Stephanie Joy Trigg FAHA (born 29 March 1958)[1] is an Australian literary scholar in the field of medieval studies, known in particular for her work on Geoffrey Chaucer.
It applies the insights of critical cultural analysis to a field that tends to be more conventionally concerned with either literary description of Chaucer's work or depiction of his life and times.
Instead, Trigg's book analyses the critical literature on Geoffrey Chaucer across the six-hundred-year period from his death in 1400 to the present, arguing that this long history of reading and writing about Chaucer is marked by a distinctive social process.
[3] Trigg argues that imagined and idealised reading communities formed around Chaucer's works, driven by the unconscious, collective desire to speak with Chaucer, and to become part of his own intimate circle of friends and other poets.
Research for the edition involved reconstructing the poem from the single, very corrupt copy of a badly damaged fifteenth-century manuscript.