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Chapter A: 

This chapter provides descriptive information about people, places, things, and concepts in Chaucer's works and Chaucer's influence on generations of writers after him, and also an overview of topics of particular significance to Chaucer scholarship. It contains entries that start with the letter “A”, and the subsequent chapters of this book are alphabetized accordingly. This book thus provides a comprehensive overview of the life, times, works, sources/analogues, and influence of Geoffrey Chaucer for a new millennium of general readers, students, and scholars. The entries contain the headword, the name and institutional affiliation of the author of the entry, the body of the entry, often a “see also” section with cross-references to related entries in the encyclopedia, and finally in most cases a list of references, with complete bibliography, that are mentioned as in-text citations in the entry.

In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was widespread concern about the fate of immigrants to the United States. One area of particular concern was mentally ill immigrants, as illustrated in contemporaneous screening procedures, asylum reports, government commissions, popular media, fiction, and scientific studies. This article examines the depiction of one mentally ill immigrant in O. E. Rølvaag's novel Giants in the Earth within the context of these discussions. The novel, published originally in two parts in 1924 and 1925 in Norwegian, was translated in collaboration with the author into English in 1927. While many explanations were posited for rates of mental illness among immigrants to North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Rølvaag presents a more nuanced view which accounts for mental responses to change of climate, environment, and cultural loss.

Nineteenth-century Madeira was a popular destination for wealthy British people suffering from consumption and other pulmonary ailments. A rich store of sources from the period provide first-hand accounts of invalids on the island or offer special advice for the invalid traveller. After positioning medical travel within the context of contemporary science about climate, health and acclimatization, this article will provide a brief account of existing sources related to medical travel to Madeira. This article then examines this material for what it reveals about contemporary ideas about the Madeiran climate upon health, as well as cultural interaction between the British and the island. In particular, the article will trace how writing about Madeira conforms or diverges from popularly held views about the southern European climate and southern European people, as well as what resonance such views may have in the present.