For twenty years, I have been directing a small annual conference for school teachers. Each year in October, forty to eighty teachers from across my state of Illinois spend a day talking about a canonical book. Some of the teachers arrive the night before for an evening lecture, film, gallery show, or concert related to the world of Chaucer, Dickinson, Dante, Austen, or whoever our chosen author may be. In the morning we listen to a guest speaker discuss the author or book and then divide up into small groups for workshop sessions in which we discuss the topic from more directed perspectives. We repeat the procedure after lunch with a second speaker and additional workshops. These meetings are exciting: we make a point of inviting distinguished scholars who have a genuine interest in working with teachers, and the workshops that follow the lectures invariably provoke the kind of stimulating discussion one expects from highly motivated, self-selecting teachers. The participants, many of whom return year after year, say they appreciate the conference because of its emphasis on reading and on talking about books and ideas, with pedagogy a secondary consideration.

The principal limitation in these meetings is that the format of five or six hourlong blocks directed to a range of interests precludes concentrating very long on any one issue. With the support of my state Humanities Council, I have also been able to direct a longer conference that is more focused, more intense, and, happily, more leisurely: weekend seminars in which twelve to fifteen teachers and librarians gather in a lodge at a state park to eat, drink, and spend ten seminar hours and some free time pondering and arguing about my preferred topic: ‘Chaucer Today: Romance and Ethics’. The point of the seminar is to enjoy Chaucer, of course, but also to think about how his poetry and ideas matter. Romance and ethics are at the heart of the seminar because Chaucer frames an extraordinarily large part of his discussion of ethical behavior in terms of spouses, lovers, wooers, and rapists. It is in bedrooms and gardens and woods, in private conversation and – surprisingly often – before an audience, that Chaucer's characters make the ethical decisions that define them and, if we see character as a spiritual quality, determine their fates.