Middle English Texts Series
- Medieval Institute Publications is part of the WMU Medieval Institute
Middle English Texts Series (METS)
The series is designed to make available texts that occupy an important place in the literary and cultural canon but have not been readily obtainable in student editions. The focus is on Middle English literature adjacent to such major authors as Chaucer or Malory. The editions include glosses of difficult words and short introductions on the history of the work, its merits and points of topical interest, and brief bibliographies.
Ten Bourdes
edited by Melissa M. Furrow
In this fresh edition of ten comic poems, Melissa M. Furrow "aims to put funny (or would-be funny) Middle English poems under the eyes of a much broader readership" than the scholarly researchers she appealed to in her earlier edition of many of the same poems.
ISBN 978-1-588044-192-6 (paperback) $20.00
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Croxton Play of the Sacrament
edited by John T. Sebastian
The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, which survives in a single sixteenth-century copy, dramatizes the physical abuse by five Muhammad-worshipping Syrian Jews of a Host, the bread consecrated by a priest during the Christian Mass. The text is the work of a playwright possessed of a tremendous theatrical imagination, notwithstanding his choice of subject matter.
ISBN 978-1-58044-181-0 (paperback) $14.00
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The Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf: A Dual-Language Edition from Latin and Middle English Printed Editions
edited by Nancy Mason Bradbury and Scott Bradbury
The two texts of the Dialogue presented here, a Latin version printed c. 1488 and a Middle English translation printed in 1492, preserve lively, entertaining, and revealing exchanges between the Old Testament wisdom figure Solomon and Marcolf, a medieval peasant who is ragged and foul-mouthed but quick-witted and verbally astute. The Dialogue was a best-seller of its day; Latin versions survive in some twenty-seven manuscripts and forty-nine early printed editions and the work was translated into a wide variety of late medieval vernaculars, including German, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, English, and Welsh.
ISBN 978-1-58044-180-3 (paperbound) $14.00
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Prik of Conscience
edited by James H. Morey
The Prik of Conscience is widely known among scholars of medieval English literature as the poem existing in more manuscripts - some 130 - than any other Middle English poem. The author remains unknown to us, but he was clearly conversant with a wide range of patristic and clerkly authority.
ISBN 978-1-58044-172-8 (paperback) $20.00
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The York Corpus Christi Plays
edited by Clifford Davidson
The feast of Corpus Christi, celebrated annually on Thursday after Trinity Sunday, was devoted to the Eucharist, and the normal practice was to have solemn processions through the city with the Host, the consecrated wafer that was believed to have been transformed into the true body and blood of Jesus. In this way the "cultus Dei" thus celebrated allowed the people to venerate the Eucharistic bread in order that they might be stimulated to devotion and brought symbolically, even mystically into a relationship with the central moments of salvation history.
ISBN 978-1-58044-162-9 (paperback) $35.00
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The Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament
edited and translated by Michael Livingston
Like the Bible upon which it is based, [the metrical paraphrase] is unlikely to be a text read cover-to-cover by the faint-hearted. . . . The Paraphrase is, in several ways, a remarkable artifact of the Chaucerian period, one that can reveal a great deal about vernacular biblical literature in Middle English, about readership and lay understandings of the Bible, about the relationship between Christians and Jews in late medieval England, about the environment in which the Lollards and other reformers worked, about perceived roles of women in history and in society, and even about the composition of medieval drama. . . .
ISBN 978-1-58044-150-6 (paperback) $40.00
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The French Balades
John Gower
edited and translated by R. F. Yeager
Gower's Traitié and Cinkante Balades are the only extant formes fixes ("fixed forms," that is, fourteenth-century French lyrics, essentially the balade, rondeau, and virelai, developed as literary styles from thirteenth-century dances) that we can be assured were written by a native Englishman, those of "Ch" (and Chaucer's "many a song and many a leccherous lay" - presumably in French) notwithstanding
Copyright 2011, pp. viii + 182
ISBN 978-1-58044-155-1 (paperback) $15.00
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The Complete Works
Robert Henryson
edited by David J. Parkinson
In this new edition of the poems of Robert Henryson, David Parkinson offers editions of Henryson's Fables, The Testament of Cresseid, Orpheus and Eurydice, and twelve shorter poems (grouped according to the strength of their attribution to Henryson), as well as the glosses and explanatory and textual notes characteristic of Middle English Texts Series volumes.
Copyright 2010, pp. viii + 294
ISBN 978-1-58044-139-1 (paperback) $20.00
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The Castle of Perseverance
edited by David N. Klausner
The Castle of Perseverance, like the other surviving morality plays, deals allegorically with the life of man, his struggle against temptation and sin, and his hope of final redemption. The play begins before Mankind’s birth and concludes with his salvation after death (presented as a close call), and features the traditional three enemies of Mankind (the World, the Flesh, and the Devil) and his two advisors (the Good Angel and the Bad Angel).
Copyright 2010, pp. viii + 150
ISBN 978-1-58044-149-0 (paperback) $14.00
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Mankind
edited by Kathleen M. Ashley and Gerard NeCastro
Mankind is without a doubt the most amusing and controversial morality play surviving from fifteenth-century England. As an allegory about the vulnerable situation in which most people find themselves—torn between good judgment and the temptation to misbehave—the play’s moral action is conventional.
Copyright 2010, pp. vi + 90
ISBN 978-1-58044-140-7 (paperback) $13.00
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Mummings and Entertainments
John Lydgate
edited by Claire Sponsler
Mummings and Entertainments presents a large sampling of the dramatic texts of John Lydgate, the preeminent poet of fifteenth-century England. These verses are, as Claire Sponsler notes in her introduction, “of great importance for literary and theatrical history.”
Copyright 2010, pp. vi + 186
ISBN 978-1-58044-148-3 (paperback) $15.00
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Two Moral Interludes: The Pride of Life and Wisdom
edited by David N. Klausner
This volume completes the presentation of the five surviving Middle English morality plays. In addition to the texts of The Pride of Life and Wisdom, Klausner’s edition includes two appendices which provide the texts of primary sources for the two plays as well as appropriate music which may have accompanied performances, especially Wisdom.
Copyright 2009, pp. viii + 118
ISBN 978-1-58044-134-6 (paperback) $13.00
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Poems and Carols (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 302)
John the Blind Audelay
edited by Susanna Fein
[Audelay’s] idiosyncratic devotional tastes, interesting personal life history, and declared political affiliations—loyalty to king, upholder of estates, anxiety over heresy—make him worthy of careful study beside his better-known contemporaries. The Audelay Manuscript also contains unique copies of other alliterative poems of the ornate style seen in Gawain and the Green Knight and The Pistel of Swete Susan.
Copyright 2009, pp. x + 394
ISBN 978-1-58044-131-5 (paperback) $23.00
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The Game and Playe of the Chesse
William Caxton
edited by Jenny Adams
Despite its title, Caxton’s Game and Playe of the Chesse does not, in fact, have much to say about a game or about playing it. Instead, the work uses the chessboard and its pieces to allegorize a political community whose citizens contribute to the common good.
Copyright 2009, pp. viii + 156
ISBN 978-1-58044-130-8 (paperback) $13.00
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Chaucer and the Poems of “Ch”
edited by James I. Wimsatt Revised Edition
On several counts, one particular collection of French lyrics made in France in the late fourteenth century, University of Pennsylvania MS 15, is the most likely repository of Chaucer’s French poems. It is the largest manuscript anthology extant of fourteenth-century French lyrics in the formes fixes (balade, rondeaux, virelay, lay, and five-stanza chanson) with by far the largest number of works of unknown authorship.
Copyright 2009, pp. viii + 166
ISBN 978-1-58044-132-2 (paperback) $13.00
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Codex Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse
edited by George Shuffelton
Since its rediscovery by nineteenth-century scholarship, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61 has never been ignored, though it has also not gained a great deal of notoriety beyond the scholars of Middle English romance. The manuscript has also been singled out as an example of the reading material popular with middle-class English families in the later Middle Ages.
Copyright 2008, pp. viii + 659
ISBN 978-1-58044-129-2 (paperback) $30.00
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The Northern Homily Cycle
edited by Anne B. Thompson
Composed in rhyming English verse, [the Northern Homily Cycle] is the earliest and most complete work of its kind [Gospel paraphrases with homilies on the theme of the Gospel texts], its widespread and enduring popularity witnessed by three distinct recensions and twenty surviving manuscripts ranging from the early fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth centuries.
Copyright 2008, pp. viii + 296
ISBN 978-1-58044-126-1 (paperback) $20.00
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Amis and Amiloun, Robert of Cisyle, and Sir Amadace
edited by Edward E. Foster
Second Edition
In A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, Amis and Amiloun, Robert of Cisyle, and Sir Amadace are classified by Lillian Herlands Hornstein as Legendary Romances of Didactic Intent, which does not mean that they are devoid of liveliness or interest.
Copyright 2007, pp. viii + 136
ISBN 978-1-58044-125-4 (paperback) $12.00
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The Temple of Glas
John Lydgate
edited by J. Allan Mitchell
The Temple of Glas takes the form of an elusive and suspenseful—but for that reason all the more sensational—dream vision that demands close attention to detail and the dynamic way in which the meaning of events unfolds. Seducing readers with possibilities remains what The Temple of Glas does best, and that special magnetism speaks not only to the provenance and textual history of Lydgate’s poem but also to its literary qualities.
Copyright 2007, pp. viii + 100
ISBN 978-1-58044-117-9 (paperback) $12.00
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The Book of John Mandeville
edited by Tamarah Kohanski and C. David Benson
The Book of John Mandeville has tended to be neglected by modern teachers and scholars, yet this intriguing and copious work has much to offer the student of medieval literature, history, and culture. [It] was a contemporary bestseller, providing readers with exotic information about locales from Constantinople to China and about the social and religious practices of peoples such as the Greeks, Muslims, and Brahmins.
Copyright: 2007, pp. viii + 180
ISBN 978-1-58044-113-1 (paperback) $14.00
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The N-Town Plays
edited by Douglas Sugano with assistance by Victor I. Scherb
In the late 1400s in eastern England, a scribe was in the process of compiling a large dramatic manuscript of over two hundred vellum folios. The manuscript contains components of an independent Mary Play, parts one and two of an independent Passion Play, and an independent Assumption of Mary Play, as well as ten play subjects that appear in no other English cycles.
Copyright 2007, pp. viii + 506
ISBN 978-1-58044-116-2 (paperback) $25.00
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Everyman and Its Dutch Original, Elckerlijc
edited by Clifford Davidson, Martin W. Walsh, and Ton J. Broos
Faced with death’s certainty—and the uncertainty of the time of its coming, particularly in a historical period of widespread plague and other afflictions—as well as the inevitability of the hereafter, what is one to do? Everyman speaks to this dilemma.
Copyright 2007, pp. viii + 108
ISBN 978-1-58044-106-3 (paperback) $13.00
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The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers
edited by John William Sutton
At the forefront of the medieval wisdom tradition was The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers, a long prose text that purports to be a compendium of lore collected from biblical, classical, and legendary philosophers and sages. Dicts and Sayings was a well-known work that traveled across many lands and was translated into many languages.
Copyright 2006, pp. viii + 168
ISBN 978-1-58044-105-6 (paperback) $15.00
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Four Middle English Romances: Sir Isumbras, Octavian, Sir Eglamour of Artois, Sir Tryamour, Second Edition
edited by Harriet Hudson
Sir Isumbras, Octavian, Sir Eglamour of Artois, and Sir Tryamour are important works in a major literary development of the fourteenth century: the flourishing of Middle English popular romance. These four narratives were among the most popular; all survive in multiple manuscripts and continued to circulate in prints through the sixteenth century.
Copyright 2006, pp. viii + 210
ISBN 978-1-58044-111-7 (paperback) $13.00
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Confessio Amantis
John Gower
edited by Russell A. Peck with Latin translations by Andrew Galloway
The complete text of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis is a three-volume edition, including all Latin components—with translations—of this bilingual poem and extensive glosses, bibliography, and explanatory notes. Volume 1 contains the Prologue and Books 1 and 8, in effect the overall structure of Gower’s poem. Volume 2 contains Books 2, 3, and 4, which follow in their structure the outline of Vice and its children found in the early French poem the Mirour de l’Omme. Volume 3 contains Books 5, 6, and 7, which follow another kind of development as Gower shifts from romance banter and formulaic confession to philosophical inquiry.
Volume 1, Second Edition
Copyright 2006, pp. xii + 334
ISBN 978-1-58044-102-5 (paperback) $22.00
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Volume 2
Copyright 2003, pp. viii + 418
ISBN 1-58044-047-9 (paperback) $20.00
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Volume 3
Copyright 2004, pp. x + 546
ISBN 1-58044-092-4 (paperback) $20.00
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Sentimental and Humorous Romances: Floris and Blancheflour, Sir Degrevant, The Squire of Low Degree, The Tournament of Tottenham, and The Feast of Tottenham
edited by Erik Kooper
This volume presents a unique collection of Middle English romances, each with a different view of society, ranging from a tale of oriental wonders (Floris and Blancheflour) to excellent examples of the burlesque (The Tournament of Tottenham and The Feast of Tottenham).
Copyright 2006, pp. viii + 226
ISBN 978-1-58044-103-2 (paperback) $17.00
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The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Selection
edited by Kathleen Forni
The poems in this volume were prized and preserved because of their association with Chaucer’s name and have been, paradoxically, almost entirely ignored by modern readers for the same reason. The various genres represented in this sampler attest to the diversity of late medieval literary tastes and to the flexibility of the courtly idiom.
Copyright 2005, pp. viii + 174
ISBN 1-58044-096-7 (paperback) $15.00
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The Minor Latin Works with In Praise of Peace
The Minor Latin Works, edited and translated by R. F. Yeager
In Praise of Peace, edited by Michael Livingston
Gower’s achievement in writing substantially in all three primary languages of his time —Anglo-French, English, and Latin—was a source of pride to others and, undoubtedly, to him too: into the final years of his life he continued to produce poetry in all three languages. In Praise of Peace [is] in the same position as the shorter Latin works edited and translated in this volume: ignored, neglected, reduced, or relegated to the dusty realm of footnotes.
Copyright 2005, pp. viii + 144
ISBN 1-58044-097-5 (paperback) $14.00
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The Kingis Quair and Other Prison Poems
edited by Linne R. Mooney and Mary-Jo Arn
This volume reflects the wide scope of these ‘prison poems’ by bringing together a new edition of The Kingis Quair, a selection from Charles d’Orleans’ Fortunes Stabilnes, a poem by George Ashby, who was imprisoned in London’s Fleet prison, and the poems of two other poets, both anonymous, who wrote about physical and/or emotional imprisonment.
Copyright 2005, pp. viii + 206
ISBN 1-58044-093-2 (paperback) $16.00
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Saints’ Lives in Middle English Collections
edited by E. Gordon Whatley, with Anne B. Thompson and Robert K. Upchurch
This volume is conceived as a complement to another METS text, Sherry Reames’ Middle English Legends of Women Saints. This selection “is intended to be broadly representative of saints’ lives in Middle English and of the classic types of hagiographic legend as these were presented to the lay public and less-literate clergy of late medieval England.”
Copyright 2004, pp. x + 378
ISBN 1-58044-089-4 (paperback) $25.00
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Siege of Jerusalem
edited by Michael Livingston
The poem chronicles a historical war, and it is this historical quality that must stand out: the poem not only has resonances of the bloodshed that battle inevitably brings, but it also is, in a very literal sense, history. That is to say, the war is over. The vengeance of Jesus has been accomplished.
Copyright 2004, pp. viii + 146
ISBN 1-58044-090-8 (paperback) $16.00
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The Complete Works
William Dunbar
edited by John Conlee
Dunbar’s poems offer vivid depictions of late medieval Scottish society and serve up a striking pageant of colorful figures at the court of James IV (r. 1488–1513), with which he was associated for much of his adult life. The poems are remarkable both for their diversity and variability and for their multiplicity of voices, styles, and tones.
Copyright 2004, pp. x + 478
ISBN 1-58044-086-X (paperback) $25.00
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Chaucerian Dream Visions and Complaints
edited by Dana M. Symons
The poems in this volume were all attributed to Chaucer by early compilers or editors of his work in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and were not removed from the Chaucer canon until the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, when they became identified simply as Chaucerian.
Copyright 2004, pp. viii + 298
ISBN 1-58044-087-8 (paperback) $22.00
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Stanzaic Guy of Warwick
edited by Alison Wiggins
The Stanzaic Guy of Warwick, which survives only in the Auchinleck Manuscript, deals with the later years of Guy’s life, beginning with his return to Warwick after having established himself on the Continent as a pre-eminent model of knighthood. After his marriage, however, he is stricken by remorse for the very actions that have brought him fame, and he sets out anonymously on a series of pilgrimages of atonement.
Copyright 2004, pp. viii + 172
ISBN 1-58044-088-6 (paperback) $16.00
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Three Purgatory Poems: The Gast of Guy, Sir Owain, The Vision of Tundale
edited by Edward E. Foster
Through these fourteenth-century Middle English poems, readers can experience something of the controversies that surfaced and resurfaced even after Aquinas had articulated his doctrine of the Communion of Saints. All three poems were quite popular, as was the doctrine of Purgatory itself.
Copyright 2004, pp. viii + 304
ISBN 1-58044-082-7 (paperback) $20.00
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Concordia: The Reconciliation of Richard II with London
Richard Maidstone
edited by David R. Carlson with a verse translation by A. G. Rigg
The poem that Richard Maidstone wrote on the metropolitan crisis of 1392 reports information about the royal entry that concluded the crisis in greater detail than any other source. . . . [It] is above all an ideologically driven intervention . . . addressing a particular political circumstance.
Copyright 2003, pp. viii + 136
ISBN 1-58044-080-0 (paperback) $13.00
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The Wallace: Selections
edited by Anne McKim
The Wallace catalogues the sheer brutality of war. We are regaled with such detailed accounts of the sacking of towns and the burning down of buildings full of screaming inhabitants that the smells and sounds, as well as the terrible sights, of war are graphically conveyed.
Copyright 2003, pp. viii + 290
ISBN 1-58044-076-2 (paperback) $20.00
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Middle English Legends of Women Saints
edited by Sherry L. Reames with the assistance of Martha G. Blalock and Wendy R. Larson
Middle English Legends of Women Saints presents a collection of saints’ Lives intended to suggest the diversity of possibilities beneath the supposedly fixed and predictable surfaces of the legends, using multiple retellings of the same legend to illustrate that medieval readers and listeners did not just passively receive saints’ legends but continually and actively appropriated them.
Copyright 2003, pp. viii + 314
ISBN 1-58044-046-0 (paperback) $20.00
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The Trials and Joys of Marriage
edited by Eve Salisbury
The disparate texts in this anthology, produced in England between the late thirteenth and the early sixteenth centuries, challenge, and in some cases parody and satirize, the institution of marriage. The texts bridge generic categories.
Copyright 2002, pp. x + 278
ISBN 1-58044-035-5 (paperback) $18.00
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Pearl
edited by Sarah Stanbury
Pearl resists identification by author, date, occasion, or place of composition; still it is almost unanimously hailed as one of the masterpieces of our literature, so skilled is its author, so eloquent its language.
Copyright 2001, pp. viii + 112
ISBN 1-58044-033-9 (paperback) $10.00
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The Siege of Thebes
John Lydgate
edited by Robert R. Edwards
John Lydgate’s The Siege of Thebes, written c. 1421–22, is the only Middle English poetic text that recounts the fratricidal struggle between Oedipus’s sons Eteocles and Polynices as they contend for the lordship of Thebes. The Siege of Thebes reflects the problem of poetic authority and the political and ethical themes of Lydgate’s poetic career in the 1420s, when he was writing as a Lancastrian propagandist and as unofficial royal poet.
Copyright 2001, pp. x + 198
ISBN 1-58044-074-6 (paperback) $11.00
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Ancrene Wisse
edited by Robert Hasenfratz
Ancrene Wisse or the “Anchoresses’ Guide” written sometime roughly between 1225 and 1240, represents a revision of an earlier work, usually called the Ancrene Riwle or “Anchorites’ Rule,” a book of religious instruction for three lay women of noble birth, sisters, who had themselves enclosed as anchoresses somewhere in the West Midlands, perhaps somewhere between Worcester and Wales.
Copyright 2000, pp. xii + 690
ISBN 1-58044-070-3 (paperback) $30.00
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The Scale of Perfection
Walter Hilton
edited by Thomas H. Bestul
Walter Hilton’s The Scale of Perfection maintains a secure place among the major religious treatises composed in fourteenth-century England. This guide to the contemplative life, written in two books of more than 40,000 words each, is notable for its careful explorations of its religious themes and also as a monument of Middle English prose.
Copyright 2000, pp. viii + 296
ISBN 1-58044-069-X (paperback) $18.00
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Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Sothsegger
edited by James M. Dean
The texts, both anonymous, are Richard the Redeless, which concerns the governmental style of Richard II, and Mum and the Sothsegger, which addresses social issues in the reign of Henry IV. Both works reveal that alliterative poetry in the Piers Plowman tradition continued to be the chief vehicle for political and social criticism at the turn of the fourteenth century.
Copyright 2000, pp. viii + 175
ISBN 1-58044-068-1 (paperback) $13.00
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The Life of Saint Katherine
John Capgrave
edited by Karen A. Winstead
In telling the story of the life of the virgin martyr, Katherine, Capgrave uses many of the tropes that mark the enormously popular genre of hagiography as it was written throughout the Middle Ages. Capgrave inserts digressions on Greek and Roman history; on just and unjust rule and justifiable vs. unjustifiable rebellion; on child care; on medieval English feasts, jousts, and pageants; and on the role(s) of women.
Copyright 1999, pp. x + 322
ISBN 1-58044-053-3 (paperback) $20.00
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The Regiment of Princes
Thomas Hoccleve
edited by Charles R. Blyth
The Regiment of Princes, written about 1410–11, was composed at a time when England was still feeling the consequences of the deposition of Richard II. Essentially it is addressed to a prince on the subject of his governance, but it exhibits considerable generic instability and thus raises fundamental questions about how we should understand the tone of considerable portions of the poem.
Copyright 1999, pp. viii + 280
ISBN 1-58044-023-1 (paperback) $18.00
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The Assembly of Gods: Le Assemble de Dyeus, or Banquet of Gods and Goddesses, with the Discourse of Reason and Sensuality
edited by Jane Chance
The Assembly of Gods is an anonymous English dream vision allegory produced, probably, in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. Within the framework of the dream vision he blends didacticism with the mythological and the courtly, and seeks to bring Reson and Sensualyté into accord by means of an assembly of the classical gods that is called to adjudicate the relative merits of Discorde’s desire to overthrow Vertu.
Copyright 1999, pp. viii + 155
ISBN 1-58044-022-3 (paperback) $14.00
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Four Romances of England: King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, Athelston
edited by Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake, and Eve Salisbury
The romances in this volume contain some of the finest imaginative work of what is known as the Matter of England, the non-Arthurian romances that deal largely with English subjects and locales. These romances span a broad period of the Middle Ages, from c. 1225 (King Horn) to c. 1355–99 (Athelston).
Copyright 1999, pp. viii + 390
ISBN 1-58044-017-7 (paperback) $20.00
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Amoryus and Cleopes
John Metham
edited by Stephen F. Page
John Metham’s Amoryus and Cleopes can be seen as a key piece in the reception of Chaucer’s works. Metham does not slavishly imitate Chaucer, however; instead, he adapts features of the master’s works to his own ultimately moral purpose, fusing them with elements of classical tale, courtly and popular romance, encyclopedic compendium, hagiography, mirror for princes, and encomium, to create a tightly constructed late-medieval romance.
Copyright 1999, pp. viii + 144
ISBN 1-58044-016-9 (paperback) $11.00
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Middle English Marian Lyrics
edited by Karen Saupe
The poems selected for this volume provide a sampling of the rich tradition of Marian devotion as expressed in Middle English. They range widely in form, tone, and aesthetic quality. Taken together, they express the full range of a people’s effort to voice its anxieties and joys through Mary.
Copyright 1998, pp. xii + 300
ISBN 1-58044-006-1 (paperback) $20.00
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Prose Merlin
edited by John Conlee
The Middle English Prose Merlin gives students of medieval Arthurian literature access—though at one remove—to the Merlin section of the Old French Vulgate Cycle, an interconnected set of Arthurian works composed during the first half of the thirteenth century. Written in the latter half of the fifteenth century, it is a treasure trove of characters, incidents, and motifs, many of which are found nowhere else in Arthurian literature.
Copyright 1998, pp. viii + 399
ISBN 1-58044-015-0 (paperback) $20.00
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The Testament of Love
Thomas Usk
edited by R. Allen Shoaf
This edition of The Testament of Love is the first to be published since W. W. Skeat undertook the task in 1897. . . . [I]n this edition, a diplomatic transcription of Thynne [1532 edition] is printed with, contrapuntally, a pointed version of the text which represents the efforts of R. Allen Shoaf, the editor, to construe it.
Copyright 1998, pp. xiv + 457
ISBN 1-58044-001-0 (paperback) $20.00
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Troy Book: Selections
John Lydgate
edited by Robert R. Edwards
Troy Book is one of the most ambitious attempts in medieval vernacular poetry to recount the story of the Trojan war. John Lydgate, monk of the great Benedictine abbey of Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, began composing the poem in October 1412 on commission from Henry, Prince of Wales, later King Henry V, and he completed it in 1420.
Copyright 1998, pp. x + 430
ISBN 1-879288-99-0 (paperback) $20.00
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Moral Love Songs and Laments
edited by Susanna Greer Fein
These moral love songs and laments illustrate how, in the devout medieval English sensibility, doctrine was vitally connected to affective receptivity. Narrative moods range from love-longing and passion to bitter grief and sorrowful lament, feelings that devolve from the intimately personal state of being God’s created creature, individually answerable to divine law and love.
Copyright 1998, pp. x + 401
ISBN 1-879288-97-4 (paperback) $20.00
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The Poems of Robert Henryson
edited by Robert L. Kindrick with the assistance of Kristie A. Bixby
Here all of Henryson's work is freshly edited, including Orpheus and Eurydice and the shorter lyrics. An Introduction and Select Bibliography are provided for each work, and Notes and Glossary are included to help students with the vagaries of Middle Scots.
In an Appendix, Anne McKim edits The Laste Epistle of Creseyd to Troyalus, which is not by Robert Henryson but which complements The Testament and the great tale that Chaucer tells.
Copyright 1997, pp. x + 317
ISBN 1-879288-94-X (paperback) $17.00
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Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales
edited by Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren with contributions by Thomas E. Kelly, Russell A. Peck, Michael Swanton, and Paul Whitfield White
Here is a comprehensive collection of materials that deal with Robin Hood and such other “outlaw” figures as Hereward the Wake, Eustache the Monk, and Fouke le Fitz Waryn. In this text the figure of Robin Hood can be viewed in historical perspective, from the early accounts in the Chronicles through the ballads, plays, and romances that grew around his fame and impressed him on our fictional and historical imaginations.
Copyright 1997; 2nd ed. 2000, pp. xvi + 726
ISBN 1-58044-0667-3 (paperback) $30.00
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The Book of Margery Kempe
edited by Lynn Staley
Written probably in the late 1430s, The Book of Margery Kempe is one of the most astonishing documents of late medieval English life. Kempe examines the fundamental conflicts and tensions of that world by describing her gradual and voluntary movement away from worldly prestige.
Copyright 1996, pp. viii + 263
ISBN 1-879288-72-9 (paperback) $13.00
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The Cloud of Unknowing
edited by Patrick J. Gallacher
Since it was written The Cloud has attracted the attention of a diverse range of readers, from Robert Bateman, an influential seventeenth-century Baptist, to the novelist Aldous Huxley and the psychologist Ira Progoff. Here a new edition makes the work available to contemporary readers.
Copyright 1997, pp. x + 133
ISBN 1-879288-89-3 (paperback) $10.00
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Medieval English Political Writings
edited by James M. Dean
The authors of the poems and documents, mostly anonymous or pseudonymous, speak in the traditional language of complaint and satire; but the outlines of their anxiety are fairly clear. This volume contains five sections: Poems of Political Prophecy; Anticlerical Poems and Documents; Literature of Richard II’s Reign and the Peasants’ Revolt; Poems against Simony and the Abuse of Money; and Plowman Writings.
Copyright 1996, pp. xxvi + 278
ISBN 1-879288-64-8 (paperback) $14.00
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The Poems of Laurence Minot, 1333–1352
edited by Richard H. Osberg
The eleven extant poems attributed to Laurence Minot celebrate a sequence of English victories on the Scottish border and on the continent between 1333, the Battle of Halidon Hill, and the surrender of the French town of Guînes in 1352. The poems appear to have been written shortly after the events they commemorate.
Copyright 1996, pp. viii + 149
ISBN 1-879288-67-2 (paperback) $12.00
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The Middle English Breton Lays
edited by Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury
Breton Lays—those poems produced by or after the fashion of Marie de France in the twelfth century and which claim to be “literary versions of lays sung by ancient Bretons to the accompaniment of the harp”—served many functions. The poems edited in this volume, were distinctly “English” Breton lays “largely because they point to a renewed interest in the nuclear English family and the shaping of distinctly English family values.”
Copyright 1995, pp. viii + 445
ISBN 1-879288-62-1 (paperback) $18.00
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Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales
edited by Thomas Hahn
Includes The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle; Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle; The Avowyng of Arthur; The Awntyrs off Arthur; The Knightly Tale of Gologras and Gawain; The Greene Knight; The Turke and Sir Gawain; The Marriage of Sir Gawain; The Carle of Carlisle; The Jeaste of Sir Gawain; and King Arthur and King Cornwall.
Copyright 1995, pp. xii + 439
ISBN 1-879288-59-1 (paperback) $16.00
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Sir Perceval of Galles and Ywain and Gawain
edited by Mary Flowers Braswell
This edition of two texts that have not been readily available to students adds much to our understanding of the texture of the Middle English romance.
Copyright 1995, pp. viii + 212
ISBN 1-879288-60-5 (paperback) $10.00
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King Arthur's Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure
edited by Larry D. Benson, revised by Edward E. Foster
Professor Benson's edition of the Stanzaic Morte Arthur and the Alliterative Morte Arthure, has been long out of print. Now his edition of these important Middle English poems, revised and updated by Professor Edward E. Foster to take account of recent scholarship, is again made available to students.
Copyright 1994, pp. xii + 292
ISBN 1-879288-38-9 (paperback) $13.00
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Lancelot of the Laik and Sir Tristrem
edited by Alan Lupack
This new edition makes the poems available to students of English romance and of the Matter of Britain and enables us to enrich our sense of the texture of English treatments of the vast body of legends that grew around the court of Arthur.
Copyright 1994, pp. viii + 282
ISBN 1-879288-50-8 (paperback) $12.00
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The Shewings of Julian of Norwich
edited by Georgia Ronan Crampton
This first-person account of the visions experienced by Julian of Norwich in May of 1373 is remarkable for its vivid prose and as an example both of early autobiographical writing in the vernacular and of a spiritual document.
Copyright 1994, pp. x + 220
ISBN 1-879288-45-1 (paperback) $10.00
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The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions
edited by John M. Bowers
When Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400, his massive project The Canterbury Tales lay unfinished and unpublished. This volume includes five such works that date from the fifteenth century and survive in at least one manuscript collection of Chaucer’s Tales: John Lydgate’s Prologue to the Siege of Thebes, The Ploughman’s Tale, The Cook’s Tale, Spurious Links, and The Canterbury Interlude and Merchant’s Tale of Beryn.
Copyright 1992, pp. viii + 200
ISBN 1-879288-23-0 (paperback) $10.00
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The Palis of Honoure
Gavin Douglas
edited by David Parkinson
Gavin Douglas’s The Palis of Honoure is a fascinating but still rather neglected dream poem from early sixteenth-century Scotland. The Palis of Honoure impresses even modern readers by means of its sheer verve and inventiveness.
Copyright 1992, pp. viii + 140
ISBN 1-879288-25-7 (paperback) $9.00
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Wynnere and Wastoure and The Parlement of the Thre Ages
edited by Warren Ginsberg
The poems are complex and provide insight into fourteenth-century culture. As the editor observes, “the poem’s perspectives are truly dizzying: on the one hand, economics, politics, ethics, and social relations are seen as an interrelated set of universal, timeless principles; on the other, they appear as actual, contingent conditions that have resulted from specific acts in history.”
Copyright 1992, pp. viii + 83
ISBN 1-879288-26-5 (paperback) $8.00
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Six Ecclesiastical Satires
edited by James M. Dean
Includes Piers the Plowman’s Crede, The Plowman’s Tale, Jack Upland, Friar Daw’s Reply, Upland’s Rejoinder, and Why I Can’t Be a Nun.
Copyright 1991, pp. vi + 250
ISBN 1-879288-05-2 (paperback) $10.00
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Heroic Women from the Old Testament in Middle English Verse
edited by Russell A. Peck
Includes The Storie of Asneth, The Pistel of Swete Susan, The Story of Jephthah and his Daughter, and The Story of Judith.
Copyright 1991, pp. x + 157
ISBN 1-879288-11-7 (paperback) $10.00
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The Floure and the Leafe, The Assembly of Ladies, The Isle of Ladies
edited by Derek Pearsall
“All three of these poems, read together, would make an interesting unit in a course in medieval women’s studies.”—from Studies in the Age of Chaucer 15 (1993)
Copyright 1990, pp. vi + 146
ISBN 0-918720-43-5 (paperback), $8.00
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Three Middle English Charlemagne Romances
edited by Alan Lupack
Includes The Sultan of Babylon, The Siege of Milan, and The Tale of Ralph the Collier.
Copyright 1990, pp. viii + 207
ISBN 0-918720-44-3 (paperback) $9.00
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