It me. Finishing mah booke.
I've meant to write about this for a while, but time's short and so forth. Plus I'm in the final stages of getting my book out (or mah booke as it's known in my house), so this will have to be short and sweet. You, and everyone you know, should head on over to "Visualizing Chaucer", a digital project by the Robbins Library (University of Rochester, New York), created and developed by Kara L McShane. It's a repository of images used to illustrate Chaucer over the years, ranging from the seventeenth- to the twenty-first century. The image collection is accompanied by an extensive (and often hyperlinked) bibliography of illustrated editions of Chaucer. By clicking on a hyperlinked entry, of which there are many, you can jump straight to the given work and browse through its visual content, if available. Nice.
Animated gif, feat Paul Bettany as Chaucer, in A Knight's Tale (Brian Helgeland, 2001)
I blogged recently with breathless exultation about Michael John Goodman's "Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive", and the way in which the database enables us to discern the ways in which the Victorians (re)interpreted Shakespeare, his work, and indeed the entire early modern period itself. "Visualizing Chaucer" operates in much the same way, but with a broader historical stroke and literary focus: as a means to identify the different ways in which postmedieval readers were presented with Chaucer's works, thus allowing us to deduce the ways in which the canonical medieval texts have been (re)imagined throughout the centuries. This lets us make out the ways in which the notion of the "medieval" itself has been processed and refashioned in different temporal eras, as the illustrations reflect a popularly circulating image of medieval characters, objects, and motifs. Somewhat predictably, I'm glad that filmic depictions of Chaucer are also included in the database, notably stills from Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1972 film I racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales). More cinematic entries would certainly be welcome, but there is an annotated Chaucer filmography on offer if you dig around.
The database is not the most user-friendly to navigate, sadly. I can't find a chronological filter, for example, which would help sort images based on when they were produced. And some areas need more work, which I assume is in progress. For instance, the filter for "images and motifs" currently only returns one: pilgrimage. But the character-level search is much more filled out, and searching via "artists and images" produces tons of results. These are the two query frameworks I suggest you consult first. ( "Authors and texts" confuses me, I admit: it seems to link to pages in which a given work has been transcribed online (great!) but doesn't return image-specific stuff?) I'd also like some explicit guidance regarding the copyright status of the images in the repository. Can they be re-used, re-blogged, or inserted in papers without issue? Are they governed by a Creative Commons license? Enquiring minds want to know! Nevertheless, "Visualizing Chaucer" is most definitely worth your perusal, and a useful addition to the teaching and learning arsenal.