Professor Emeritus, English
School of Humanities

medieval literature

Phi Beta Kappa. See "grants" below.

Asst and Assoc Prof of English, Yale, 1968-78
Visiting Associate Professor, University of Virginia, 1978
Visiting Professor of English, Wesleyean University (CT), 1981
Prof of English, UCI, 1978-98
Prof Emeritus of English, UCI, 1998-

My dissertation was on 'Piers Plowman,' work finished nearly 40 years later in a commentary on part of the poem. My publications indicate my range of interests. I have finally completed an edition that I began in the early 1970's, a Latin religious text of the twelfth century, the 'Distinctiones Abel' of Peter the Chanter.

Books:
Word-Hoard: An Introduction to Old English Vocabulary. Yale University Press, 1977.

Allegories of History, Allegories of Love. Archon, 1978.

Edited. Chaucer’s Troilus: Essays in Criticism. Archon, 1980.

Edited. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde—text, explanatory notes, textual notes. In The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson et al. Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Edited. Annotation and Its Texts. Oxford University Press, 1991.

Studies in Troilus: Chaucer’s Text, Meter, and Diction. Colleagues Press, 1993. Part repr. in A.T. Gaylord, ed., The Art of Chaucer’s Verse. Routledge, 2001.

Edited, with Theodore M. Andersson. Contradictions: From ‘Beowulf’ to Chaucer. Selected Studies of Larry D. Benson. Scolar Press, 1995.

Translated, with Wendy Lewis, Jennifer Beach, and Oliver Berghof. The ‘Etymologies’ of Isidore of Seville. Cambridge University Press, 2006.

The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman: Volume Five. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

Edited, Geoffrey Chaucer: ‘Troilus and Criseyde’. Norton Critical Edition. Norton, 2006.

Edited, Petri Cantoris Distinctiones Abel, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis, vols. 288, 288A, Brepols, Turnhout, Belgium, 2020.

Translated, Peter the Chanter: The Abel Distinctions. Brepols, 2021

select Articles:
"Troilus Bound,” Speculum 47 (1972): 445-58. Repr. in Geoffrey Chaucer (Wege der Forschung, 253), ed. Willi Erzgräber, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983; also repr. in Chaucer’s ‘Troilus and Criseyde’: Current Essays in Criticism, ed. R. A. Shoaf, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 104 (Binghamton, N.Y.)

“The Plowshare of the Tongue: The Progress of a Symbol from the Bible to Piers Plowman,” Mediæval Studies 35 (1973): 261-93.

“An Evaluation of the Pardoner’s Tale,” pp. 83-95 in Twentieth-Century Interpretations of the Pardoner’s Tale, ed. Dewey Faulkner (Prentice-Hall, 1973). Repr. in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, 17:150-55, ed. James E. Person. (Detroit: Gale Research).

“Visible Allegory: The Distinctiones Abel of Peter the Chanter,” Harvard English Studies 9 (1981): 87-107.

“Suddenness and Process in Chaucer,” Chaucer Review 16 (1982): 18-37.

“Chaucer’s Lists,” pp. 189-223, 297-307 in The Wisdom of Poetry, ed. Larry D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel (Harvard University Press, 1982).

“Allegory,” Dictionary of the Middle Ages 1:178-88 (Scribners, 1983).

“The Words,” pp. 166-72 in Approaches to Teaching ‘Beowulf’, ed. Jess B. Bessinger and Robert F. Yeager (MLA, 1984).

“Allegorical Visions,” pp. 117-33 in A Companion to ‘Piers Plowman’, ed. John A. Alford (University of California Press, 1988).

“Spenser’s Reference Works” and “Troy” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Routledge, 1990).

“Ordo paginis: The Gloss on Genesis 38,” in Commentary as Cultural Artifact, ed. Stephen Nichols and Lee Patterson, special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly 91 (1992): 929-43

“Langland’s Prosody: The State of Study,” pp. 65-85 in The Endless Knot: Essays on Old and Middle English in Honor of Marie Borroff, ed. M. Teresa Tavormina and R. F. Yeager (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995).

Trans., with Wendy Lewis, Calvin Normore, and Terence Parsons, “On the Properties of Discourse: A Translation of Tractatus de Proprietatibus Sermonum (author anonymous),” Topoi 16 (1997): 77-93.

“Langland’s Mighty Line,” pp. 103-117 in William Langland’s ‘Piers Plowman’: A Book of Essays, ed. Kathleen Hewett-Smith (NY: Routledge, 2001).

"A Revised Edition of the C Text," Yearbook of Langland Studies 23 (2009): 263-86

Wilson Prize, best student in Honors Program, UVA, 1964 Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, 1964-65 Kent Fellowship, 1965-68 Elliott Prize, best first article in medieval studies, Medieval Academy of America, 1972 Morse Fellowship (Yale), 1972-73 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, 1976 National Endowment for the Humanities, Research Tools Grant (two years), 1979-81 Guggenheim Fellowship, 1986-87 UC Humanities Research Institute Fellow, 1990, 1994 National Endowment for the Humanities, Interpretive Research Grant (five years;principal investigator), 1992-97 UC President’s Research Fellow in the Humanities, 1994 UCI Humanities Associates Teaching Award, 1998 American Philosophical Society, Lincoln Research Grant, 2011

Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=5525

Last updated
09/01/2021