About This Issue

This collection of articles on Chaucer and Rhetoric, which has been prepared as a special issue of The Chaucer Review, commences immediately after an essay included here as part of a current conversation about editorial practices when preparing a scholarly edition of Chaucer’s texts. A. S. G. Edwards offered an assessment of the new Oxford Chaucer’s editing methods in an article appearing in the October 2025 issue of this journal. The Oxford editors Christopher Cannon and James Simpson offer here their response. This special issue marks the centennial of John Matthews Manly’s important 1926 article, “Chaucer and the Rhetoricians.” Guest editors Joseph Turner and Martin Camargo have assembled a distinguished group of specialists in medieval rhetoric to reexamine a subject that has gone somewhat dormant in Chaucer studies: Chaucer and rhetorical pedagogy and practice. Opening with a brief critical history by the editors, this issue shows—in six articles contributed by Rita Copeland, Christopher Cannon, Nicolette Zeeman, Georgiana Donavin, Alex Mueller, and Joseph Turner—how new thinking about the rhetoricians of Chaucer’s age may productively inform present-day Chaucer studies.Chaucer’s tales often mix genres, styles, and voices in ways not readily explicable by traditional categories of medieval rhetorical theory. Rita Copeland proposes that the principle of forma tractatus, to which medieval readers turned when approaching incongruities in classical and sacred texts, explains Chaucer’s “messy” method rather well, and she applies this logic to an analysis of the Merchant Tale’s narrative movement among an “incongruous assemblage” of genres and tones.Christopher Cannon explores three devices used by Chaucer to evoke and capture sound: “a uniquely inventive onomatopoeia, the materialization of speech, and collective speech.” These rhetorical techniques had occurred earlier, but, in adopting them across his oeuvre, Chaucer makes them his own. Sonic effects in the House of Fame and Nun’s Priest Tale offer strong examples of the Chaucerian aural style.Scholars have long recognized Chaucer’s use of affective piety to stimulate reader response. Nicolette Zeeman considers Chaucer’s awareness that the power of affective feeling for literary effect might be abused by some to advance social and secular purposes. Chaucer begins to investigate the rhetoric of affective piety as early as the Book of the Duchess. In later writings such as the Miller’s, Man of Law’s, and Prioress’s Tales, his employ of affect becomes increasingly “disengaged and critical.”Turning to Chaucer’s experimentation with women’s speech, Georgiana Donavin detects an intriguing link between the Pardoner’s and Physician’s Tales. The female voice progresses from the “repetitious garrulity” of the Goddess Nature, to the “disciplined brevity” of Virginia’s maiden tongue, to the “death-swallowing” silence of Mother Earth. Chaucerian voices tagged as maternal “establish artistic control over the dizzying life cycle.”Alex Mueller examines Chaucer’s engagement with the rhythms and forms in Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae, Filippo Ceffi’s Italian translations of the Historia and Ovid’s Heroides, and Guido-inspired epistolary models promoted in the ars dictaminis. Chaucer’s reading informs his own rhetorical practice in Troilus and Criseyde and the Legend of Good Women, where he adapts the rhythms of color and cadence found in his sophisticated predecessors.Joseph Turner’s article closes the special issue by showing how Chaucer mined Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova not just for ideas about rhetorical architecture (as voiced by Pandarus), but also for fashioning psychologically complex “interior lives” for Troilus’s principal characters. Pandarus’s counsel on the need for rhetorical control is countered in “unscripted scenes of Troilus and Criseyde’s initial infatuation” and in Diomedes’s “sodeyn” success. Chaucer’s experiments with rhetorical models are just what the master, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, would have hoped for.We are grateful to Joe and Martin for organizing such a stimulating and collaborative exploration of Chaucer’s ever-inventive engagement with the rhetorical models of his day.