Carolyn P. Collette

Professor Emeritus of English

Specialization
Old and Middle English literature; Chaucer; women writers of the Renaissance; nineteenth-century fiction;  late medieval Anglo-French culture; Christine de Pizan;  multilingualism in later medieval England; Cilician Armenia;  semiotic theory

 Carolyn Collette's current research interests center on late medieval and early modern women. In addition to first-year courses in medieval studies and an advanced course on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Collette regularly taught courses on women, language, and power in the late medieval and early modern period. She also offered a seminar on versions of the stories of King Arthur and Joan of Arc.

Past president of the North American Branch of the International Courtly Literature Society, Collette is also a member of the Medieval Academy of America and of the New Chaucer Society. With Dick Johnson she is coauthor of Finding Common Ground (Addison Wesley Longman, 1997), a text devoted to personal expression and public voice. Her most recent book is Species, Phantasms, and Images: Vision and Medieval Psychology in the Canterbury Tales (University of Michigan Press, 2001), and she is working on a new book about women's voices and power in late medieval and early modern England for a book series on medieval women. Collette is the author of numerous articles on Chaucer and late medieval English literature.

Selected Recent Publications:

"Charlotte D'Evelyn: A Passion to Explore," in Women Medievalists in the Academy, ed. Jane Chance (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).

"The Canon's Yeoman's Tale" with Vincent DiMarco, Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, vol. 2 (Cambridge: D.S.Brewer, 2005), 715-47.

The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2006).

Performing Polity: Women and Agency in the Anglo-French Tradition, vol. 15 in Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts Series (Turnhout, Belgium:Brepols), 2006.

"The Alchemy of Imagination and the Labyrinth of Meaning: Some Caveats about the After Life of Sources," Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 28 (2006), 243-48.