The New Chaucer Society is a professional academic organization dedicated to the study of Geoffrey Chaucer and the Middle Ages, founded in 1977. It is based at the Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. The society's institutional home rotates based on the Executive Director's home university.
History The predecessor of the New Chaucer Society, the Chaucer Society, was founded by Frederick James Furnivall in 1870 and closed in 1912.Antonia Ward, "'My Love For Chaucer': F. J. Furnivall and Homosociality in the Chaucer Society," in Medievalism and the Academy, ed. Leslie, J. Workman, Kathleen Verduin, and David D. Metzger (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 48.
The New Chaucer Society was incorporated in 1977 by Paul Ruggiers, a David Ross Boyd and George Lynn Cross Research Professor of English, at the University of Oklahoma and launched its first membership drive in 1978 when 6,000 invitations were sent to scholars across the United States and 2,000 were sent to medievalists in the United Kingdom, Europe, and Japan. It sought to reconstitute the original Chaucer Society founded by Frederick Furnivall in the United Kingdom in 1870, which became defunct during World War I.
The New Chaucer Society was established as a venue for international exchange through an annual yearbook, newsletter, and congress. The first edition of Studies in the Age of Chaucer was published in April 1979 under the editorship of Roy Pearcy; the first congress was held in Washington, D.C. that same month."New Directions in Chaucer Scholarship." Washington, D.C., 20 April 1979, The Inaugural International Congress of The New Chaucer Society, Annual Conference Funded by The University of Oklahoma and The National Endowment for The Humanities. The Society was originally headquartered at the University of Oklahoma as it was an outgrowth of the Variorum Chaucer project led by Ruggiers, but moved to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville in 1983 when John Hurt Fisher became executive director. Subsequently the Society’s headquarters was tied to the institution of the executive director. Its first international congress was held in York, UK in 1984.
Publications and Outputs The society publishes an annual journal, Studies in the Age of Chaucer.Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 23.
The society also organizes a biennial international congress and supports the Chaucer Bibliography Online.Paul R. Burden, A Subject Guide to Quality Web Sites, (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 43.
The society endorses New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy & Profession.
Past presidents The following persons are or have been president of the society:
References
External links
Studies in the Age of Chaucer