Susanna Fein’s long and distinguished scholarly career has helped to redefine how we understand the role of scribes and manuscripts from late medieval England. She has carried out groundbreaking research on seminal manuscripts (e.g., Harley 2253, the Thornton Manuscripts, John Audley’s autograph manuscript, and the Auchinleck Manuscript). She has written extensively on the more complex and challenging metrical forms the period produced. And she has edited foundational primary texts and collections of essays. A wide range of scholars have been influenced by Fein’s work, many of whom present original research—much of it following trails first laid down by Fein—in this volume.

Essays on a variety of topics in late medieval literature, linked by an engagement with form. The insight that "the implications of textuality as such" can and must underlie our interpretations of literary works remains one of A.C. Spearing's greatest contributions to medieval studies. It is a tribute to the breadth and significance of his scholarship that the twelve essays gathered in his honour move beyond his own methods and interests to engage variously with "textuality as such," presenting a substantial and expansive view of current thinking on form in late medieval literary studies. Covering a range of topics, including the meaning of words, "experientiality", poetic form and its cultural contexts, revisions, rereadings, subjectivity, formalism and historicism, failures of form, the dit, problems of editing lyrics, and collective subjectivity in lyric, they offer a spectrum of the best sort of work blossoming forth from close reading of the kind Spearing was such an early advocate for,continues to press, and which is now so central to medieval studies. Authors and works addressed include Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women, "Adam Scriveyn", "To Rosemounde", "TheComplaint Unto Pity"), Langland (Piers Plowman), the Gawain-poet (Cleanness), Charles d'Orleans, Gower (Confessio Amantis), and anonymous lyrics. Cristina Maria Cervone teaches English literature and medieval studies at the University of Memphis; D. Vance Smith is Professor of English at Princeton University. Contributors: Derek Pearsall, Elizabeth Fowler, Claire M. Waters, Kevin Gustafson, Michael Calabrese, David Aers, Nicolette Zeeman, Jill Mann, D. Vance Smith, J.A. Burrow, Ardis Butterfield, Cristina Maria Cervone, Peter Baker.

Essays on book history, manuscripts and reading during a period of considerable change. The production, transmission, and reception of texts from England and beyond during the late medieval and early renaissance periods are the focus of this volume. Chapters consider the archives and the material contexts in which texts were produced, read, and re-read; the history of specific manuscripts and early printed books; and some of the continuities and changes in literary and book production, dissemination, and reception in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Responding to Professor Julia Boffey's pioneering work on medieval and early Tudor material and literary culture, they cover a range of genres - from practical texts written in Latin to works of Middle English poetryand prose, both secular and religious - and examine an assortment of different reading contexts: lay, devotional, local, regional, and national. TAMARA ATKIN is Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval and Early RenaissanceLiterature, and JACLYN RAJSIC is Lecturer in Medieval Literature, at the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London. Contributors: Laura Ashe, Priscilla Bawcutt, Martin Camargo, Margaret Connolly, Robert R. Edwards, A.S.G. Edwards, Susanna Fein, Joel Grossman, Alfred Hiatt, Pamela M. King, Matthew Payne, Derek Pearsall, Corinne Saunders, Barry Windeatt, R.F. Yeager.

Essays exploring different aspects of late medieval and early modern manuscript and book culture. Late medieval manuscripts and early modern print history form the focus of this volume. It includes new work on the compilation of some important medieval manuscript miscellanies and major studies of merchant patronage and of a newly revealed woman patron, alongside explorations of medieval texts and the post-medieval reception history of Langland, Chaucer and Nicholas Love. It thus pays a fitting tribute to the career of Professor A.S.G. Edwards, highlighting his scholarly interests and demonstrating the influence of his achievements. Carol M. Meale is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol; the late Derek Pearsall was Professor Emeritus at Harvard University and Honorary Research Professor at the University of York. Contributors: Nicolas Barker, J.A. Burrow, A.I. Doyle, Martha W. Driver, Susanna Fein, Jane Griffiths, Lotte Hellinga, Alfred Hiatt, Simon Horobin, Richard Linenthal,Carol M. Meale, Orietta Da Rold, John Scattergood, Kathleen L. Scott, Toshiyuki Takamiya, John J. Thompson.

Fresh examinations of the manuscript which is one of the chief compendiums of literature in the Middle English period. Created in London c. 1340, the Auchinleck manuscript (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland Advocates MS 19.2.1) is of crucial importance as the first book designed to convey in the English language an ambitious range ofsecular romance and chronicle. Evidently made in London by professional scribes for a secular patron, this tantalizing volume embodies a massive amount of material evidence as to London commercial book production and the demand for vernacular texts in the early fourteenth century. But its origins are mysterious: who were its makers? its users? how was it made? what end did it serve? The essays in this collection define the parameters of present-day Auchinleck studies. They scrutinize the manuscript's rich and varied contents; reopen theories and controversies regarding the book's making; trace the operations and interworkings of the scribes, compiler, and illuminators; teaseout matters of patron and audience; interpret the contested signs of linguistic and national identity; and assess Auchinleck's implied literary values beside those of Chaucer. Geography, politics, international relations and multilingualism become pressing subjects, too, alongside critical analyses of literary substance. Susanna Fein is Professor of English at Kent State University and editor of The Chaucer Review. Contributors: Venetia Bridges, Patrick Butler, Siobhain Bly Calkin, A. S. G. Edwards, Ralph Hanna, Ann Higgins, Cathy Hume, Marisa Libbon, Derek Pearsall, Helen Phillips, Emily Runde, Timothy A. Shonk, Miceal F. Vaughan.

The popular genre of medieval romance explored in its physical, geographical, and literary contexts. The essays in this volume take a representative selection of English and Scottish romances from the medieval period and explore some of their medieval contexts, deepening our understanding not only of the romances concerned but also of the specific medieval contexts that produced or influenced them. The contexts explored here include traditional literary features such as genre and rhetorical technique and literary-cultural questions of authorship, transmission and readership; but they also extend to such broader intellectual and social contexts as medieval understandings of geography, the physiology of swooning, or the efficacy of baptism. A framing context for the volume is provided by Derek Pearsall's prefatory essay, in which he revisits his seminal 1965 article on the development of Middle English romance. Rhiannon Purdie is Senior Lecturer in English, University of St Andrews; Michael Cichon is Associate Professor of English at St Thomas More College in the University of Saskatchewan. Contributors: Derek Pearsall, Nancy Mason Bradbury, Michael Cichon, Nicholas Perkins, Marianne Ailes, John A. Geck, Phillipa Hardman, Siobhain Bly Calkin, Judith Weiss, Robert Rouse, Yin Liu, Emily Wingfield, Rosalind Field

Essays considering the relationship between Gower's texts and the physical ways in which they were first manifested. The media in which Gower's works were first transmitted, whether in print of manuscript form, are of vital importance to an understanding of both the poet and his audience. However, in comparison with those of his contemporary Chaucer, they have been relatively little studied. This volume represents a major collaboration between specialist scholars in manuscript and book history, and experts in Gower more generally, breaking new ground in approaching Gower through first-hand study of his publications in manuscript and print. Its chapters consider such matters as manuscript and book illumination, provenance, variant texts and editions, scribes, and printers, looking at how, and to what degree, the materiality of the vellum, paper, ink and binding illuminates - and even implicates - the poet and his poetry. MARTHA DRIVER is Distinguished Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at Pace University; the late DEREK PEARSALL was Gurney Professor of English Literature, Emeritus, Harvard University; R.F. YEAGER Is Professor of English and Foreign Languages, Emeritus, University of West Florida. Contributors: Stephanie L. Batkie, Julia Boffey, Margaret Connolly, Sian Echard, A.S.G. Edwards, Robert Epstein, Brian W. Gastle, Amanda J. Gerber, Yoshiko Kobayashi, Aditi Nafde, Tamara Perez-Fernandez, Wendy Scase, Karla Taylor, David Watt.

Essays exploring Chaucer's identity as a London poet and the urban context for his writings. Literature of the city and the city in literature are topics of major contemporary interest. This volume enhances our understanding of Chaucer's iconic role as a London poet, defining the modern sense of London as a city in history, steeped in its medieval past. Building on recent work by historians on medieval London, as well as modern urban theory, the essays address the centrality of the city in Chaucer's work, and of Chaucer to a literature and a language of the city. Contributors explore the spatial extent of the city, imaginatively and geographically; the diverse and sometimes violent relationships between communities, and the use of language to identify and speak for communities; the worlds of commerce, the aristocracy, law, and public order. A final section considers the longer history and memory of the medieval city beyond the devastations of the Great Fire and into the Victorian period. Dr ARDIS BUTTERFIELD is Reader in English at University College London. Contributors: ARDIS BUTTERFIELD, MARION TURNER, RUTH EVANS, BARBARA NOLAN, CHRISTOPHER CANNON, DEREK PEARSALL, HELEN COOPER, C. DAVID BENSON, ELLIOTKENDALL, JOHN SCATTERGOOD, PAUL DAVIS, HELEN PHILLIPS

New essays on the burgeoning of pastoral and devotional literature in medieval England. Pastoral and devotional literature flourished throughout the middle ages, and its growth and transmutations form the focus of this collection. Ranging historically from the difficulties of localizing Anglo-Saxon pastoral texts tothe reading of women in late-medieval England, the individual essays survey its development and its transformation into the literature of vernacular spirituality. They offer both close examinations of particular manuscripts, and of individual texts, including an anonymous Speculum iuniroum, the Speculum religiosorum of Edmund of Abingdon and later vernacular compositions and translations, such as Handlyng Synne and Bonaventure's Lignum Vitae. The reading and devotional use of texts by women and solitaries is also considered. They therefore form an appropriate tribute to the work of Bella Millett, whose research has done so much to advance our knowledge of the field. Contributors: Alexandra Barratt, Mishtooni Bose, Joseph Goering, Brian Golding, C. Annette Grise, Cate Gunn, Ralph Hanna, Bob Hasenfratz, Catherine Innes-Parker, E. A. Jones, Derek Pearsall, Elaine Treharne, Nicholas Watson, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne

Originally published in 1981, Middle English Prose is an edited collection providing an index of research and scholarship on Middle English prose. The book is split into specific thematic areas of scholarship covering such areas as editorial technique and middle English mystical prose, as well as focusing more in detail on specific prose such as Nicholas Love's Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ. Each chapter contains a collection of useful sources and an editorial analysis and description on each source. Even today, this will provide a useful and valuable resource for researchers of the medieval period.

Originally published in 1977, Old English and Middle English Poetry provides a historical approach to English poetry. The book examines the conditions out of which poetry grew and argues that the functions that it was assigned are historically integral to an informed understanding of the nature of poetry. The book aims to relate poems to the intellectual and formal traditions by which they are shaped and given their being. This book will be of interest to students and academics studying or working in the fields of literature and history alike.

Originally published in 1970, John Lydgate sets out to restore a sense of perspective to the work of Lydgate, not by attributing a spurious modernity as a precursor of the Renaissance, but by accepting the fact that he is fundamentally medieval. The book analyses Lydgate's background in literary tradition and compares this with Chaucer's work. The book looks at Lydgate as a professional craftsman and examines how his work adapted to the demands and occasions of his age. Without over-valuing the poetry, this approach makes it possible to discriminate with increased objectivity between the more and less worthwhile and to distinguish the unexpectedly large number of poems in which craftsman-like competence rises to rhetorical artistry of a high order. In accepting Lydgate as the epitome of his age, the book also provides a diagram of the medieval poetic mind in its basic form and suggests the usefulness of Lydgate as a source book for the understanding of medieval literature.

Essays intended as a companion to a reading of the works of the Gawain poet: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness and Patience The essays collected here on the Gawain-Poet offer stimulating introductions to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness and Patience, providing both information and original analysis. Topics includetheories of authorship; the historical and social background to the poems, with individual sections on particularly important features within them; gender roles in the poems; the manuscript itself; the metre, vocabulary and dialect of the poems; and their sources. A section devoted to Sir Gawain investigates the ideas of courtesy and chivalry found within it, and explores some of its later adaptations from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. Afull bibliography completes the volume. DEREK BREWER was Emeritus Professor of English Literature, University of Cambridge; JONATHAN GIBSON has worked as a lecturer in the Universities of Exeter and Durham. Contributors: DEREK BREWER, MALCOLM ANDREW, A.C. SPEARING, JANE GILBERT, MICHAEL J. BENNETT, DAVID AERS, RALPH ELLIOTT, MICHAEL THOMPSON, FELICITY RIDDY, ANNE ROONEY, MICHAEL LACY, A.S.G. EDWARDS, H.N. DUGGAN, ELISABETH BREWER, RICHARD NEWHAUSER, HELEN COOPER, NICHOLAS WATSON, PRISCILLA MARTIN, NICK DAVIS, DEREK PEARSALL, GILLIAN ROGERS, BARRY WINDEATT, DAVID J. WILLIAMS

Originally published in 1981, Middle English Prose is an edited collection providing an index of research and scholarship on Middle English prose. The book is split into specific thematic areas of scholarship covering such areas as editorial technique and middle English mystical prose, as well as focusing more in detail on specific prose such as Nicholas Love's Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ. Each chapter contains a collection of useful sources and an editorial analysis and description on each source. Even today, this will provide a useful and valuable resource for researchers of the medieval period.

Originally published in 1977, Old English and Middle English Poetry provides a historical approach to English poetry. The book examines the conditions out of which poetry grew and argues that the functions that it was assigned are historically integral to an informed understanding of the nature of poetry. The book aims to relate poems to the intellectual and formal traditions by which they are shaped and given their being. This book will be of interest to students and academics studying or working in the fields of literature and history alike.

Originally published in 1970, John Lydgate sets out to restore a sense of perspective to the work of Lydgate, not by attributing a spurious modernity as a precursor of the Renaissance, but by accepting the fact that he is fundamentally medieval. The book analyses Lydgate's background in literary tradition and compares this with Chaucer's work. The book looks at Lydgate as a professional craftsman and examines how his work adapted to the demands and occasions of his age. Without over-valuing the poetry, this approach makes it possible to discriminate with increased objectivity between the more and less worthwhile and to distinguish the unexpectedly large number of poems in which craftsman-like competence rises to rhetorical artistry of a high order. In accepting Lydgate as the epitome of his age, the book also provides a diagram of the medieval poetic mind in its basic form and suggests the usefulness of Lydgate as a source book for the understanding of medieval literature.

This classic and eminently readable work provides a full critical introduction to the complete Canterbury Tales. Essential reading for students of Chaucer.

Illustrated examination of the arts and literature of European culture in the High Middle Ages—exploring the world of Chaucer, Boccaccio, Petrarch and Arthurian romances.

Fully illustrated with original plates of buildings, paintings, music and literature, the author shows the movement from a church-dominated culture to one which, by the end of the period, was much more secular, much more self-confident and inquiring, and on the point of bursting into full humanist flower. This is a truly inter-disciplinary account of Europe during this period written by well-known expert, this is cultural history on a grand scale.

This uniquely ambitious history offers an account of all aspects of cultural activity and production throughout the world of Latin Christendom 1200-1450. Beginning with a detailed description of the political and economic circumstances that allowed the 'Gothic Moment' to flourish, the body of the book is both a celebration of the Gothic cultural achievement - in cathedral-building, in manuscript illumination, in chivalric love-romance, in stained glass and in many other arts - and an investigation of its social origins and systems of production.

This classic and eminently readable work provides a full critical introduction to the complete Canterbury Tales. Essential reading for students of Chaucer.

Influential scholars from Britain and North America discuss future directions in rapidly expanding field of manuscript study. The study of manuscripts is one of the most active areas of current research in medieval studies: manuscripts are the basic primary material evidence for literary scholars, historians and art-historians alike, and there has been an explosion of interest over the past twenty years. Manuscript study has developed enormously: codices are no longer treated as inert witnesses to a culture whose character has already been determined by the modern scholar, but are active participants in a process of exploration and discovery. The articles collected here discuss the future of this process and vital questions about manuscript study for tomorrow's explorers. They deal with codicology and book production, with textual criticism, with the material structure of the medieval book, with the relation of manuscripts to literary culture, to social history and to the medieval theatre, and with the importance to manuscript study of the emerging technology of computerised digitisation and hypertext display. The essays provide an end-of-millennium perspective on the most vigorous developments in a rapidly expanding field of study. Contributors: A.I. Doyle, C. David Benson, Martha W. Driver, J.P. Gumbert, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Linne R. Mooney, Eckehard Simon, Alison Stones, John Thompson. DEREK PEARSALL is former Professor and Co-Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies, York, and Professor of English at Harvard University.

`Provides an excellent one-volume guide to the works of the anonymous Gawain-poet.' CHOICE The essays collected here on the Gawain-Poet offer stimulating introductions to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness and Patience, providing both information and original analysis. Topics includetheories of authorship; the historical and social background to the poems, with individual sections on particularly important features within them; gender roles in the poems; the manuscript itself; the metre, vocabulary and dialect of the poems; and their sources. A section devoted to Sir Gawain investigates the ideas of courtesy and chivalry found within it, and explores some of its later adaptations from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. Afull bibliography completes the volume. The late DEREK BREWER was Emeritus Professor of English Literature, University of Cambridge; JONATHAN GIBSON has worked as a lecturer in the Universities of Exeter and Durham.

New perspectives on one of the most important medieval poets. The essays in this volume pay tribute to the distinguished career of Professor R.F. Yeager. Appropriately for one who has done so much to advance scholarship and critical debate on this poet, they focus on John Gower. The approaches taken range widely, from poetics to palaeography, from close critical interpretation to ecocriticism, offering important new readings of Gower and his age. Particular topics addressed include Gower's revisions to the Tale ofRosiphilee; theological and philosophical positions within Gower's work; the violence of manuscript images of Confessio Amantis; and the views of a fellow poet on Gower - Edward Thomas.

Attitudes towards `labour', in the wake of the Black Death, shown to range from early protest literature to repressive authoritarianism. At the very moment that the image of the honest labourer seemed to reach its apogee in the Luttrell Psalter or, a few decades later, in Piers Plowman, the dominant culture of the landed interests was increasingly suspiciousof what it described as the idleness, greed and arrogance of the lower orders. Labour was one of the central issues during the fourteenth century: the natural disasters and profound social changes of the period created not merelya "problem" of labour, but also new ways of discussing and (supposedly) solving that problem. These studies engage with the contrasting and often competing discourses which emerged, ranging from the critical social awareness of some of the early fourteenth-century protest literature to the repressive authoritarianism of the new national employment laws that were enforced in the wake of the Black Death, and were expressed in counter-cultures of resistanceand dissent. JAMES BOTHWELL and P.J.P. GOLDBERG lecture in history, and W.M. ORMROD is Professor of History, at the University of York. Contributors: CORDELIA BEATTIE, CHRISTOPHER DYER, RICHARD K. EMMERSON,P.J.P. GOLDBERG, KATE GILES, CHRIS GIVEN-WILSON, STEPHEN KNIGHT, DEREK PEARSALL, SARAH REES JONES.

Created in London c. 1340, the Auchinleck manuscript (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland Advocates MS 19.2.1) is of crucial importance as the first book designed to convey in the English language an ambitious range ofsecular romance and chronicle. Evidently made in London by professional scribes for a secular patron, this tantalizing volume embodies a massive amount of material evidence as to London commercial book production and the demand for vernacular texts in the early fourteenth century. But its origins are mysterious: who were its makers? its users? how was it made? what end did it serve? The essays in this collection define the parameters of present-day Auchinleck studies. They scrutinize the manuscript's rich and varied contents; reopen theories and controversies regarding the book's making; trace the operations and interworkings of the scribes, compiler, and illuminators; teaseout matters of patron and audience; interpret the contested signs of linguistic and national identity; and assess Auchinleck's implied literary values beside those of Chaucer. Geography, politics, international relations and multilingualism become pressing subjects, too, alongside critical analyses of literary substance. SUSANNA FEIN is Professor of English at Kent State University and editor of The Chaucer Review. Contributors: Venetia Bridges, Patrick Butler, Siobhain Bly Calkin, A. S. G. Edwards, Ralph Hanna, Ann Higgins, Cathy Hume, Marisa Libbon, Derek Pearsall, Helen Phillips, Emily Runde, Timothy A. Shonk, Miceal F. Vaughan.