Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog: Medieval Studies and New Media

The New Middle Ages

by Brantley L. Bryant

Medieval Studies and New Media presents all of the most memorable posts of the medievalist internet phenomenon "Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog," newly revised and updated, along with essays on the genesis of the blog itself, the role of internet blogs in medieval scholarship, and the unique pleasures of studying a time period full of plagues, schisms, and assizes. "Le Vostre GC" and medievalists Bonnie Wheeler, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, and Robert W. Hanning draw new conclusions about the ways medieval studies are perceived, the connection between the past and the present, and the historical roots of popular culture.

Genres: Medieval, Literary Criticism, Humor

210 pages, Hardcover

First published April 15, 2010

About the author

Geoffrey “LeVostreGC” Chaucer blogs at houseoffame.blogspot.com and is working on a forthcoming poem collecting the “tales” of a group of pilgrims on the way to Canterbury.

Reviews

[Patricia H · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the original blog and was delighted to find this collection in print. The quips are funny. The language is obscure. The characters are happily entrenched in their little world, unaware that they are a part of a larger, modern joke.

I found the academics a bit a dry. I realize the author was probably basing his phD studies on this project, which explains the preliminary essays.

The fun part is the blog itself, written in pseudo? medieval jargon, which challenges the 21st Century brain. Worth the effort!

[Cara · Rating 4 out of 5]

To me, this book is like a marvelous cookie that has hidden raisins inside. The cookie is absolutely wonderful until you bite into a raisin and go "Yuck!"

The original blog entries are marvelous, and by themselves, deserve 5 stars. Reading them in paper format has shown me nuances I missed during more casual scans of the online blog, and they hold up quite well to the test of time. That said, however, the casual reader should be aware that this book is entirely an inside joke; if you don't have a passing acquaintance with both Middle English spelling/grammar and with the areas of popular culture the author alludes to, you will dislike the book; not only that, it may not even be readable to you. Check out the blog online before buying. I am glad I purchased the book so that I have the blog entries on paper.

The additional material is where the book falls flat: academic essays introduce the blog entries, and they are dreadful (even the one providing examples of other medievalists' humor manages to do so in a stuffy, droning way that renders the jokes abysmally dull and uninteresting-- and the final comment in that essay consists of the author admitting he knows the jokes aren't very funny in this format. And yet, he continued and published the essay anyway!).

While author Brantley Bryant is also an academic, his blog entries display a sense of humor that is rare and wonderful (though he almost seems uncomfortable or even defensive about that at times during his own essay commentary on the blog-- perhaps because he has been subject to other academics' disapproval of the mismatch between his comic wit and the usual lusterless critical commentaries of academic writing). In this vein, the contributions of other academics do not match well with the humorous tone of the blog material. The writings consist of typically stuffy, pedantic academic prose which attempts and fails to convince the reader how cool all medievalist professors are and holds up the clannish society of the Kalamazoo medieval conference as a Mecca purely composed of exciting comic revelry with people who do lots of things like the Chaucer blog (which definitely isn't the case). Not interesting and often not even particularly relevant, the academic commentaries do not shine any light on the material they introduce.

The academic essays delay the reader in coming to the true meat of the book: the blog entries themselves, which could speak on their own without assistance. The additional material is possibly an attempt to pad the book and make it longer, which it didn't need to be; perhaps it's also an attempt to draw in a more conventional academic readership and coax them into tolerating the humor, but as a "borderline academic," I didn't find it an effective tactic.

I must add that in the book there is a small amount of writing by LeVostreGC which is not available for free online; it's hilarious. Other than that, if you are buying this book for the additional material, unless you are a dyed-in-the-wool academic, you will be disappointed.

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not sure whether my favorite part was the video game blog line, "All your Aquitaine are belong to us," or the scene in Vegas when Bolingbroke is live action role playing as a man from the suburbs. This is a brilliant little book that schools readers on Chaucer, middle English, and the infinite returns of our own human absurdities. Must be read aloud for full effect.