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, ...

. He is an Academy Professor of English (Emeritus) at

Ohio State University The Ohio State University (Ohio State or OSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio, United States. A member of the University System of Ohio, it was founded in 1870. It is one ...

and the 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 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 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 or verity is the Property (philosophy), property of being in accord with fact or reality.Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionarytruth, 2005 In everyday language, it is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise cor ...

during the reign of

Richard II of England Richard II (6 January 1367 – ), also known as Richard of Bordeaux, was King of England from 1377 until he was deposed in 1399. He was the son of Edward the Black Prince, Edward, Prince of Wales (later known as the Black Prince), and Jo ...

; 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. Green’s third book, ''Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church'', “argues that a set of common beliefs about fairies were found across edievalEurope, and was shared by all classes of secular people, not just the illiterate peasantry.” Central to his thesis is “the struggle between these secular masses and the Christian clerics who first pronounced that fairies were demons, then promoted them to devils and called belief in them heretical.�
[9
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/nowiki> Ronald Hutton has written that “this book carries its subject to a new level, and its achievement deserves high praise.”Time and Mind, 10 (2017): 229. ''Elf Queens and Holy Friars'' won the 2017 Mythopoeic Society award for Myth & Fantasy Studies, the 201
Hans Gründler Book Prize
and the 202
Haskins Medal
from the Medieval Academy of America.

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)