CANCELLED: Knowledge Translation on the Medieval English Literary Scene—and Now

What do memes and manuscripts have in common? We use media to carve paths for our ideas and shape the publics with whom we engage. In this talk, literary history provides a new take on the way we establish credibility and translate ideas. In the Middle English literary scene, authors like Geoffrey Chaucer, creator of The Canterbury Tales, operated on the fringe between academic and urban life. Chaucer and his colleagues reinvented knowledge from university culture by recasting it in radically different contexts. From astronomy, to mythology, to alchemy, Chaucer’s reimagining of scholarly ideas changed the dimensions of public discourse. His approach shows us how not only language and content, but also new contexts and new media, can mobilize research and effect change.

Erica Machulak has a PhD in English Literature from the University of Notre Dame, and wrote her dissertation on the ways that vernacular Aristotelianism—filtered through Arabic sources—changed literary culture in the later Middle Ages.