Editors' introduction: Chaucer's global orbits and global communities

Abstract

Encompassing perspectives beyond what Braj B. Kachru terms the “Inner Circle” of Anglophone hegemony, this collection of essays presents a vivid and distinct opportunity to appreciate how Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales adapts to life across disparate languages (Persian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Danish, Spanish, Turkish, American Sign Language, and internal varieties of London English) while also moving across cultures (Shiite Iran, Brazilian Gauchoria, Tokyo academia, rural Denmark, Mexican universities, Ottoman Turkey, US Deaf culture, and London's multiethnic East End communities). The term compaignye, a quintessentially Chaucerian keyword absorbed into Middle English through Anglo‐French, suggests an intimate multitude of people sharing a common interest or purpose. To this end, our textual compaignye incorporates contributors who are academics in the traditional sense as well as authors and artists who operate alongside normative structures of the academy. Many of the compaignye's so‐called “nonacademics” have garnered prestigious awards for their creative work, and “amateur” cultural artifacts reveal that a deep love of Chaucerian material characterizes both academic and nonacademic endeavors. Such a compaignye, with its many forms of expertise, can expand our knowledge by creating “a vibrant resonance,” as Carolyn Dinshaw explains, between “amateur [popular] medievalism and professional [academic] medievalism.” As the fields of comparative literary analysis, translation theory, and medievalism studies increasingly move away from models of textual “fidelity” that reinforce static distinctions between an “original” and a “derivative,” we offer this cluster of essays as an example of the benefits gained by pluralizing the modes through which we understand processes of linguistic transfer and cultural adaptation.