This spring Professor Frank Grady joins the Carleton English Department as the Benedict Distinguished Visiting Professor. Professor Grady is the associate chair of the Department of English and director of the English MA program at the University of Missouri St. Louis. He is a prominent scholar of Chaucer and Medieval literature and will be teaching two classes spring term, one on Chaucer and another survey course on Medieval literature. Check him out! (Zoe Borden, ’15)
Have you ever been to Carleton or Minnesota? What are you most excited for during your stay?
I’ve never been to Northfield, but I have been to Minnesota several times. The last time I was there, though, the Twins were still playing in the Metrodome. Aside from the teaching? I like to fish, so I’m hoping to explore some local lakes and streams. I’m also a bit of a birdwatcher, so hiking around the Cowling Arboretum during migration season is definitely on the agenda.
What can students expect from your classes?
Pop culture references appropriate to their parents’ generation, a smattering of Latin terms and phrases, and a seemingly endless stream of PowerPoint slides.
How did you come to study Medieval literature? What is it about it that you find most compelling?
Though I’d read Chaucer in high school and college, I went to graduate school thinking I would study the Renaissance (as we still called it back then)—Shakespeare and company. But then I had a conversion experience: I took a seminar on Piers Plowman, by Chaucer’s contemporary William Langland– a wild philosophical dream vision, political satire and spiritual allegory all wrapped up together and revised obsessively by its author over 25 years. I’d never read anything like it, and from that point I was hooked.
Why is important for all students to have an understanding of Medieval literature or Chaucer? What about these classes makes them pertinent for the contemporary scholar?
When you close your book and put on your glasses to check the clock on the wall to see how much time is left in class, you’re drawing on three medieval inventions—the codex, eyeglasses, analog timepieces–while participating in the ongoing history of a medieval institution, the university. Swipe your ATM card at the checkout while listening to a song on your iPod about how much love hurts, and you’re taking advantage of a system of credit and humming along to a version of romantic love that Chaucer and his generation would find quite familiar. So understanding the middle ages involves, in the first place, recognizing the ways in which they are still very much with us—including in the idea that we ourselves are modern, which is an idea that resurfaces repeatedly in the middle ages. More broadly, of course, Chaucer and medieval texts work as well as anything else to serve the larger goals and values of a liberal education: rigorous critical analysis and clear communication, flexible and innovative thinking, the cultivation of a sympathetic imagination. Plus they’re a lot more fun than some of the alternatives.
What are your favorite lines of Chaucer? Why?
That’s actually a pretty hard question to answer—I have a lot of favorites. But I can share the lines that I put up next to my desk when I became chair of my department last summer, because I knew they’d help me keep things in perspective. They’re from the Franklin’s Tale:
Pacience is an heigh vertu, certeyn,
For it venquysseth, as thise clerkes seyn,
Thynges that rigour sholde nevere atteyne.
For every word men may nat chide or pleyne.
Lerneth to suffre, or elles, so moot I goon,
Ye shul it lerne, wher so ye wole or noon;
For in this world, certein, ther no wight is
That he ne dooth or seith somtyme amys.
Ire, siknesse, or constellacioun,
Wyn, wo, or chaungynge of complexioun
Causeth ful ofte to doon amys or speken..
On every wrong a man may nat be wreken.
After the tyme moste be temperaunce
To every wight that kan on governaunce.