Marion Turner

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Marion Turner
Born1976
NationalityBritish
OccupationProfessor and published author
Notable work
  • Chaucer: A European Life

A Handbook of Middle English Studies

Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London

Marion Turner (born 1976)[1] is a Professor of English Literature and Tutorial Fellow in English at Jesus College, Oxford[2] and an academic authority on Geoffrey Chaucer.[3][4] She has authored several books, including Chaucer: A European Life,[5] which was shortlisted in 2020 for the Wolfson History Prize and for which she was awarded the 2020 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize.

Education[]

Turner received her MA and DPhil from Oxford University and her MA from York University.[2]

Career[]

Turner has been a research fellow of the Leverhulme Trust, the Wellcome Trust, and the British Academy.[2] After teaching at King’s College London, she began her Tutorial Fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford in 2007.[2] In 2007, she published the book Chaucerian Conflict, and in 2013, edited A Handbook of Middle English Studies.[2] Chaucer: A European Life was published in 2019. Alison Flood writes in The Guardian, "Turner’s book is the first full biography of Chaucer for a generation, and the first written by a woman."[6]

She is an elected Trustee of the New Chaucer Society.[7]

Critical reception[]

Kirkus Reviews describes Chaucer: A European Life, as "A meticulously researched, well-styled academic study" and writes, "Though perhaps too dense for general readers, the book is well-suited to scholars and students of medieval literature."[8] Philip Knox writes for The Review of English Studies, "Her expansive book is written with an unusual mix of erudition, clarity, and wit: it will be required reading for specialists, an invaluable resource for students, and a rich introduction to Chaucer’s world for the general reader."[9]

Alastair Minnis writes for The Spenser Review, "Turner’s style is her own – lively, vivid, witty and often chatty, dispensing many delightful confections of information by way of contextualising the few hard facts that are known about the poet’s life."[10] Tim Smith-Laing describes Turner for The Telegraph as "Stating her belief that Chaucer’s “emotional life [...] is beyond the biographer’s reach”, she disclaims any attempt to reconstruct the person, and opts, via daunting amounts of original research and scholarly legwork, for the more complex and satisfying task of interrogating how it is that personhood emerges from its place in the world."[11]

Steve Donoghue of Open Letters Monthly writes, "Turner is a smooth, engaging writer and an exhaustive one. She obviously cares about keeping her readers interested (and she herself seems raptly interested throughout), but she’s likewise unwilling to skirt, condense, or over-simplify, and she has an enormous story to tell."[12] Stephanie Trigg writes for The Sydney Morning Herald, "in the context of contemporary English politics it is hard not to see this as an anti-Brexit biography: one that affirms the complex multicultural and multilingual nature of medieval Europe, and England's participation in many of Europe's cultural and literary traditions."[13] Joe Stadolnik writes for the Los Angeles Review of Books, "The book’s deliberate accessibility, and its evocation of a more relatable Chaucer, deserves some praise. But this approach runs a risk, that the same enthusiasm to make Chaucer more accessible will gloss over what makes him uneasily medieval, someone who thought and moved through the world in ways impossibly remote and alien to us."[14]

Books[]

  • Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton University Press, 2019)[15][16]
  • A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013)
  • Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London (OUP, 2007)[17]

Journal articles[]

  • 'Unlocked Doors: Geoffrey Chaucer's Writing-Rooms and Elizabeth Chaucer's Nunnery.' Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 40 (2018): 423-434
  • ‘Illness Narratives in the Later Middle Ages: Arderne, Chaucer, and Hoccleve,’ JMEMS 46:1 (2016): 61-87
  • ‘Thomas Usk and John Arderne’, Chaucer Review 47 (2012): 95-105
  • ‘Usk and the Goldsmiths’, New Medieval Literatures 9 (2008): 139-77
  • ‘Troilus and Criseyde and the Treasonous Aldermen of 1382: Tales of the City in Late Fourteenth Century London’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 25 (2003): 225-57
  • ‘“Certaynly his noble sayenges can I not amende”: Thomas Usk and Troilus and Criseyde’, Chaucer Review 37:1 (2002): 26-39

Selected articles in edited books[]

  • 'Form,' in The Cambridge Companion to the Canterbury Tales, ed. Frank Grady (CUP, 2020)
  • ‘The Senses,’ in A New Companion to Chaucer, ed Peter Brown (Wiley-Blackwell, 2019)
  • ‘The English Context,’ in Chaucer in Context ed. Ian Johnson (Cambridge, CUP, 2019)
  • 'Chaucer' in A Companion to Literary Biography, ed. Richard Bradford (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018)

Honours and awards[]

References[]

  1. ^ "Turner, Marion, 1976-". id.loc.gov. Retrieved July 3, 2021.
  2. ^ a b c d e "Professor Marion Turner". Jesus College Oxford. Retrieved 29 May 2021.
  3. ^ "Marion Turner, Talks at the Buckingham History Festival April 2019". Buckingham History Festival. Retrieved 2021-05-05.
  4. ^ "Chaucer webchat: expert Dr Marion Turner on his feminism, love for slapstick and more". The Guardian. September 28, 2018. Retrieved 29 May 2021.
  5. ^ Turner, Marion (April 9, 2018). "Marion Turner on Chaucer: A European Life". Princeton Press. Retrieved 29 May 2021.
  6. ^ "The teenage dandy's tale: how a female biographer saw Chaucer afresh". the Guardian. 2019-03-19. Retrieved 2021-05-05.
  7. ^ a b "Rose Mary Crawshay Prize". The British Academy. Retrieved 2021-05-05.
  8. ^ "CHAUCER". Kirkus Reviews. February 3, 2019. Retrieved 29 May 2021.
  9. ^ Knox, Philip (April 2020). "Marion Turner. Chaucer: A European Life, The Review of English Studies". The Review of English Studies. 71 (299): 373–375. doi:10.1093/res/hgz122. Retrieved 29 May 2021.
  10. ^ Minnis, Alastair (2020). "Marion Turner, Chaucer: A European Life". Spenser Review. Retrieved 29 May 2021.
  11. ^ Smith-Laing, Tim (April 20, 2019). "Chaucer: A European Life by Marion Turner, review: will the real Chaucer please stand up?". The Telegraph. Retrieved 29 May 2021.
  12. ^ Donoghue, Steve (April 30, 2019). "Chaucer: A European Life by Marion Turner". Open Letters Review. Retrieved 29 May 2021.
  13. ^ Trigg, Stephanie (July 26, 2019). "Fresh pilgrimage with the man who gave us the Canterbury Tales". Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 29 May 2021.
  14. ^ Stadolnik, Joe (June 26, 2019). "Chaucer's Traces". LA Review of Books. Retrieved 29 May 2021.
  15. ^ Williams, Mark (March 29, 2019). "Chaucer: A European Life by Marion Turner review — male totty, civil servant, urban poet". The Times. Retrieved 29 May 2021.
  16. ^ Sobecki, Sebastian (April 2019). "The Poet of Everything". Literary Review. No. 474. Retrieved 29 May 2021.
  17. ^ Clarke, K. P. (September 2007). "marion turner. Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London". The Review of English Studies. 58 (236): 555–557. doi:10.1093/res/hgm055. Retrieved 29 May 2021.
  18. ^ "Chaucer: A European Life - The Wolfson History Prize Chaucer". The Wolfson History Prize. Retrieved 2021-05-05.
  19. ^ "THE 2020 PROSE AWARDS FINALISTS" (PDF). Association of American Publishers. Retrieved 12 June 2021.
  20. ^ "English and American Literature". Choice. July 10, 2020. Retrieved 12 June 2021.
  21. ^ "Chaucer scholar honored with prestigious Medieval Institute book prize". WMU News. Western Michigan University. May 27, 2021. Retrieved 12 June 2021.

External links[]

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