Daniel Joseph Ransom

Prof. Ransom, director of the Variorum Chaucer, has contributed the textual commentary and notes to the Variorum edition of The General Prologue of "The Canterbury Tales" (University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), and he is preparing the Variorum edition of the Parson's Tale.  He has published articles on Dante in Dante Studies (1977) and MLN (2012); on Old Provençal lyric in Magister Regis (Fordham University Press, 1986); and on Middle English lyric in Studies in Philology (1978), an article reprinted in his book Poets at Play: Irony and Parody in the Middle English Lyric (1985). He has published articles on Chaucer, contributed 48 entries to The Chaucer Encyclopedia (in progress).  He is also working on a book to be titled Chaucer’s Anatomy: An Examination of the Lexis.  Prof. Ransom teaches courses in the history of English, medieval literature, and Chaucer. He is comfortable in the lecture format but enjoys free ranging discussion.  In his graduate seminars he focuses on the techniques of textual analysis and editing, and on the facts of literary texts and the histories of those texts. His most recent publication, in JEGP (2019), concerns the strange history of the word ‘jape’ and the sporadic spelling ‘yape’ in editions of Chaucer published in 1598 and 1602.

Medieval literature; the history of English; Chaucer

Poets at Play: Irony and Parody in the Harley Lyrics (Pilgrim, 1985)