Project: Writing a chapter and finishing two others for a nearly completed book Signs of Decay: Language and the Declining World in Later Medieval Poetry.  The book begins with an extended examination of patristic and medieval commentaries on the first eleven chapters of Genesis, particularly on the origin of language and its subsequent participation in the Fall, first in the Garden of Eden itself and then even more notoriously with the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel; the opening section also examines, more briefly, the commentaries on Pentecost and the Apocalypse.  St. Augustine's influence on these commentaries is paramount, though there are other voices of importance as well (starting with the debate between Plato and Aristotle on whether names signify naturally or by convention). The second chapter looks at one of the most important poetic uses of this material, the conflation of linguistic division with divisions of sex and gender; it focuses particularly on the Complaint of nature, by the twelfth-century poet Alain de Lille.  A third chapter concerns linguistic divisions as they are described, and attributed to the effects of Babel, in later medieval literature and culture, especially in fourteenth-century France and England.  The rest of the book—and the heart of the Camargo project—in large part concerns the works of three major poets: Jean de Meun, Dante, and Chaucer.  It argues that Jean's part of the Roman de la Rose and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales oppose, in essential respects, Dante's paradigm of fallen and redeemed language.  Especially in the notorious quarrel between Reason and the lover, concerning obscenity in language, Jean de Meun implies that the language of the fallen world is itself inevitably and inescapably marked by that fall.  Chaucer, especially in the tales that focus on language and rhetoric, and in the anticlimactic conclusion to his work, in turn shows how the communicative and referential powers of language disintegrate, to be replaced by the silence that marks the end of human discourse in the world.