ABSTRACT
Reader-response and reception theory have become important sub-fields for Chaucer studies, and it is in these fields that many of the most interesting new developments both in Chaucer studies and in Medieval Studies as a whole have taken place. The old division between "critics" and "scholars" seems to have disappeared, and few scholars today could do without either the close reading techniques inherited from New Criticism or the palaeographical, codicological and philological tools inherited from the more historicist branches of past scholarship. Seth Lerer's study of Chaucer's fifteenth- and sixteenth-century readers was groundbreaking in many ways, for it studied the way in which those readers both reworked Chaucer's texts and remained faithful, in their terms, to "Father Chaucer". Writers such as Charlotte Morse extend studies of Chaucer's audience to the Victorians and nineteenth-century readers, while Steve Ellis and Candace Barrington explore the non-academic twentieth-century responses to Chaucer's works.
