The Canterbury Tales and Medieval Culture

FAIN: FV-50205-09

Yale University (New Haven, CT 06510-1703)
Lee W. Patterson (Project Director: March 2009 to March 2011)

Funding details:
Original grant (2009) $150,783.00
Supplement (2010) $4,637.50

: A six-week school teacher summer seminar for sixteen participants on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and its cultural context.

This six-week Summer Seminar for School Teachers provides an opportunity to read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales both as literary masterpiece in its own right and as a way of understanding the central values and practices of late medieval culture. Members of the seminar will learn to read the work in the original Middle English, will have the opportunity to discuss each of the Tales in detail, and will read historians' accounts of the central issues of medieval culture that the Tales explore. The goal of the seminar is to empower the participants with a secure understanding both of Chaucer and of medieval culture so that they can return to their classrooms confident in their ability to teach the literature and history of the period.