Marie de France (fl. late twelfth century) is the earliest known French woman poet, and her lais are among the finest examples of the genre.

Lais are short stories in verse based on Breton tales, depicting a moment of crisis in a love relation always intense and refined, and often far more complicated than our received view of courtly love might lead us to suppose. The lovers are not always timid for example, nor are the ladies necessarily unhappily married. Modern readers will find Marie's forceful and resourceful heroines and her undoctrinaire approach to love immensely sympathetic, while her contemporary audience, the English court and Plantagenet royal family, must have seen their own adventures mirrored here, for although there is a fairy-tale atmosphere the protagonists are undeniably human. 'Suffering from what is often called love is present in every lai,' one critic has observed, 'but the means of overcoming this suffering is beautifully and subtly illustrated.'

For this new edition, Glyn Burgess and Keith Busby have included two new lais in the Old French original, Lanval and Chevrefoil, and an updated and expanded Bibliography.

‘Just as a stag flees before the hounds,
So the pagans take flight before Roland’

On 15 August 778, Charlemagne’s army was returning from a successful expedition against Saracen Spain when its rearguard was ambushed in a remote Pyrenean pass. Out of this skirmish arose a stirring tale of war, which was recorded in the oldest extant epic poem in French. The Song of Roland, written by an unknown poet, tells of Charlemagne’s warrior nephew, Lord of the Breton Marches, who valiantly leads his men into battle against the Saracens, but dies in the massacre, defiant to the end. In majestic verses, the battle becomes a symbolic struggle between Christianity and paganism, while Roland’s last stand is the ultimate expression of honour and feudal values of twelfth-century France.

Glyn Burgess’s lucid translation is designed to assist the reader in understanding the original French of the Chanson de Roland, of which a substantial portion is included as an appendix in this volume. This edition also includes notes and an updated list for further reading.

The events of the years 1600-1642 have been argued over intensively by historians. Central to these arguments has been a search for the causes of the English Revolution. Many recent historians have denied that the Revolution had any long-term causes, and they have begun to see the period before 1642 in its own terms. These historians have suggested that before the 1640s English politics was based on consensus rather than conflict or opposition.

Glenn Burgess examines the implications of these recent revisions of the early Stuart period for the history of political thought. This book is primarily a study of the political ideas of common lawyers--the ideology of the "Ancient Constitution"--and looks closely at the ideas of such men as Sir Edward Coke and John Selden. On this Dr. Burgess builds a general interpretation of early Stuart political thought.

He argues that before 1625 ideological consensus was maintained in England, not because everyone agreed with everyone else, nor because there was no conflict over matters of principle, but because there were agreed conventions that held together seemingly contradictory political theories. Burgess examines the history of political thought in relation to professional groups--civil and common lawyers, and clerics, primarily--and in terms of the distinctive discourses they produced. After 1625 the boundaries between their discourses began to dissolve and political disputes became more threatening to the nation's stability.

Through this approach, Burgess is able to show why it was that a period of "ideological consensus" was also a period of bitter political conflict.