Margaret Hallissy

Because my Everyman edition of the Canterbury Tales doesn't have much support material apart from a few glosses of difficult words in the margin (and some student's handwritten annotations on the first three pages of the General Prologue), I borrowed Hallissy's Companion from the library to get a bit of historical and critical background for what I was reading. It turned out to be only moderately useful - Hallissy, who teaches at Long Island University, evidently had the needs of her own students (of the MTV generation) in mind, and didn't set the bar very high. She doesn't assume any knowledge of medieval history or literature, or even very much knowledge of 1990s society (there are a lot of sentences that start "Many people today still..."). In fact, she's not even really counting on the student reading the actual text, because every chapter includes a lengthy précis of the Tale in question and a few selected quotations to use in your essay. Hallissy's strength is in analysing Chaucer's social and religious attitudes (especially about marriage and the role of women in society) in the context of 14th century beliefs, and it's probably worth reading the book for this, but there's a lot of chaff to get through, and sadly she only pays very minimal attention to Chaucer's language or use of verse-forms. Not the waste of space I was afraid it might be when I opened it, but probably not the most useful guide unless you are an American undergraduate who thinks of the middle ages as the pre-smartphone era...… (meer)