Richard Firth Green is a Canadian scholar who specializes in

Middle English literature The term Middle English literature refers to the literature written in the form of the English language known as Middle English, from the late 12th century until the 1470s. During this time the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English b ...

. He is a Humanities Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at

Ohio State University The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best publ ...

and author of three monographs on the social life, law, and literature of the late Middle English period. Green's first book, ''Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages'', studies "business of reading and writing at court", as "a social and a literary history" of the life of men of letters at the English courts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. One of the points argued in the book is that an appointment as

court poet A poet laureate (plural: poets laureate) is a poet officially appointed by a government or conferring institution, typically expected to compose poems for special events and occasions. Albertino Mussato of Padua and Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) ...

also involved important administrative responsibilities, which could be more important than producing poetry: "he was a civil servant first and a poet second". His second book is ''A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England'' (1998), which

Derek Pearsall Derek Albert Pearsall (1931–2021) was a prominent medievalist and Chaucerian who wrote and published widely on Chaucer, Langland, Gower, manuscript studies, and medieval history and culture. He was the co-director, Emeritus, Centre for Medi ...

praised in 2004 as "the best book that has been written on medieval English literature in the last ten years". In ''A Crisis of Truth'', a "monumental, encyclopedic volume", Green analyzes the shift in the meaning of the word and concept of

truth Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality.Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionarytruth 2005 In everyday language, truth is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as belie ...

during the reign of Richard II of England; this transformation changes "an ethical truth in which truth is understood to reside in persons transforms...into a political truth in which truth is understood to reside in documents" or, in Pearsall's summary, from a subjective to an objective concept.

Books authored

*''Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages'' (1980) *''A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England'' (U of Pennsylvania P, 1998; repr. 2002) *''Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church'' (U of Pennsylvania P, 2016)

References

External links

Green at OSU
{{DEFAULTSORT:Green, Richard Firth Canadian expatriate academics in the United States Canadian medievalists Canadian literary critics Literary critics of English Living people American medievalists Ohio State University faculty Year of birth missing (living people)