Jill Mann

Jill Mann is an English medievalist. Born in York in 1943 and raised in Sunderland, she studied at St Anne's College, Oxford, and took her doctorate at Cambridge. She taught there from 1972, held the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English from 1988 to 1998, then moved to the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, where she is now an emerita professor. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Life Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge.

Her work is scholarly rather than fiction, and it moves easily between languages. Chaucer is the centre of it, but she also reads Latin, French and English texts side by side, especially medieval animal stories. Her first book, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (1973), grew out of research on the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Feminizing Chaucer (2002) looks at how his poetry treats women and what it asks of men.

Beyond Chaucer, she edited and translated the twelfth-century Latin beast epic Ysengrimus, and her study of medieval beast literature, From Aesop to Reynard (2009), won the British Academy's Sir Israel Gollancz Prize in 2011. She co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer with Piero Boitani.

For a first book, take her Penguin Classics edition of The Canterbury Tales (2005), the one listed on WebToTell. It keeps Chaucer's Middle English, with standardised spelling, glosses on the page and a full glossary. Her introduction and notes are there to help a reader find the way in. If you then want to know why the poem's women and its social types matter, Feminizing Chaucer is the natural next step.