Comprehensive survey of the Middle English lyric, one of the most important forms of medieval literature. Winner of a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award The Middle English lyric occupies a place of considerable importance in the history of English literature. Here, for the first time in English, are found many features of formal and thematic importance: they include rhyme scheme, stanzaic form, the carol genre, love poetry in the manner of the troubadour poets, and devotional poems focusing on the love, suffering and compassion of Christ and theVirgin Mary. The essays in this volume aim to provide both background information on and new assessments of the lyric. By treating Middle English lyrics chapter by chapter according to their kinds - poems dealing with love, with religious devotion, with moral, political and popular themes, and those associated with preaching - it provides the awareness of their characteristic cultural contexts and literary modalities necessary for an informed critical reading. Full account is taken of the scholarship upon which our knowledge of these lyrics rests, especially the outstanding contributions of the last few decades and such recent insights as those of gender criticism. Also included are detailed discussions of the valuable information afforded by the widely varying manuscript contexts in which Middle English lyrics survive and of the diverse issues involved in editing these texts. Separate chapters are devotedto the carol, which came to prominence in the fifteenth century, and to Middle Scots lyrics which, at the end of the Middle English lyric tradition, present some sophisticated productions of an entirely new order. Contributors: Julia Boffey, Thomas G. Duncan, John Scattergood, Vincent Gillespie, Christiania Whitehead, Douglas Gray, Karl Reichl, Thorlac Turville-Petre, Alan J. Fletcher, Bernard O'Donoghue, Sarah Stanbury and Alasdair A. MacDonald. THOMAS G. DUNCAN is Honorary Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of St Andrews

This is an examination of the descriptive art found in four medieval poems generally accepted as being the work of a single author: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Purity and Patience. It focuses on the poet's powers of physical description.

Comprehensive survey of the Middle English lyric, one of the most important forms of medieval literature. Winner of a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award The Middle English lyric occupies a place of considerable importance in the history of English literature. Here, for the first time in English, are found many features of formal and thematic importance: they include rhyme scheme, stanzaic form, the carol genre, love poetry in the manner of the troubadour poets, and devotional poems focusing on the love, suffering and compassion of Christ and theVirgin Mary. The essays in this volume aim to provide both background information on and new assessments of the lyric. By treating Middle English lyrics chapter by chapter according to their kinds - poems dealing with love, with religious devotion, with moral, political and popular themes, and those associated with preaching - it provides the awareness of their characteristic cultural contexts and literary modalities necessary for an informed critical reading. Full account is taken of the scholarship upon which our knowledge of these lyrics rests, especially the outstanding contributions of the last few decades and such recent insights as those of gender criticism. Also included are detailed discussions of the valuable information afforded by the widely varying manuscript contexts in which Middle English lyrics survive and of the diverse issues involved in editing these texts. Separate chapters are devotedto the carol, which came to prominence in the fifteenth century, and to Middle Scots lyrics which, at the end of the Middle English lyric tradition, present some sophisticated productions of an entirely new order. Contributors: Julia Boffey, Thomas G. Duncan, John Scattergood, Vincent Gillespie, Christiania Whitehead, Douglas Gray, Karl Reichl, Thorlac Turville-Petre, Alan J. Fletcher, Bernard O'Donoghue, Sarah Stanbury and Alasdair A. MacDonald. THOMAS G. DUNCAN is Honorary Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of St Andrews.

Little remains of the rich visual culture of late medieval English piety. The century and a half leading up to the Reformation had seen an unparalleled growth of devotional arts, as chapels, parish churches, and cathedrals came to be filled with images in stone, wood, alabaster, glass, embroidery, and paint of newly personalized saints, angels, and the Holy Family. But much of this fell victim to the Royal Injunctions of September 1538, when parish officials were ordered to remove images from their churches. In this highly insightful book Sarah Stanbury explores the lost traffic in images in late medieval England and its impact on contemporary authors and artists. For Chaucer, Nicholas Love, and Margery Kempe, the image debate provides an urgent language for exploring the demands of a material devotional culture-though these writers by no means agree on the ethics of those demands. The chronicler Henry Knighton invoked a statue of St. Katherine to illustrate a lurid story about image-breaking Lollards. Later John Capgrave wrote a long Katherine legend that comments, through the drama of a saint in action, on the powers and uses of religious images. As Stanbury contends, England in the late Middle Ages was keenly attuned to and troubled by its "culture of the spectacle," whether this spectacle took the form of a newly made queen in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale or of the animate Christ in Norwich Cathedral's Despenser Retable. In picturing images and icons, these texts were responding to reformist controversies as well as to the social and economic demands of things themselves, the provocative objects that made up the fabric of ritual life.