Reading and Teaching Troilus Otherwise: St Maure, Chaucer, Henryson

Medieval studies has it all . At the end of the twentieth century, whatever one wishes to explore, one can find it adumbrated or more plainly available in the middle ages. Nor does one have to listen (as I have done with pleasure and profit over the years) to that committed teacher and scholar, Douglas Wurtele, in order to appreciate this. I was assured of that by Matthew P. MacDiarmid when I was an undergraduate at Aberdeen. When I went to Oxford as a graduate student, the endless potential and compelling actualities of medieval studies were even more palpable than at Aber-deen, especially for someone intending to work in the nineteenth century . However, the Aberdeen all proved to be different from the Oxford all, most notably in the place granted to the so-called Scottish Chaucerians in a decidedly Anglocentric scheme of things. And this conflicted sense of all — what it is and who gets to define it—helped open the door for me on what has in the last two decades been a site for some of the most important and intermittently-productive debates in literary studies and in the humanities more generally.