Dear Colleagues:
I believe that many of you have already heard about the passing of our good friend Paul Thomas, the indefatigable Co-Director of the Chaucer Studio. Everyone who worked with Paul knew him as a kind and pious man. His contributions to the Studio, first as Business Manager, then as Co-Director reflect a legacy of devotion to preserving and providing affordable access to medieval texts. He spent countless hours at conferences producing the recordings that have provided many cherished memories.
For many years Paul oversaw—in a delightful, warm, and wonderful way—the dramatic production of texts in a number of medieval languages to be used in medievalists’ classrooms. Many teachers were so grateful for his work over the years. He facilitated access to many vital recordings not only of Chaucer but also of Langland, Malory, a host of other writers, and musicians/composers in various European languages.
In this message I announce to you, with great pleasure, that I have been asked to organize a team of Co-Directors to continue the tradition of the Chaucer Studio. All the (generous, volunteer) colleagues signing below are part of the new team.
We now re-introduce you to the Chaucer Studio.
First and foremost, the Chaucer Studio is a not-for-profit organization where people volunteer their time, which entails hours of rehearsing, reciting, and recording to create MP3 downloads that you and your students can use to enhance classroom instruction (and student home study) in dramatically valuable ways.
Years ago, we produced cassettes (what?!), then CD’s, and now we offer 100% MP3 downloads. The Chaucer Studio catalogue can be found at the link below. Please start ordering titles you need for Spring instruction.
https://creativeworks.byu.edu/
Now let's look to the future. Our profession is enjoying a wondrous embrace of the “global middle ages.” We will absolutely invite performers and actors who can record texts in any world language from any time during the global middle ages, including texts from medieval Japan, Persia, from throughout the Middle East, Africa, China, Thailand, the Philippines, and Mesoamerica—and from any locus in any medieval language, including Hebrew and Arabic. If you have the skill, the will, and the texts, please write to us with a proposal; we will be delighted to review all such ideas from anyone with an interest to participate.
Many more texts in European languages and in Middle English need to be recorded or re-recorded and made available. We will expand our catalogue in ME and revamp various recordings.
This is an open invitation to anyone who would like to send us an audition reading (formerly called an “audition tape”). If anyone is interested in getting some coaching, our Co-Directors are very happy to work with you. We are always grateful for readers and welcome graduate students to participate.
I here introduce and thank Co-Directors Re Evitt, Cathy Hume, and Joe Parry and Executive Assistant to the Co-Directors, Christina Gomez. We stand at your service. Finally, a particular note of thanks to Tom Burton, the Studio’s Founder, who continues his ancient post as Co-Director. We all will strive to maintain the Studio and to preserve and perpetuate its mission to serve various reading communities around the world that want student-focused, affordable, and accessible tools with which to teach and preserve the middle ages.
Please feel free to share this information and to write any of us if you would like to perform or to suggest a text from among the great sea of stories around the globe from the middle ages.
Thank you all and best wishes,
Michael Calabrese, <mcalabr@calstatela.edu>
on behalf of:
Co-Directors:
Tom Burton <thomas.burton@adelaide.edu.au
Regula Meyer Evitt <rmevitt@coloradocollege.edu>;
Cathy Hume <cathy.hume@bristol.ac.uk>;
Joseph Parry <joseph_parry@byu.edu>;
Executive Assistant to the Co-Directors:
Christina Gomez <moviwatcher@gmail.com>
Co-Directors
Tom Burton
Tom Burton (Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Adelaide and editor of Sidrak and Bokkus for the Early English Text Society) founded the Chaucer Studio in 1986. He now works mainly on nineteenth-century dialect poetry, publishing William Barnes’s Dialect Poems: A Pronunciation Guide (2010), The Sound of William Barnes’s Dialect Poems (with audio recordings, freely available online at https://www.adelaide.edu.
Michael Calabrese
Michael Calabrese is professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles. For the Chaucer Studio, he has directed performances of Piers Plowman: The B Text and the Middle English Cleanness. He is the author of Chaucer's Ovidian Arts of Love, An Introduction to Piers Plowman, and most recently a translation of Piers Plowman: The A Version, published by the Catholic University of America Press.
Regula Meyer Evitt
Re Evitt is professor of English at Colorado College. She has performed for various Chaucer Studio productions (most recently The Parson’s Tale) and has presented regularly for The Gaylord Workshop on Reading Chaucer Out Loud. She publishes on eschatology and antisemitism in liturgical and late medieval drama and has served as editor for Le Cygne. She is co-author (with Monica Potkay) of Minding the Body: Women and Literature in the Middle Ages, 800-1500.
Cathy Hume
Cathy Hume is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol. She works mainly on Middle English literature and its social and cultural contexts, including cultures of reading. Her first book, Chaucer and the Cultures of Love and Marriage, was published by Boydell and Brewer in 2013. She recently published Middle English Biblical Poetry: Romance, Audience and Tradition (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2021) and is currently working on an edition of biblical poems. She also has an article forthcoming on cognitive approaches to readers' comprehension of Malory.
Joseph Parry
Joseph Parry is professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities in the Comparative Arts and Letters Department and affiliated faculty with the Philosophy Department at Brigham Young University. He has published on Gerald of Wales, Lawman, Malory, Chaucer, and Spenser, among others, and edited the volume Art and Phenomenology for Routledge (2010). His current work examines the ways in which late Medieval and Renaissance/Early Modern love poetry is a mode of philosophical inquiry in its own right.
Executive Assistant to the Co-Directors
Christina Gomez
Christina Gomez is an English Graduate Student at California State University of Los Angeles, where she also earned her B.A. in English with a focus in medieval literature. She attends school part-time while working full-time for the City of Los Angeles as a Management Analyst.
The above bios can also be viewed in PDF format at the following link:
https://drive.google.com/file/