Candace Barrington, Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, pursues two research interests. One studies medieval England’s legal and literary discourse, leading to several articles and coedited volumes. The other examines Chaucer’s popular reception, resulting in American Chaucers (2007) plus numerous articles. With Jonathan Hsy, she directs Global Chaucers. She is a founding member of the collaborative developing the Open Access Companion to The Canterbury Tales, a free, online introduction reaching Chaucer’s global audience.

^†Derek Brewer (1923–2008) was Professor of English in the University of Cambridge and Master of Emmanuel College until retirement in 1990. A prolific critic and scholar of medieval English literature in a career spanning 60 years, he also founded, with Richard Barber, the academic press Boydell and Brewer for the advancement of medieval studies. In the 1950s he taught for two years in Japan, which deeply informed his understanding of the role of honor in societies. Having seen active service in Italy in the Second World War he greatly savored, in later life, being the only academic in the room who had been a soldier in battle and experienced the soldierly chivalry of warfare.

Peter Brown is the author of Geoffrey Chaucer for the Oxford World’s Classics Authors in Context series (2011), Chaucer and the Making of Optical Space (2007), and editor of The Blackwell Companion to English Literature and Culture c. 1350–c. 1400 (2006). He is Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Kent and Academic Director of its postgraduate Paris School of Arts and Culture.

Peter Guy Brown is an independent scholar. He spent most of his professional life as a journalist on the London Times and The Independent. He then took a Master’s in medieval history and literature at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He is currently researching medieval glovers and summoners.

^†David Burnley was Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Sheffield until his death in 2001. He published numerous articles on medieval language and literature as well as the history of English and is the author of Chaucer’s Language and the Philosophers’ Tradition (1979), A Guide to Chaucer’s Language (1983), an annotated bibliography The Language of Middle English Literature (1994, with M. Tajima), and Courtliness and Language in Medieval England (1998). These and other works, as well as the legacy carried on by his students, are testament to his status as one of the preeminent scholars of medieval English.

Caroline D. Eckhardt is the Mary Jean and Frank P. Smeal Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the Pennsylvania State University. She has written on the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and other Chaucerian topics, on medieval chronicles, and on Arthurian literature, including the historical and political uses of the prophecies of Merlin. She is editor of the two‐volume edition of Castleford’s Chronicle, or The Boke of Brut for the Early English Text Society (1996).

Robert R. Edwards is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. His most recent book is Invention and Authorship in Medieval England (2017). His earlier books include The Flight from Desire: Augustine and Ovid to Chaucer (2006), Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity (2002), The Dream of Chaucer: Representation and Reflection in Chaucer’s Early Narrative (1989), and editions of John Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes (2001) and Troy Book (1998).

Roger Ellis retired as Reader in the School of English at the University of Cardiff in 2003. He has written on Chaucer, Hoccleve, the Middle English mystics, St Birgitta of Sweden and the religious order she founded, and medieval translation. In 1987 he founded a conference on translation in the Middle Ages, published as The Medieval Translator; 16 volumes have so far appeared.

Susanna Fein is Professor of English at Kent State University and editor of The Chaucer Review. She has coedited (with David Raybin) the collections Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches (2010) and Chaucer: Visual Approaches (2016) and has published widely on Middle English poetry and medieval manuscripts, including a three‐volume edition/translation of the trilingual contents of London, British Library MS Harley 2253 (2014–15).

John M. Fyler is Professor of English at Tufts University and Lecturer at the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English. He edited the House of Fame for the Riverside Chaucer and has published Chaucer and Ovid (1979) and Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun (2007), as well as a number of essays. He has been awarded several fellowships, including from the American Council of Learned Societies and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Andrew Galloway is Professor of English at Cornell University, where he has directed the Medieval Studies Program and chaired the Department of English. His books include The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman, Volume 1 (2006), Medieval Literature and Culture (2006), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Culture (2011), and The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman (with Andrew Cole, 2014). He has published over eighty essays, chapters, and encyclopedia entries on literature and culture in medieval England.

Jane Griffiths is a Fellow and Tutor in English at Wadham College, Oxford. Her monographs, John Skelton and Poetic Authority (2006) and Diverting Authorities: Experimental Glossing Practices in Manuscript and Print (2014), are both published by Oxford University Press.

Nicky Hallett retired as a Reader from the School of English at the University of Sheffield. She has published essays on medieval literature and auto/biography, and books on nuns’ life‐writing, including The Senses in Religious Communities, 1600–1800: Early Modern “Convents of Pleasure” (2013); Life‐Writing: English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800 (2012); Lives of Spirit: English Carmelite Self‐Writing of the Early Modern Period (2007); and Witchcraft, Exorcism and the Politics of Possession in a Seventeenth‐Century Convent (2007).

Michael Hanly is Professor of English at Washington State University and researcher in a medieval history unit, based in Paris, of the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS‐UMR 8589 “LAMOP”). His publications include articles and book chapters dedicated to trans‐European political and literary culture in the late fourteenth century, a monograph examining the multilingual relationships in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and a critical edition and translation of Honorat Bonet’s L’Apparicion maistre Jehan de Meun (1398). He is working on a project examining international cultural exchange in the time of Chaucer, focusing upon the political milieu of the diplomat and author Philippe de Mézières.

Michael Hanrahan is Director of Curricular and Research Computing at Bates College. He has published widely on late fourteenth‐century English literature and culture, computing and English studies, and technology and pedagogy. He recently coedited a special issue on digital medieval manuscript cultures for Archive Journal (2018) and is currently working on “Mapping 1381,” which uses Geographic Information Systems to visualize the social networks that enabled the rebels to organize and mobilize during the Peasants’ Revolt.

Jonathan Hsy is Associate Professor of English at George Washington University and cofounder of its Digital Humanities Institute. His interests span translation theory, media studies, pop culture medievalism, and disability history. He is author of Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature (2013) and codirects the Global Chaucers project with Candace Barrington; his individual and coauthored works on appropriation of medieval texts in modern media have appeared in Accessus, postmedieval, and PMLA.

Laura Kendrick, emeritus professor at the Université de Versailles / Paris‐Saclay, belongs to the research center there on the dynamics of heritage and culture (DYPAC). She is also a member of the French team reediting the complete works of Eustache Deschamps and of a national research group studying the power of lists in the Middle Ages (POLIMA).

Daniela Landert is a senior research and teaching associate in English linguistics at the University of Zurich. Her research interests include historical pragmatics, corpus pragmatics, modality, mass media communication, and the pragmatics of fiction. She is the author of a monograph on Personalisation in Mass Media Communication (Benjamins, 2014). Currently, she is working on a project in historical corpus pragmatics, in which she investigates epistemic and evidential stance in early modern English.

Kathy Lavezzo is Professor of English at the University of Iowa. She is the editor of Imagining a Medieval English Nation (2004) and the author of Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature and English Identity, 1000–1534 (2006) and The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton (2016). She is writing a book about race in medieval Europe.

Tim William Machan is Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. His teaching and research involve both medieval language and literature and historical English linguistics. His most recent books are (ed., with Jón Karl Helgason) From Iceland to the Americas: Vinland and Historical Imagination (forthcoming); (ed.) Imagining Medieval English: Language Structures and Theories, 500–1500 (2016); and What Is English?: And Why Should We Care? (2013).

Sarah McNamer teaches English and Medieval Studies at Georgetown University. She is the author of Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion 2009) and editor of Meditations on the Life of Christ: The Short Italian Text (2018) and essays on literature and the history of emotion. She is currently at work on a book on the Pearl‐poet.

Jenni Nuttall is Fellow and Lecturer in Old and Middle English at St. Edmund Hall, University of Oxford. She is writing a book about poetic terminology, experiment, and innovation in Middle English and Middle Scots poetry.

Ryan Perry is interested in the production of Middle English literature in various genres, but with a particular interest in catechetic and devotional texts. He publishes on the transmission and utilities of these kinds of texts for their readers and studies what the manuscript contexts might tell us about the producers and consumers of religious literature in the late Middle Ages.

Helen Phillips was until retirement Professor of Medieval Literature at Cardiff University. Her research and publications are mostly in medieval literature and medievalism, especially Chaucer, dream poems, and outlaw traditions. She has also published on modernist literature and art.

John F. Plummer is Professor of English Emeritus at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He is the author of The Summoner’s Tale: A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1995) and articles on Chaucer, Arthurian romance, and medieval drama and lyrics. With Florence Ridley, he has recently completed The Friar’s Tale: A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer.

Masha Raskolnikov is Associate Professor of English at Cornell University. She is primarily interested in critical theory as a project of unmaking “common sense,” and in working with medieval literature as a means of doing so; she is also interested in feminist, lesbian, gay, and transgender/transsexual studies. The author of Body Against Soul: Gender and Sowlehele in Middle English Allegory (2009), she is currently working on a book on the rhetorical mode of the apology.

Stephen H. Rigby is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Social and Economic History at the University of Manchester. He has published widely on the society and economy of late‐medieval England, on medieval social and political thought, and on medieval English literature.

James Simpson is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. He was formerly Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. His most recent books are Reform and Cultural Revolution, volume 2 in the Oxford English Literary History (2002); Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (2007); and Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo‐American Tradition (2010).

Sebastian Sobecki is Professor of Medieval English Literature and Culture at the University of Groningen. His books include The Sea in Medieval English Literature (2008) and Unwritten Verities: The Making of England’s Vernacular Legal Culture, 1463–1539 (2015). He is currently writing a book on Lancastrian literature for Oxford University Press.

Lynn Staley is the Harrington and Shirley Drake Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English at Colgate University. Her most recent publication is The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell (2012).

Sarah Stanbury is Distinguished Professor in the English Department at the College of the Holy Cross. She is the author of The Visual Object of Desire in Late‐Medieval England (2007), Seeing the Gawain‐Poet: Description and the Act of Perception (1991), three coedited essay collections, and an edition of Pearl. Her current project is on domestic design in Chaucer. Recent essays include “Quy la?”: architectural interiors, the counting house and Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale” (2016), and “Multilingual lists and Chaucer’s ‘Former Age’” (2015).

Robert Swanson is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Ecclesiastical History at the University of Birmingham, and writes widely on the late‐medieval English church. His major publications include Indulgences in Late Medieval England: Passports to Paradise? (2007), Religion and Devotion in Europe, c. 1215–c. 1515 (1995), and Church and Society in Late Medieval England (1989).

Irma Taavitsainen is Professor Emerita of English Philology at the University of Helsinki and Deputy Director of the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English. She is a corpus compiler for Early English Medical Texts (2005, 2010, and forthcoming). Her research focuses on historical pragmatics, corpus linguistics, genre and register variation, and scientific thought styles in medical writing. She has well over 100 publications including peer‐reviewed articles, book chapters, and (co)edited volumes.

Alfred Thomas is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has published several monographs on Czech and British culture, including Anne’s Bohemia: Czech Literature and Society, 1310–1420 (1998); A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare (2007); Prague Palimpsest: Writing, Memory and the City (2010); Shakespeare, Dissent and the Cold War (2014); and Reading Women in Late Medieval Europe: Anne of Bohemia and Chaucer’s Female Audience (2015).

Marion Turner is Associate Professor of English at Jesus College, University of Oxford. Her publications include Chaucerian Conflict (2007) and, as editor, A Handbook of Middle English Studies (2013), as well as numerous articles. Her biography of Chaucer – Chaucer: A European Life – is forthcoming in 2019.

Michael Van Dussen is Associate Professor of English at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. His books include From England to Bohemia: Heresy and Communication in the Later Middle Ages (2012) and The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches (with Michael Johnston, 2015).

Linda Ehrsam Voigts, Curators’ Professor of English at the University of Missouri‐Kansas City, is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and the Society of Antiquaries of London. She has published extensively on scientific and medical writing in medieval England (Latin and vernacular) and is, with Patricia Deery Kurtz, editor of Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English: an Electronic Reference (eVK2, 10,000 records) and an expanded electronic version of Thorndike and Kibre, Catalogue of Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin (eTK, 30,000 records). Both datasets can be searched online.

David Wallace has been Judith Rodin Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania since 1996 and is currently President of the Medieval Academy of America. Relevant publications include Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (1985); Giovanni Boccaccio: Decameron (1991); Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (1997); Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn (2004); Europe: A Literary History, 1348–1418, 2 vols (ed., 2016); and Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Introduction (2017).

Nicholas Watson teaches English at Harvard University and is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. He is the author of several books, editions, and collections and some fifty articles. His interests include visionary writing in England and northern Europe, women’s writing, and the history of vernacular religious textuality, broadly conceived, from the Old English period down to the Reformation.

Graham Williams is Senior Lecturer in the History of English at the University of Sheffield. One of his PhD supervisors was Alison Wiggins (Glasgow), herself a student of David Burnley. His most recent publication is a new book, Sincerity in Medieval English Language and Literature (2018).

Barry Windeatt is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His most recent books are a parallel‐text edition of the Short and Long Texts of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love (2016) and a new translation of both texts for Oxford World’s Classics (2015). He is completing a cultural history of medieval East Anglia.

I should like to extend heartfelt gratitude to the following people for their unstinting interest, help, and generosity – sometimes direct and practical, sometimes unwitting – in bringing this book to completion: Emma Bennett, who thought that a second edition of the Companion to Chaucer was a good idea; Angela Gallego‐Sala, who understands only too well the vicissitudes and angst that can accompany academic projects; my son Oliver and daughter Louisa, who have maintained their affectionate interest in what their father “really does”; Laura Carosi and Doug Macari who sustained me with delicious Italian meals and the occasional tango at their home; Grazyna Godlewska‐Vernon for therapeutic conversations about books and ideas; Alice Gauthier and Rob Miles whose exciting and beautiful projects in art and music are so energizing; my long‐suffering colleagues in Paris, Frank Mikus and Emily Rae; Manish Luthra who has been the soul of encouragement, patience, and good humor; and Sandra Kerka for her eagle‐eyed attention to the text.

Line numbers of Chaucer’s works refer to The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn., gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).