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Iterative Circulation in Chaucer: Medieval Contexts of Seriality

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Published/Copyright: April 16, 2025
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Abstract

The idea of serial circulation is difficult to reconcile with the realities of medieval practices of text production before the advent of printing. Rather than dismissing the concept altogether, however, this article considers both seriality and circulation as productive categories for analyzing medieval literature. Focusing on Geoffrey Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales, I argue that medieval poets were attuned to ‘serial thinking’, which manifested itself in repetition as a key formal feature of medieval literature. I introduce the concept of ‘iterative circulation’ as an alternative approach to forms of seriality and circulation within and across medieval literary works. Using the “Knight’s Tale” and the “Franklin’s Tale” as my examples, I demonstrate the usefulness of iterative circulation, which brings to the fore the fraught relationship between causality and seriality in the “Knight’s Tale”, and the tension between different kinds of rhythm in the “Franklin’s Tale”.

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Published Online: 2025-04-16
Published in Print: 2025-04-09

© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. Preliminary Remarks
  4. Introducing Serial Circulation: Print Cultures and Periodical Modernities
  5. Iterative Circulation in Chaucer: Medieval Contexts of Seriality
  6. Medieval Modes of Reading: The Circulation Culture of Late Middle English Romances from William Caxton’s Press
  7. “In a course of publications”: Seriality, Public Recognition, and Judith Sargent Murray’s The Gleaner (1792–1798)
  8. The Laughing Mrs. Churchill: Longfellow’s Kavanagh (1849) and the Earliest Anglo-American Mathematics Journals
  9. “Life-like Delineations of Real Life”: Illustrating Wilfred Montressor; Or, The Secret Order of the Seven, a New York City Mystery of 1846
  10. Circulating Superheroes in City Mystery Novels: Prefigurations of a Popular Serial Figure
  11. The Experiment of Condensed Fiction in the Review of Reviews
  12. Erasure and Seriality: The “Serial Attitude” in A Humument and Tree of Codes
  13. Power the Dark Lord Knows Not: The Fractal Serialities of Fanfiction
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