The fourth edition of this essential Middle English textbook introduces students to the wide range of literature written in England between 1150 and 1400. Beginning with an extensive overview of middle English history, grammar, syntax, and pronunciation, the book goes on to examine key middle English texts -- including a new extract from Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Divine Love -- with helpful notes to direct students to key points within the text. Keeping in mind adopter feedback, this new edition includes a new model translation section with a student workbook and model exercise for classroom use. This new chapter will include sections on 'false friend' words, untranslatable idioms and notes on translating both poetry and prose. The text and references will be fully updated throughout and a foreword dedicated to the late J. A. Burrow will be included.

Originally published in 1989, Alliterative Poetry of the Later Middle Ages is an anthology of texts looking at the tradition of alliterative poetry in medieval English literature. The book presents lesser known alliterative Middle English poems, which are unmodernised and include explanatory footnotes designed to give clarity to the text and enable critical response to the texts. The book illustrates the great range and variety of alliterative verse, both rhymed and unrhymed. The poems range from descriptions of armies, bloody battles, dramatic storms and dreams of goddesses. Whatever the subject, social and political satire, theological controversy and moral admonition is always given a lively and interesting setting. The book contains a succinct and incisive introductory material and a carefully selected bibliography which will encourage further reading.

England the Nation is the first book to pay detailed attention to the earlier fourteenth century in England as a literary period in its own right. Thorlac Turville-Petre surveys the wide range of writings by the generation before Chaucer, and explores how English writers in the half-century leading up to the outbreak of the Hundred Years War expressed their concepts of England as a nation, and how they exploited the association between nation, people, and language. At the centre of Turville-Petre's work is a study of the construction of national identity that takes place in the histories written in English. The contribution of romances and saints' lives to an awareness of the nation's past are also considered, as in the questions of how writers were able to reconcile their sense of regional identity with commitment to the nation. A final chapter explores the interrelationship between England's three languages - Latin, French, and English - at a time when English was attaining the status of the national language, Middle English quotations are glossed or translated into modern English throughout. England the Nation takes the current debate on nationalism into a new area, and will be of interest to anyone studying medieval English literature and history, as well as the development of nationalism, and the rise of English as a national language.

Originally published in 1989, Alliterative Poetry of the Later Middle Ages is an anthology of texts looking at the tradition of alliterative poetry in medieval English literature. The book presents lesser known alliterative Middle English poems, which are unmodernised and include explanatory footnotes designed to give clarity to the text and enable critical response to the texts. The book illustrates the great range and variety of alliterative verse, both rhymed and unrhymed. The poems range from descriptions of armies, bloody battles, dramatic storms and dreams of goddesses. Whatever the subject, social and political satire, theological controversy and moral admonition is always given a lively and interesting setting. The book contains a succinct and incisive introductory material and a carefully selected bibliography which will encourage further reading.

Pearl is a moving elegy written in the late fourteenth century, in which a grief-stricken narrator struggles to come to terms with the death of his baby daughter. He meets her, now transformed into a beautiful young lady, in a dream, where she attempts to bring him to understand the place of death in the divine plan, and where he is granted a sight of the heavenly Jerusalem. Pearl is celebrated as a jewel among medieval poems, although it is the most challenging of the four works by the anonymous author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This new critical edition is designed to offer the maximum support for the reader of the poem. The text is accompanied by a close translation, and each of the twenty sections of the poem is provided with an introductory headnote as well as a running commentary. A general introduction supplies the necessary background information, on manuscript and authorship, form and structure, sources and influences, style, vocabulary and verse-form. The bibliography selects the most significant of the extensive critical studies. Written for both the specialist and the general reader, this book is an essential guide to this profound and complex poem. Designed as a replacement for E. V. Gordon’s standard edition of 1953 this is the only edition of Pearl to be accompanied by a literal translation and a full literary commentary and is the fruit of the author's 40 years of teaching medieval literature.

A survey of the history, holdings, decoration, and conservation of one of England's finest medieval libraries, with full catalogue. The Willoughby family, from Wollaton, Nottinghamshire, built up an extensive medieval library, including the notable Wollaton Antiphonal; theirs is the largest surviving library gathered by a gentry family of the period, the product of a single acquisitive burst, beginning around 1460 and mainly completed at about the time of the Dissolution in 1540. The manuscripts remain unique because of the very substantial core which survives more or less in situ, together with a huge collection of family archives, at the University of Nottingham, just a few miles from their original home. This book focuses upon the ten manuscripts now in the Wollaton Library Collection as well asthe famous Antiphonal. Essays explore the history of the library and the Willoughby family, the books of Sir Thomas Chaworth, the art and function of the Antiphonal, the works of pastoral instruction, the decoration of the Frenchmanuscripts (including the earliest fully illustrated manuscript of romances), the Confessio Amantis, and the conservation of the collection. The essays are followed by a full catalogue of the Wollaton Library Collection aswell as of manuscripts and early printed books now dispersed as far afield as Tokyo and New York. Contributors: Alixe Bovey, Gavin Cole, Ralph Hanna, Dorothy Johnston, Rob Lutton, Derek Pearsall, Alison Stones, Thorlac Turville-Petre.

Essays on Ricardian Literature develops issues and themes first broached in John Burrow's ground-breaking book Ricardian Poetry and incorporates a bibliography of his published writings, which have revolutionized critical appreciation of medieval literature. The contributors to this volume, all leading scholars in the field, explore such areas as the status of Anglo-Latin and the influence of French culture on the Ricardian court, offer radical re-readings of some more familiar works, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Patience, and demonstrate how closely the literature of the period is bound up with political and social conditions.

Informative study of the 14th-century revival of alliterative poetry which culminated in the major masterpieces of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Piers Plowman. The revival of alliterative poetry in the fourteenth century, which culminated in the major masterpieces of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Piers Plowman, poses many problems for the historians of literature. As a result, the poems have tended to be studied in isolation, and their poetic context and use of an established tradition have been largely ignored. This book assesses the alliterative revival as a poetic movement, and restores the poems to their literary context. In particular, it offers an evaluation of the obscure origins of the revival, and on the type of audience for whom the poems were intended.

The characteristic alliterative poem of the 14th and 15th centuries tells a story of incident and adventure: it is pre-eminently the poetry of narrative. Yet it is also, more than any other kind of medieval verse, remarkable for passages of vivid description, taking advantage of the extraordinary rich verbal resources of the alliterative poets and the characteristic strengths of the alliterative line. Memorable examples are the green chapel in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the storm at sea in Patience, the dream-landscape in Pearl, and the mysterious tomb in St Erkenwald; there are violent battle-scenes, descriptions of hunting and hawking, beautiful meadows and terrifying mountains, purling streams and wild rivers. Here is a seeming contradiction, or at least a tension that needs to be explored. The descriptive passages are digressions that interrupt the narrative; the story must pause to take in a visual effect. In Description and Narrative in Middle English Alliterative Poetry, Thorlac Turville-Petre explores this relationship between description and narrative, and the contribution of description to the narrative. Passages from all the major alliterative poems are analysed, and translated as necessary, so that the book may meet the needs of students as well as scholars familiar with the language and the topics discussed.

Pearl is a moving elegy written in the late fourteenth century, in which a grief-stricken narrator struggles to come to terms with the death of his baby daughter. He meets her, now transformed into a beautiful young lady, in a dream, where she attempts to bring him to understand the place of death in the divine plan, and where he is granted a sight of the heavenly Jerusalem. Pearl is celebrated as a jewel among medieval poems, although it is the most challenging of the four works by the anonymous author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This new critical edition is designed to offer the maximum support for the reader of the poem. The text is accompanied by a close translation, and each of the twenty sections of the poem is provided with an introductory headnote as well as a running commentary. A general introduction supplies the necessary background information, on manuscript and authorship, form and structure, sources and influences, style, vocabulary and verse-form. The bibliography selects the most significant of the extensive critical studies. Written for both the specialist and the general reader, this book is an essential guide to this profound and complex poem. Designed as a replacement for E. V. Gordon's standard edition of 1953 this is the only edition of Pearl to be accompanied by a literal translation and a full literary commentary and is the fruit of the author's 40 years of teaching medieval literature.

This edition, the first of its kind in Piers Plowman studies, aims to establish the archetypal text of the B-version of the poem, the ancestor of all extant manuscripts. The editors claim that this can be determined with certainty in the majority of lines by examining the relationship between the best copies of the alpha and beta families of the B-version stemma. Past editors have attempted to reconstruct the authorial text by extensive emendation, but Burrow and Turville-Petre claim that the archetype was not nearly as corrupt as previously maintained. In Piers Plowman: The B-Version Archetype the editors have opened a new chapter in the study of the B-text tradition.

This edition, the first of its kind in Piers Plowman studies, aims to establish the archetypal text of the B-version of the poem, the ancestor of all extant manuscripts. The editors claim that this can be determined with certainty in the majority of lines by examining the relationship between the best copies of the alpha and beta families of the B-version stemma. Past editors have attempted to reconstruct the authorial text by extensive emendation, but Burrow and Turville-Petre claim that the archetype was not nearly as corrupt as previously maintained. In Piers Plowman: The B-Version Archetype the editors have opened a new chapter in the study of the B-text tradition.