Introduction

Over the course of a distinguished career that spanned four and a half decades, Lee Patterson (1940–2012) taught medieval studies at the University of Toronto, Johns Hopkins, Duke, and Yale (as Frederick W. Hilles Professor of English), with visiting stints at Cambridge and Cornell. During his summers, he directed an NEH seminar for college teachers and a dozen seminars for secondary school teachers: six for Bread Loaf, six for the NEH. Lee was a teacher first and foremost, and we think he would have been pleased by this collection offered by many of his students.This special issue was planned in honor of Lee, and then it transformed, upon his unforeseen death, into a memorial volume. As scholars and editors, we, along with the entire community of medievalists, knew Lee well for his discipline-changing books and essays. Phi Beta Kappa awarded Chaucer and the Subject of History the Christian Gauss Prize for the Best Book of Literary Criticism published in 1991. This book, along with Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (1987) and his edited Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530 (1990), substantially helped to establish “historicism” as a dominant mode in medieval literary studies. Lee is equally famous for his more than two dozen dazzlingly perceptive articles and chapters. The subjects of his scholarship include Beowulf, the Roman de la Rose, the alliterative Morte Arthure, Clanvowe, Lydgate, and Hoccleve, along with literary history, philology, and postmodernism. But most of all he wrote on Chaucer. One can hardly study the Knight's Tale, the Miller's Tale, the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale, the Clerk's Tale, the Pardoner's Prologue and Tale, the Prioress's Tale, Thopas and Melibee, the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, or the Parson's Tale without reading a defining essay by Lee Patterson.The “ultimate subject” of Chaucer and the Subject of History, Patterson writes, is Chaucer's “making of himself as a man at once in and out of history—a making enacted in and through writing.”1 The book's two opening chapters examine Chaucer's initial engagement with medieval historicity in Anelida and Arcite and Troilus and Criseyde, in which the poet raised “questions about historical origin and the legitimacy of the historical life itself, questions central to aristocratic self-definition.”2 The remaining six chapters turn (with a brief excursus into the Legend of Good Women) to what Patterson names “the text that provides us with the shrewdest and most capacious analysis of late medieval society we possess.”3 This praise of the Canterbury Tales reflects Patterson's scholarly insistence on the primacy of the literary text. Throughout his career, whatever theoretical approach he championed, he never moved far from the language and intellect of Chaucer's poetry and prose.Patterson was dedicated to taking the study of Chaucer beyond the university classroom. His Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales: A Casebook (2006) is directed “to the relative newcomer to Chaucer' poetry,”4 and it gathers essays notable for their lucidity and broad scope, scholarship that a teacher or curious undergraduate will find interesting. His interest in reaching an undergraduate audience is also reflected in his widely read essay, “‘Experience woot well it is nought so’: Marriage and the Pursuit of Happiness in the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale” (1995), published in a collection of contemporary approaches to the Wife of Bath. In a memorable moment at a Biennial Congress of the New Chaucer Society, Lee chided the society for scheduling its meetings in mid-July because they necessarily conflicted with NEH summer seminars for teachers. Lee's goal was to bridge the divide between secondary and university education by opening the Congress to school teachers, and movement in this direction has been a marked trend in recent years. As fellow directors of these seminars, we enthusiastically endorse this attitude. In 2010, the NEH decided to sponsor two seminars on the Canterbury Tales simultaneously: Lee's at Yale and ours in London. Together, we shared many genial exchanges about our common methods, goals, and abundance of eager applicants.The influence of Lee Patterson's ground-breaking scholarship emerges in how often his articles and chapters have been reprinted in collections intended for both specialized and general audiences. This memorial issue both honors and reviews the impact his work has had on the discipline of medieval studies and, most especially, on the study of Chaucer.5Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.Chaucer and the Subject of History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.Putting the Wife in Her Place. William Matthews Lectures. London: Birkbeck College, 1995.Temporal Circumstances: Form and History in the Canterbury Tales. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Acts of Recognition: Essays on Medieval Culture. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2009.Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.Old Books, New Learning: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Books at Yale. Ed. with Robert G. Babcock. The Yale University Library Gazette, Occasional Supplement 4 (January, 2001). New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 2001.Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.Rewriting the Middle Ages. A special issue of The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 18.2 (1988).Commentary as Cultural Artifact. Ed. with Stephen G. Nichols. A special issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly 91.4 (1992).“Masterpieces of the Middle Ages.” In Sarah N. Lawall, gen. ed. The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. The Western Tradition, Vol. 1: Literature of Western Culture through the Renaissance. 7th and 8th edns. New York: Norton, 1999, 2004. 1009–1660.“The Logic of Textual Criticism and the Way of Genius: The Kane-Donaldson Piers Plowman in Historical Perspective.” In Jerome McGann, ed. Textual Criticism and Literary Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. 55–91, 212–19.“Literary History.” In Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds. Critical Terms for Literary Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. 250–62.“‘Thirled with the poynt of remembraunce’: Memory and Modernity in Chaucer.” In Luis Beltrán Almería and José Antonio Escrig, eds. Modernité au moyen âge: le défi du passé. Geneva: Droz, 1990. 113–51.“Court Politics and the Invention of Literature: The Case of Sir John Clanvowe.” In David Aers, ed. Culture and History, 1380–1450. London: Harvester, 1992. 7–41.“Writing Amorous Wrongs: Chaucer and the Order of Complaint.” In James M. Dean and Christian K. Zacher, eds. The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays on Chaucer and Medieval Culture in Honor of Donald Howard. Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1992. 55–71.“Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and John Lydgate.” In Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds, eds. New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. 69–107.“The Return to Philology.” In John Van Engen, ed. The Past and Future of Medieval Studies. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994. 231–44.“‘Experience woot well it is nought so’: Marriage and the Pursuit of Happiness in the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale.” In Peter G. Beidler, ed. The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Boston: St. Martin's Press, 1995. 67–89.“The Place of the Modern in the Late Middle Ages.” In Lawrence Besserman, ed. The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives. New York: Garland, 1996. 51–66.“The Heroic Laconic Style: Reticence and Meaning from Beowulf to the Edwardians.” In David Aers, ed. Medieval Literature and Historical Inquiry: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000. 133–57.“Beinecke MS 493 and the Survival of Hoccleve's Series.” In Robert G. Babcock and Lee Patterson, eds. Old Books, New Learning: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Books at Yale. The Yale University Library Gazette, Occasional Supplement 4 (January, 2001). New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 2001. 92–103.“Freedom and Necessity: The Example of Chaucer's Clerk's Tale.” In Bonnie Wheeler, ed. Mindful Spirits in Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth Kirk. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 187–210.“Christian and Pagan in the Testament of Cresseid.” Philological Quarterly 52 (1973): 696–714.“Chaucerian Confession: Penitential Literature and the Pardoner.” Medievalia et Humanistica 7 (1976): 153–73.“The Parson's Tale and the Quitting of the Canterbury Tales.” Traditio 34 (1978): 331–80.“Ambiguity and Interpretation: A Fifteenth-Century Reading of Troilus and Criseyde.” Speculum 54 (1979): 297–330.“Writing about Writing: The Case of Chaucer.” University of Toronto Quarterly 48 (1979): 263–82.“‘Rapt with Pleasaunce’: Vision and Narration in the Epic.” ELH 48 (1981): 455–75.“The Historiography of Romance and the Alliterative Morte Arthure.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 13 (1983): 1–32.“‘For the Wyves Love of Bathe’: Feminine Rhetoric and Poetic Resolution in the Roman de la Rose and the Canterbury Tales.” Speculum 58 (1983): 656–95.“‘No Man His Reson Herde’: Peasant Consciousness, Chaucer's Miller, and the Structure of the Canterbury Tales.” South Atlantic Quarterly 86 (1987): 457–95.“‘What Man Artow?’: Authorial Self-Definition in the Tale of Sir Thopas and the Tale of Melibee.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989): 117–76.“On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies.” Speculum 65 (1990): 87–108.“Introduction.” South Atlantic Quarterly 91 (1992): 787–91. (Special issue: Lee Patterson and Stephen G. Nichols, eds. Commentary as Cultural Artifact.)“Perpetual Motion: Alchemy and the Technology of the Self.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 15 (1993): 25–57.“The Disenchanted Classroom.” Exemplaria 8 (1996): 513–45.“‘The Living Witnesses of Our Redemption’: Martyrdom and Imitation in Chaucer's Prioress's Tale.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001): 507–60.“Brother Fire and St. Francis's Drawers: Human Nature and the Natural World.” Medieval Perspectives 16 (2001): 1–19.“Chaucer's Pardoner on the Couch: Psyche and Clio in Medieval Literary Studies.” Speculum 76 (2001): 638–80.“‘What is me?’ Hoccleve and the Trials of the Urban Self.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23 (2001): 435–68.Douglas Kelly, Medieval Imagination: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Courtly Love, in Modern Language Notes 94 (1979): 1237–41.Mary Salu, ed., Essays on Troilus and Criseyde, in Speculum 56 (1981): 912–14.John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, in Criticism 24 (1982): 70–73.R. A. Shoaf, Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word: Money, Images, and Reference in Late Medieval Poetry, in Journal of English and Germanic Philology 84 (1985): 545–47.V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales, in Virginia Quarterly Review 61 (1985): 727–32.Stephen Knight, Geoffrey Chaucer, in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 9 (1987): 220–25.Jesse M. Gellrich, The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages: Language Theory, Mythology, and Fiction, in Speculum 63 (1988): 664–67.Paul A. Olson, The Canterbury Tales and the Good Society, in Comparative Literature 43 (1991): 187–90.Brian Stock, Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past, in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 13 (1991): 240–45.Karla Taylor, Chaucer Reads the Divine Comedy, in The Comparatist 16 (1992): 141–42.Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer, in Speculum 67 (1992): 485–88.Ruth Morse, Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages: Rhetoric, Representation, and Reality, in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 14 (1992): 184–87.Allen J. Frantzen, Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Discipline and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, in Journal of English and Germanic Philology 94 (1995): 237–39.Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340, in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 19 (1997): 324–28.Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism, in American Historical Review 104 (1999): 1258–59.Paul Strohm, England's Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422, in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 540–44.David Lawton, Wendy Scase, and Rita Copeland, eds., New Medieval Literatures, Vol. 3, in Modern Language Review 98 (2003): 162–63.Helen Barr, Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England, in Notes and Queries 50.1 (2003): 99–100.Joel T. Rosenthal, Telling Tales: Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England, in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 27 (2005): 353–55.

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