Chaucer's presence in songes and sonettes

In an elegy to Wyatt published in Tottel’s Miscellany, Surrey claims that Wyatt ‘reft Chaucer the glory of his wit’. This statement, which both lauds and resists Chaucer, is a microcosm of the way Chaucer is treated throughout the Miscellany. In examining the collection’s paradoxical attitude to Chaucer, this essay focuses particularly on the Squire’s Tale, the Franklin’s Tale, Anelida and Arcite, the Legend of Good Women, and several short lyrics. In its interest in courtly love poetry and Petrarch, the Miscellany follows a trajectory in English poetry set by Chaucer. Its courtly verse is saturated with words, phrases, and tropes from his poetry. Rhyme royal, which he introduced into English poetry, is widely used. The Canterbury Tales has been fully assimilated and can be referred to allusively with the same confidence of the audience’s knowledge as is the case when referring to classical myth; in Wyatt’s ‘Myne owne Jhon Poins’, the speaker, disclaiming deceitfulness, says that he cannot ‘say that Pan/ Passeth Appollo in musike manifold:/ Praise syr Topas for a noble tale,/ And scorne the story that the knight tolde’ (lines 48-50). However, Chaucer’s poetry is also downplayed and contested in the Miscellany. ‘Truth’, the only poem of his which appears in the volume, is disingenuously placed in the ‘Uncertain Authors’ section. In addition, some of the most important elements of his work are strongly resisted in the Miscellany, either ignored, dismissed or challenged. These elements include Chaucer’s interest in variety of voice, his sympathetic engagement with women, particularly wronged women, and his interest in female speech and particularly female complaint. The Miscellany, by contrast, is dominated by male-voiced lyrics preoccupied with the pain inflicted on the lover by a lady who is frequently unfeeling, cruel, or faithless. Chaucer’s frequent focus on the cynical seduction and betrayal of female by male is reversed in the Miscellany, and the language and metaphors he uses to express male cruelty (e.g. the word ‘newfangleness’ and images of hooks, nets and traps) are usurped to describe the lady’s cruelty to the suffering lover. On occasion, poems in the Miscellany challenge specific Chaucerian texts; ‘On His Love Named White’ throws down a gauntlet to The Book of the Duchess, while two of Surrey’s poems implicitly take issue with the female falcon’s voice in the Squire’s Tale, giving the deceitful tercelet the opportunity to shout down the falcon’s charges. The essay thus shows that in many respects Tottel’s Miscellany is only superficially Chaucerian, and that it both passively and actively takes issue with Chaucer’s work.

Brill Greek, Adobe Arno Pro, Adobe Text/Brevier Greek typefaces

Typeface design: a series of collaborative projects commissioned by Adobe, Inc. and Brill to develop extensive polytonic Greek typefaces. The two Adobe typefaces can be seen as extension of previous research for the Garamond Premier Pro family (2005), and concludes a research theme started in 1998 with work for Adobe’s Minion Pro Greek. These typefaces together define the state of the art for text-intensive Greek typesetting for wide character set texts (from classical texts, to poetry, to essays, to prose). They serve both as exemplar for other developers, and as vehicles for developing the potential of Greek text typography, for example with the parallel inclusion of monotonic and polytonic characters, detailed localised punctuation options, fluid handling of case-conversion issues, and innovative options such as accented small caps (originally requested by bibliographers, and subsequently rolled out to a general user base). The Brill typeface (for the established academic publisher) has an exceptionally wide character set to cover several academic disciplines, and is intended to differentiate sufficiently from its partner Latin typeface, while maintaining a clear texture in both offset and low-resolution print-on-demand reproduction. This work involved substantial amounts of testing and modifying the design, especially of diacritics, to maintain clarity the readability of unfamiliar words. All together these typefaces form a study in how Greek typesetting meets contemporary typographic requirements, while resonating with historically accurate styles, where these are present. Significant research in printing archives helped to identify appropriate styles, as well as originate variants that are coherent stylistically, even when historical equivalents were absent.

Bernard Spencer: essays on his poetry & life

15 chapters by separate hands, an introduction, and updated bibliography publishing proceedings from the 2009 Bernard Spencer Centenary Conference at the University of Reading, along with other related work.

The selected poetry and prose of Vittorio Sereni

2013 centenary corrected paperback edition of a 2006 publication, with introduction, co-translations, and notes