Given by Professor Stephen Rigby of the University of Manchester, this year’s Chaucer Lecture is entitled, Three Approaches to Chaucer in Context. The open lecture will take place on Thursday, 13th October at 6.00pm in Woolf College’s Lecture Theatre, at the University of Kent’s Canterbury Campus. All are welcome and a wine reception will follow the lecture.
Stephen Rigby is Emeritus Professor at the University of Manchester. One of his key interests in research and teaching is late medieval English literature in its historical context. Professor Rigby’s Chaucer in Context was a survey of critical attempts to establish the social meaning of medieval literature, an area he also explored in his article on medieval defences of women for Chaucer Review, his discussion of literature as social ideology in the Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages and his Wisdom and Chivalry which discusses Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ in relation to medieval political theory.
He is currently editing a volume for Oxford University Press in which historians attempt to locate Chaucer’s pilgrims in the ‘General Prologue’ to the Canterbury Tales in their historical context and future projects include an article on the representation of peasants in medieval social ideology.