Chaucer Gentrified: The Nexus of Art and Politics in the Ellesmere Miniatures
The twenty-three miniatures of the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales (San Marino, Huntington Library MS 26 C 9) have been well studied, from Edwin Ford Piper's 1924 descriptive article to several essays in the 1997 The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation, which was published in con junction with the sumptuous new facsimile of the manuscript and Mary C. Olson's chapter in Chaucer Illustrated.1 Among the issues debated over the decades has been the fidelity, or lack thereof, of the illustrations to the text. Piper, Martin Stevens, Malcolm Parkes, and A. I. Doyle have argued that the pictures are, in Stevens's words, "as faithful as possible to the verbal portraits."2 Conversely, Richard K Emmerson's close study of the miniatures denies that the artists attempted to reproduce Chaucer's verbal portraits. Olson concurs with Emmerson.3 Anyone who gives the Ellesmere miniatures more than a cursory glance must acknowledge that Emmerson and Olson are correct in stating that the artists' depictions deviate in varying degrees from Chaucer's descriptions. Such deviations generally do not detract from the pictures' ability to function as rubrics. On the contrary, the additions of the Physician's urinal, the Summoner's summons, the Reeve's keys, and the Clerk's books4 allow a reader to iden tify the characters quickly and so are included, even though (with the pos sible exception of the keys) they are inappropriate accoutrements to be carrying on horseback on a pilgrimage.5 Rendering images more easily recognizable was only one motivation for the artists' innovations, though. Taken together, the changes amount to a program seeking to deflect Chaucer's satire of the upper and upper-middle classes and of most of the religious figures while emphasizing the negative aspects of the lower orders. Whereas the text tends to the ambiguous and the equivocal, the illustrations consistently eliminate these qualities and instruct the reader/viewer in how to regard each pilgrim. The Ellesmere miniatures reveal that, within a decade of Chaucer's death, the Canterbury Tales was being turned into an icon of establishment values.
Musicality, Subjectivity, and the Canterbury Tales
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Increasing pulp yield in kraft cooking of softwoods by high initial effective alkali concentration (HIEAC) during impregnation leading to decreasing secondary peeling of cellulose
Abstract Pulp yield can be improved by a more homogeneous delignification of the chips, achieved by improved impregnation prior to the cooking stage. Complete and efficient impregnation is obtained by increasing the diffusion rate by means of an impregnation liquor with a high initial effective alkali concentration (HIEAC). In the present study, the effect of HIEAC in the impregnation was evaluated and compared to a reference impregnation procedure and a prolonged impregnation. After the various impregnation scenarios, the alkali concentration was always adjusted to the same level in the beginning of the cooking stage. Impregnation with a HIEAC resulted in yield improvements by 1–1.5% units, due to a higher cellulose yield and possibly also to higher yield of glucomannan. The HIEAC with an even alkali distribution within the chips prior to the cooking stage resulted in a more uniform delignification carbohydrate degradation. Yield increase obtained by uniform delignification is due to both decreased shives content as well as less secondary peeling.