight, and the work has largely been relegated to the status of hard analogue—albeit with a “relevance greater than any other.”2 Most readers agree that Petrarch’s translation of Decameron X.10, Insignis obedientia et fides uxoria,3 serves as Chaucer’s primary source, while some agree with J. Burke Severs’s claim that Chaucer also relied on an anonymous French translation

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.5325/chaucerrev.47.3.0274.pdf

Redressing Griselda: Restoration through Translation in the Clerk's Tale

Leading scholars of Chaucer and Boccaccio offer original, provocative answers to the question of the influence of the Decameron on the genesis and shape of the Canterbury Tales in light of recurring critical resistance to the idea of the Decameron as a text for Chaucer.

The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales. New Essays on an Old Question

On pp. 88-100, Koff cites Gower a number of times in his desciption of Chaucer's relation with his audience as part of his general argument on the way in which Chaucer's poetry creates its own community of understanding. Chaucer's choice of English, like Gower's, may be part 
of an attempt to incorporate his English readers into a broader international community of letters. Gower's account of the commissioning of CA may reveal the impetus behind LGW as well; and Chaucer's only political commentary, in the F Prologue of LGW, reflects similar concerns revealed in all of Gower's works. Chaucer's interest in edification may be more oblique than Gower's but is just as real: both share a sense of the importance of books, and the well-known T&C frontispiece showing Chaucer reading his work to the court suggests an 
attempt to give instruction to young King Richard that echoes Gower's in CA. All of Koff's citations of CA are taken from the Prologue and epilogue; consequently he has little directly to say about Gower and the art of storytelling. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.1]

Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling

The topic of mobs has resonances in a remarkable number of disciplines and provides a link between past and present-mobs are clearly of much importance today. The idea of mobs provides the context for all the essays and topics in this volume - from Heraclitus to the writings of Elias Canetti to the notion of internet mobs. The essays here speak to the complex nature of the mob: its defining characteristics and the varying consequences of its behavior. Mobs as a book brings wide-ranging clarity to a topic that touches such disciplines as medieval studies, literature, musicology, theology and philosophy, history, social theory, the development of the early university, and theatre. Contributors are (in order within the volume): Leonard M. Koff, Ben Schomakers, Bernard S. Bachrach, Nancy van Deusen, Paul W. Knoll, Charlotte Bauer, Andrew Galloway, Robert W. Hanning, Terence Tunberg, Peter Howard, Cornelia Oefelein, Teofilo Ruiz, Richard Taruskin, David B. Rosen, Aino Paasonen and Richard Sogliuzzo.

Mobs : an interdisciplinary inquiry

Book Chapters and Peer-Reviewed Journal Publications 1. "The Divine Comedy's Construction of its Audience in Paradiso 2.1-18." Under review. 2. "Time, History, and Providence in the Philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa." Under review. 3. "Providence, Temporal Authority, and the Illustrious Vernacular in Dante's Political Philosophy."

Leonard Michael Koff

Papers

The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales. New Essays on an Old Question

Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling

Mobs : an interdisciplinary inquiry