One of the most widely read and studied texts produced in Late Antiquity is the prison diary of a young woman who was martyred in the year 202 or 203 C.E. in Carthage, as part of a civic celebration. Her name was Perpetua, and, despite her honorable marriage and her baby son, she refused to recant her faith after she was arrested with a group of Christians. Imprisoned with her was a slave girl called Felicitas, who was in an advanced state of pregnancy. Felicitas gave birth just before she entered the arena, where the two women were mauled by wild animals and died with their fellow inmates. A description of their heroic deaths is appended to the diary by an editor, who tells us that, as they died, Perpetua and Felicitas arranged each other's clothes modestly and finally bid farewell in this life with the kiss of peace. This remarkable document survives in one Greek manuscript and nine Latin versions. Perpetua's story is read in numerous courses and, thanks to the Frontline (PBS) special "From Jesus to Christ," it has found a growing popular audience. Thomas Heffernan's new edition of this extraordinary work contains much that has never been done before, including a new English translation and the first detailed historical commentary in English on the entire narrative of the Passion. It also includes newly edited versions of the Latin manuscripts and - rarer still - a version of the Greek manuscript. He concludes the book with a description of all of the known manuscripts and thorough scholarly indices of the text itself.

Studies in the Age of Chaucer is the annual yearbook of the New Chaucer Society, publishing articles on the writing of Chaucer and his contemporaries, their antecedents and successors, and their intellectual and social contexts. More generally, articles explore the culture and writing of later medieval Britain (1200-1500). Each SAC volume also includes an annotated bibliography and reviews of Chaucer-related publications.

Though medieval "saints' lives" are among the oldest literary texts of Western vernacular culture, they are routinely patronized as "pious fiction" by modern historiography. This book demonstrates that to characterize the genre as fiction is to misunderstand the intentions of medieval authors, who were neither credulous fools nor men blinded by piety. Concentrating on English texts, Heffernan reconstructs the medieval perspective and considers sacred biography in relation to the community for which it was written; identifies the genre's rhetorical practices and purposes; and demonstrates the syncretistic way in which the life of the medieval saint was transformed from oral tales to sacred text. In the process, Heffernan not only achieves a more contextually accurate understanding of the medieval saints' lives, but details a new critical method that has important implications for the practice of textual criticism.