Middle English Texts

• Thomas Hahn, University of Rochester, General Editor
• Anna Siebach-Larsen, University of Rochester, Executive Director
  
• Pamela Yee, University of Rochester, Managing Editor

Proposals or completed projects to be considered for publication by Medieval Institute Publications should be sent to the general editor, Thomas Hahn; the executive director, Anna Siebach-Larsen; and the series acquisitions editor, Tyler Cloherty.

The English Apocalypse: A Fourteenth-Century Translation of the Book of Revelation from Columbia University, MS Plimpton Add. 03

Edited by Ethan Campbell

Before the Wycliffite Bible in the 1380s, one of the only complete books of the Bible to be translated into Middle English was the Book of Revelation. The English Apocalypse, translated from the French sometime in the early 14th century, must have been well known to the later translators, since it appears in 18 extant manuscripts, sometimes alongside Wycliffite material. This edition reproduces, for the first time, a copy of the English Apocalypse, which actually replaced the Book of Revelation at the end of a Wycliffite New Testament. Whether the manuscript compiler simply preferred this version or meant it to be a placeholder or translation guide, this unique text is immensely valuable to scholars of early English Bible translation, as well as to students of Middle English literature and medieval religious practice.

ISBN 978-1-58044-698-3 (paperback), 978-1-58044-699-0 (hardback), 978-1-58044-700-3 (PDF) © 2025

Two Middle English Prayer Cycles: Holkham Prayers and Meditations and Simon Appulby, The Fruyte of Redempcyon

Edited by Ben Parsons

This volume presents the first critical editions of two fascinating but overlooked medieval prayer sequences: the Holkham “Prayers and Meditations” (c. 1400-1420), a rare example of medieval religious literature by a female author written to guide a “religious sustir” in her devotions; and Simon Appulby’s Fruyte of Redempcyon (1514), composed by one of England’s last anchorites to serve his urban community. Patterned after the widely influential fourteenth-century Meditationes vitae Christi (“Meditations on the Life of Christ”) and its psychological model of prayer, both cycles direct their readers to imagine themselves in Jesus’s presence during key events of Christian history, mystically envisioning and experiencing Christ’s life and passion in the here and now through a state of spiritual intimacy. Despite their differences in century, contexts, and intended audiences, these prayer sequences together introduce readers to one of the most vital and idiosyncratic traditions of medieval Christian devotion. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-678-5 (paperback), 978-1-58044-679-2 (hardback), 978-1-58044-680-8 (PDF) © 2023

William Caxton's Paris and Vienne and Blanchardyn and Eglantine

Edited by Harriet Hudson

Paris and Vienne, published in 1485, and Blanchardyn and Eglantine, published in 1489, are unique among the romances printed for English audiences by William Caxton, the printer responsible for many of the earliest print versions of major canonical works in England. The only independent tales of adventure that Caxton did not draw from the epic cycles of England, France, Greece, and Rome, these romances enjoyed widespread popularity throughout medieval Europe in multiple languages and in both verse and prose prior to Caxton’s translations. Presenting lively characters, distinctive treatments of familiar plots, and differing but complementary accounts of chivalry and courtly love, these romances were both edifying and entertaining for medieval English audiences; as two of the first knightly romances ever printed in England, they also provide important witnesses to the development of English prose style, the evolution of the romance genre, and late medieval precursors to the novel.   

ISBN 978-1-58044-555-9 (paperback), 978-1-58044-556-6 (hardback), 978-1-58044-557-3 (PDF) © 2023

The Owl and the Nightingale and the English Poems of Oxford, Jesus College, MS 29 (II)

Edited and translated by Susanna Fein

Made in the West Midlands in the thirteenth century, Oxford Jesus College, MS 29 (II) provides an anthology described by volume editor Susanna Fein as “the most abundant, most persistently English assemblage of imaginative short poems to turn up in the period between the tenth-century Old English Exeter Book and the mid-fourteenth-century Harley Lyrics.” Moralizing, witty, assertively English, and pragmatic about life and the afterlife, the anthology reflects the personality, erudition, and interests of its lone scribe; it includes the learned debate poem “The Owl and the Nightingale”; Thomas of Hales’s “Love Rune,” the first known English Franciscan lyric; “The Proverbs of Alfred,” collected wisdom attributed to Alfred the Great; and twenty-five additional works, many of them uniquely preserved in this manuscript. Fein’s edition presents all of Jesus 29’s English materials in facing-page translation, supplementing their challenging early Middle English with modern English translations for students and advanced scholars alike. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-520-7 (paperback), 978-1-58044-521-4 (hardback), 978-1-58044-522-1 (PDF) © 2022

The Destruction of Jerusalem, or Titus and Vespasian

Edited by Kara L. McShane and Mark J. B. Wright

The Destruction of Jerusalem, also called Titus and Vespasian, is a fictionalized version of the historical Roman siege of Jerusalem, intriguing enough to fifteenth-century readers that it survives in twelve separate manuscripts. Marked by antisemitism, Christian nationalism, and violence, this Middle English poem weaves together sources both medieval and classical, transforming first-century Romans into Christian agents of divine vengeance. Moreover, it participates in a late medieval English trend of building national identity through association with Jerusalem, constructing England in Jerusalem’s image through historical romances and travel narratives. Here presented in the most comprehensive edition to date, the poem will interest scholars and students of Middle English romance, the Crusades, medieval antisemitism, and literary reimaginings of historical events. Further, this new edition expands our understanding of the fall of Jerusalem tradition in late medieval England, bringing attention to a long-ignored English retelling of these first-century events that captivated Christian audiences. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-487-3 (paperback), 978-1-58044-488-0 (hardback), 978-1-58044-489-7 (PDF) © 2021

Of Knyghthode and Bataile

Edited by Trevor Russell Smith and Michael Livingston

Composed for King Henry VI in the middle of the Wars of the Roses, Of Knyghthode and Bataile adapts the most widely used military manual in the Middle Ages—the late Roman Christian writer Vegetius’s treatise De re militari—into English verse. The poet freely adapts Vegetius’s work to his own historical context, reflecting the changing status of chivalry at the end of the Middle Ages, the introduction of gunpowder and warships to military conflicts, and the poet’s wish that a properly trained military might unify the country under England’s rightful king. Responding to both the evolution of warfare and the historical background of his own time, its anonymous poet produced what one critic has called “one of the most brilliant military poems of the fifteenth century.” The present edition showcases this poetic achievement, including textual variants from all four surviving manuscripts, a contextualizing introduction, and copious notes and glosses. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-476-7 (paperback), 978-1-58044-475-0 (hardback), 978-1-58044-477-4 (PDF) © 2021

Christine de Pizan’s Advice for Princes in Middle English Translation: Stephen Scrope’s The Epistle of Othea and the Anonymous Lytle Bibell of Knighthod

Edited by Misty Schieberle

One of the most popular mirrors for princes, Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea (Letter of Othea) circulated widely in England. Speaking through Othea, the goddess of wisdom and prudence, in the guise of instructing Hector of Troy, Christine advises rulers, defends women against misogyny, and articulates complex philosophical and theological ideals. This volume brings together for the first time two fifteenth-century medieval English translations, Stephen Scrope’s precise translation The Epistle of Othea and the anonymous Lytle Bibell of Knyghthod, once criticized as a flawed translation. With substantial introductions and comprehensive explanatory notes that attend to literary and manuscript traditions, this volume contributes to the reassessment of how each English translator grappled with adapting a French woman’s text (which itself borrows from a long tradition of conduct manuals in Latin and French) to English social, political, and literary contexts. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-385-2 (paperback), 978-1-58044-386-9 (hardback), 978-1-58044-477-3 (PDF) © 2020

The Roland and Otuel Romances and the Anglo-Norman Otinel

Edited by Elizabeth Melick, Susanna Fein and David Raybin

This edition contains four anonymous Middle English Charlemagne romances from the Otuel cycle: Roland and Vernagu, Otuel a Knight, Otuel and Roland, and Duke Roland and Sir Otuel of Spain, all from the fourteenth century; and a facing-page translation of the Anglo-Norman Otinel, the late-twelfth- or early-thirteenth-century chanson de geste from which three of the romances in this edition originate. Drawing from the famous Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland), these Crusades stories center on conflicts between Frankish Christians led by the legendary Charlemagne and various “Saracen” groups that captured the imaginations of medieval English Christians. In addition to Charlemagne and Roland, each romance features a Muslim character: either the kind but loathsome giant Vernagu or Otuel, Vernagu’s handsome and sharp-tongued nephew. This volume offers readers an accessible approach to the Otuel Cycle and its increasingly relevant nuanced treatment of the racial and religious Other. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-388-3 (paperback),  978-1-58044-389-0 (hardback), 978-1-58044-412-5 (PDF) © 2020

John Lydgate's Dance of Death and Related Works

Edited by Megan L. Cook and Elizaveta Strakhov

Late medieval England and France, marked by plague and the Hundred Years War, saw a surge in literature treating death as a dominant theme. From this milieu emerged the danse macabre, a tradition of death poetry defined by themes of social satire, death as the great equalizer, and confrontations between the living and the dead. This volume brings together new editions of both texts of John Lydgate’s fifteenth-century poem the Dance of Death with related Middle English works from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It also includes a new facing-page translation of Lydgate’s French source, La Danse macabre. These poems showcase the power and versatility of the danse macabre motif, offering a vivid window into life and death in late medieval Europe. In vivid, often grotesque, and darkly humorous terms, these poems ponder life’s fundamental paradox: while we know that we all must die, we cannot imagine our own death. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-380-7 (paperback), 978-1-58044-381-4 (hardback), 978-1-58044-408-8 (PDF) © 2019

Guillaume de Machaut, The Complete Poetry and Music, Volume 2: The Boethian Poems Le Remede de Fortune and Le Confort d'Ami

Edited and translated by R. Barton Palmer, Uri Smilansky and Domenic Leo

Guillaume de Machaut, one of the most important cultural figures of fourteenth-century France, was a polymath—a poet, composer, and illuminator. The 13-volume Complete Poetry and Music is the only series to present Machaut’s multimodal oeuvre in its entirety, interpolating his Middle French texts (in facing translation), musical scores, and grisaille miniatures as they appear in BnF fr. 1584 with historical context and scholarly commentary.The Boethian Poems include the Remede de Fortune (Remedy for Fortune) and the Confort d’ami (Consolation from a Friend), two dits which adapt Boethian themes of worldly suffering, fickle Fortune, and divine justice into love poetry. The Remede follows a fearful male protagonist who is counseled by the allegorical Lady Esperence (Hope) in the art of love; their emotional expression is elevated by seven musical insertions. The Confort offers consolation and advice to Machaut’s patron Charles of Navarre, during his imprisonment by his political rivals, through classical and biblical exempla—many of which are highlighted with illustrations.

ISBN 978-1-58044-374-6 (paperback), 978-1-58044-375-3 (hardback), 978-1-58044-390-6 (PDF) © 2019

Gavin Douglas, The Palyce of Honour

Edited by David John Parkinson

Composed at the turn of the sixteenth century amid Scotland’s growing sense of its own cultural and linguistic distinctiveness, Gavin Douglas’s The Palyce of Honour ingeniously combines such diverse materials as biblical tradition, Ovidian and Chaucerian poetry, and Scottish history and politics to produce a distinctively Scottish rendering of the medieval dream vision genre. Its dreamer, a would-be poet of love who dreams of divine figures from Greek mythology processing on horseback through a wilderness, travels with the Muses to the mountain palace of the god Honour, the judge of traitors and usurpers. Written in a genre associated with divine truth, Douglas’s dream vision champions literature as the best means of instilling in rulers the spiritual lessons, moral edification, and knowledge of the classical past that are essential to kingly power. The present edition furnishes readers with historical context, extensive glosses and notes, and a guide to the Scots language. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-372-2 (paperback), 978-1-58044-373-9 (hardback), 978-1-58044-409-5 (PDF) © 2018

Six Scottish Courtly and Chivalric Poems, Including Lyndsay's Squyer Meldrum

Edited by Rhiannon Purdie and Emily Wingfield

These six poems explore late medieval Scotland’s engagement with courtly and chivalric values. Sir David Lyndsay’s sixteenth-century Historie and Testament of Squyer Meldrum blend comedy, tragedy and medieval romance to tell the biography of the real-life William Meldrum, a work which C. S. Lewis compared favorably to Chaucer’s canon. Lyndsay’s comic Answer to the Kingis Flyting cautions the promiscuous young king James V. In the three anonymous fifteenth-century poems, Robert Bruce is added to the traditional “Nine Worthies” of chivalry in the Balletis of the Nine Nobles; the tragic early death of the French dauphin’s Scottish bride is lamented in Complaint for the Death of Margaret, and moral and chivalric conduct is exemplified by the heraldic beast-narrators of the Talis of the Fyve Bestes. With extensive introductions, notes, and an Older Scots reading guide, this edition serves as a primer to important texts in the medieval Scottish tradition.

ISBN 978-1-58044-332-6 (paperback), 978-1-58044-342-5 (hardback), 978-1-58044-410-1 (PDF) © 2018

Guillaume de Machaut, The Complete Poetry and Music, Volume 9: The Motets

Edited by Jacques Boogaart, translated by R. Barton Palmer and Jacques Boogaart, with art historical commentary by Domenic Leo

Considered the most significant French poet and composer of the fourteenth century, Guillaume de Machaut composed a body of work unrivaled in volume and influence among his contemporaries; his music enjoyed performances for decades after his death, and his poetry influenced writers well into the fifteenth century, including such luminaries as Geoffrey Chaucer. This new, multivolume series of Machaut’s complete works uses one of the most authoritative medieval sources for his compositions: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 1584. Unique in the series for its exclusive emphasis on music, Volume 9 presents Machaut’s twenty-three motets, representing the largest surviving collection by a single composer and about a quarter of all surviving fourteenth-century examples of this polyphonic musical genre. Intended for performers and scholars alike, this edition presents clear, readable scores alongside detailed commentaries, full English translations of French and Latin texts, variants for each piece, and up-to-date bibliographies. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-287-9 (paperback), 978-1-58044-302-9 (hardback), 978-1-58044-288-6 (PDF) © 2018

The Digby Mary Magdalene Play

Edited by Theresa Coletti

The Digby Mary Magdalene is named after the sixteenth-century manuscript containing the play’s only known copy. Along with “The Conversion of Saint Paul,” its companion in Bodleian Library MS Digby 133, it also provides exclusive access to the dramatic genre of the English saint play. This multifaceted portrait of Mary weaves together several distinct narrative traditions of Mary as a noblewoman, prostitute, redeemed sinner, and meditative desert saint, highlighting the paradoxes central to her broad appeal. The Digby Magdalene is striking for its simultaneously local and cosmopolitan character: it reflects the local priorities, religious devotion, and prolific tradition of English drama that characterize its home of East Anglia, yet incorporates elements from continental Europe’s wealth of texts, images, and performances dedicated to the Magdalene. By participating in this international tradition, the Digby Magdalene underscores Mary’s status as one of the most widely venerated saints of Western Europe. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-285-5 (paperback), 978-1-58044-301-2 (hardback), 9781580442862 (PDF) © 2018

The Towneley Plays

Edited by Garrett P. J. Epp

Named for the former owners of the manuscript containing them, the Towneley Plays present some of the best-known examples of Middle English drama. The manuscript itself is now thought to have been produced as late as the mid-sixteenth century, although most of its plays were written much earlier. Once called the Wakefield Cycle on the assumption that they form a cohesive cycle of mystery plays performed by medieval guilds in Wakefield in Yorkshire’s West Riding, previous editions of the plays present them in the order in which they appear in the manuscript, encompassing Christian history from Creation to the Day of Judgment. The present edition not only foregrounds the collection’s status as an anthology of varied origins and production requirements, but also reflects manuscript evidence of attempts to shape the collection into a coherent whole, while also providing context for theatrical production, facilitating classroom study, and promoting scholarly argument. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-283-1 (paperback), 978-1-58044-304-3 (hardback), 978-1-58044-284-8 (PDF) © 2018

Sir Torrent of Portingale

Edited by James Wade

Composed toward the end of the fourteenth century, the anonymous Sir Torrent of Portingale is a Middle English romance defined by its outsized proportions and commitment to outdoing its predecessors. Its 2,671 lines make it one of the longer surviving tail-rhyme romances—nearly double the length of its nearest literary analogue and partial source, the romance Sir Eglamour of Artois. Its valorous Portuguese hero and virtuous but feisty princess, narrative investment in lineage and dynastic ambition, grand geographic scope, and sheer abundance of romance tropes speak to an audience both well-versed in the conventions of adventure literature and hungry for ever grander narratives. A likely influence on Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, and prominent among the print editions of Middle English romance that flourished in the early Tudor period, Sir Torrent of Portingale showcases one of medieval England’s most popular literary genres in its full maturity. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-250-3 (paperback), 978-1-58044-251-0 (PDF) © 2017

Lydgate’s Fabula duorum mercatorum and Guy of Warwyk

Edited by Pamela Farvolden

This edition presents two short, accessible, yet relatively understudied narrative works by the late medieval poet John Lydgate (ca. 1371–1449). Although differing in subject matter, style, and genre, both texts were likely composed during the same phase of Lydgate’s career in the 1420s and represent a new treatment of an earlier source. In the Fabula Duorum Mercatorum (Tale of Two Merchants), Lydgate transforms a short, straightforward twelfth-century exemplum into a courtly, philosophical romance masterfully exploring the popular theme of male friendship, replete with allusions to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and “The Knight’s Tale” as well as Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. By contrast, Lydgate’s Guy of Warwyk draws from one of the best-known English medieval romance traditions only to break from it; this self-consciously historical narrative is considerably shorter than its romance counterparts, focusing on Guy’s return to England, his battle against the giant Colbrond, and his death. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-246-6 (paperback), 978-1-58044-247-3 (PDF) © 2016

The Katherine Group (Bodley MS 34)

Edited by Emily Rebekah Huber and Elizabeth Robertson

This edition presents for the first time newly edited and translated versions of the texts known collectively as the Katherine Group, contained in the early thirteenth century manuscript known as Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 34. Curated to highlight the virtues of female virginity, these texts include saints’ lives of Saints Katherine, Margaret, and Juliana, which affirm the triumph of virginity over the temptations of material wealth and power; Hali Meithhad (Holy Maidenhood), a virginity tract that skillfully recasts patristic commentary to reflect choices available to middle-class and upper-class women in thirteenth-century England; and Sawles Warde (The Guardianship of the Soul), an allegorical homily encouraging readers to avoid sin by achieving emotional balance in earthly life. Together, these texts provide valuable witnesses for the rigorous anchoritic spiritual life pursued by female recluses in medieval England and the development of Middle English writing in the first centuries after the Norman Conquest. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-248-0 (paperback), 978-1-58044-249-7 (PDF) © 2016

The Complete Poetry and Music of Guillaume de Machaut, Volume 1: The Debate Poems: Le Jugement dou Roy de Behaigne, Le Jugement dou Roy de Navarre, Le Lay de Plour

Edited by Prof. R. Barton Palmer and Yolanda Plumley with Domenic Leo and Uri Smilansky

Guillaume de Machaut, one of the most important cultural figures of fourteenth-century France, was a polymath—a poet, composer, and illuminator. The 13-volume Complete Poetry and Music is the only series to present Machaut’s multimodal oeuvre in its entirety, interpolating his Middle French texts (in facing translation), musical scores, and grisaille miniatures as they appear in BnF fr. 1584 with historical context and scholarly commentary. The Debate Poems brings together two dits: Le Jugement dou Roy de Behaingne (Judgment of the King of Bohemia), in which a narrator named Guillaume witnesses a lady bereft of her lover and a knight betrayed by his lady debate to determine who is most unhappy before their judge, the titular king Jean of Bohemia; and Le Jugement dou Roy de Navarre (Judgment of the King of Navarre), where the lady blames the narrator for the original debate’s outcome and they seek out the advice of the Charles, king of Navarre. Le Lay de Plour (Lay of Weeping) continues the story in lyric form. 

ISBN: 978-1-58044-252-7 (paperback),  978-1-58044-253-4 (PDF) © 2016

John Hardyng, Chronicle, Vol. 1

Edited by James Simpson and Sarah Peverley

One of the few texts written in the twilight years of Henry VI’s reign, John Hardyng’s first Chronicle, completed in 1457, offers the observations, hopes, and anxieties of a gentleman soldier who participated in the key events that defined his era. Born in Northumbria, Hardyng was a royal spy sent to investigate Scotland’s unrest. He later incorporated his extensive knowledge of Scottish politics into his Middle English Chronicle, documenting the history of British kings, including mythological figures like Lear and Arthur. His text advises the English crown on themes like the body politic, war, lawlessness, justice, and self-governance in the troubled period preceding and during the War of the Roses. Volume 1 contains the Prologue and first three books. Transcribed from MS Lansdowne 204, this edition presents not only the first complete edition of the Chronicle but also offers insight into the material conditions of its composition, discovered during the British Library’s multispectral imaging.

ISBN 978-1-58044-213-8 (paperback),  978-1-58044-241-1 (PDF) © 2015

Richard Coer de Lyon

Edited by Peter Larkin

Centuries-long in its composition, the fourteenth-century Middle English crusading poem Richard Coer de Lyon recounts in verse the exploits, both historical and fanciful, of Richard I, king of England. While the poem centers on Richard’s participation in the Third Crusade, presenting these events with historically traceable details and geographic specificity, it also diverges from the accounts of chronicle sources and the conventions of chansons de geste with a number of fabulous interpolations and anachronistic reinterpretations of the past. Despite its immense popularity to medieval audiences, the poem suffered a long period of neglect, even disparagement, in past scholarly assessments of the work; this new edition of Richard Coer de Lyon, accompanied by a substantial introduction and comprehensive explanatory and textual notes, signally contributes to the reappraisal and understanding of this “most medieval” of English popular romances.

ISBN 978-1-58044-201-5 (paperback),  978-1-58044-241-1 (PDF) © 2015

The King of Tars

Edited by John H. Chandler

Previously overlooked by scholars for centuries for its defiance of genre classifications and conventions, the early fourteenth century The King of Tars blends elements of saints’ lives, medieval romances, miracle tales, and travel narratives in service of both entertainment and religious instruction. A striking early variant of the Constance tale most famously told in English in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, this narrative centers not on its namesake Christian king but his beautiful daughter, who agrees to wed the sultan making war on her father’s kingdom to stop the conflict. The marvelous birth that their union produces becomes the object of a spiritual test between the parents, culminating in two spectacular moments of miraculous baptism and conversion. Chandler’s edition introduces readers to this remarkable text and its conceptions of race, gender, and religion with the help of a detailed introduction, extensive glosses, explanatory and textual notes. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-204-6 (paperback), 978-1-58044-238-1 (PDF) © 2015

Oton de Granson, Poems

Edited and translated by Peter Nicholson and Joan Grenier-Winther

The Savoyard knight, diplomat, and poet Oton de Granson was among the first and most successful of the late fourteenth century’s courtier poets. Well-known in both the French and English courts, he spent much of his career in service to the English king and also was likely a personal friend to poets Geoffrey Chaucer and Eustache Deschamps, with Chaucer’s “Complaint of Venus” praising Granson as the flower of French poetry. Though his contributions to medieval French lyric poetry enjoyed little recognition in his lifetime, he is partly credited with popularizing poetic forms that became popular after his death and was later celebrated alongside—and his works sometimes misattributed to—luminary poets such as Eustache Deschamps, Guillaume de Machaut, and Alain Chartier. This new edition of Granson’s works presents them in his original Middle French verse accompanied by modern English translations, a detailed scholarly introduction, and extensive explanatory and textual notes.

ISBN 978-1-58044-206-0 (paperback), 978-1-58044-239-8 (PDF) © 2015

The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, Volumes 1–3

Edited and translated by Susanna Fein, with David Raybin and Jan Ziolkowski

Although few concrete details exist about the fourteenth-century manuscript known as London, British Library MS Harley 2253, it contains one of the most important surviving literary collections from medieval England. In rarity, quality and abundance, its collection of secular love lyrics is unrivaled, accompanying delicate lyrics of religious devotion and contemporary political songs preserved in no other manuscript. Beyond these Middle English treasures are no less intriguing French and Latin works: four fabliaux (the largest set from medieval England), three Anglo-Saxon saints’ lives, and numerous satires, comedies, debates, interludes, collected sayings, conduct literature, Bible stories, dream interpretations, and pilgrim guides. This phenomenal range owes to the Ludlow scribe, the manuscript’s compiler and copyist, himself credited with authoring parts of the collection. Volume 1 presents Booklets 1 and 2 of the manuscript, containing the rich assortment of religious narratives in Anglo-French verse and prose copied by Scribe A. Volume 2 presents Booklets 3, 4, and the majority of Booklet 5 of the manuscript, including its extraordinary anthology of religious and secular lyrics. Volume 3 presents Booklet 5’s last works and Booklets 6 and 7 of the manuscript, including a handbook of practical religion and the largest English collection of Anglo-Norman fabliaux. 

 Volume 1

ISBN 978-1-58044-205-0 (paperback), 978-1-58044-239-8 (PDF)  © 2015

Volume 2

ISBN 978-1-588044-198-8 (paperback), 978-1-58044-198-8 (PDF) © 2014

Volume 3

ISBN 978-1-588044-199-5 (paperback), 978-1-58044-237-4 (PDF) © 2014

Lybeaus Desconus

Edited by Eve Salisbury and James Weldon

Surviving in six extant manuscripts and referenced by later English luminaries such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Sir Thomas Malory, and John Skelton, Lybeaus Desconus ranks among the most popular of Middle English romances. Dated to the mid-fourteenth century, it belongs to the widely disseminated narrative tradition of “the Fair Unknown,” in which a handsome and mysterious young outsider journeys to King Arthur’s court to prove his worth despite his illegitimate birth. Granted the opportunity to demonstrate his physical prowess and hidden nobility, Lybeaus undertakes a series of quests that pit him against supernatural foes, teach him chivalric conduct, overcome his illegitimacy, and restore his patrimony. This edition presents two manuscript versions belonging to distinct textual traditions of the tale, with the original author’s version preserved in Lambeth Palace MS 306, and the fifteenth-century revision from Naples XIII.B.29 reflecting a late medieval trend of adapting earlier material to new contexts. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-195-7 (paperback), 978-1-58044-459-0 (PDF) © 2013

Confessio Amantis

John Gower
Edited by Russell A. Peck, with Latin translations by Andrew Galloway

Though never quite matching the popularity and scholarly acclaim of his friend and contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer, the prolific English poet John Gower produced an impressive body of poetry in Anglo-Norman French, Latin, and Middle English and has earned his reputation as one of the great English poets of the fourteenth century. His Confessio Amantis, or “The Lover’s Confession,” ranks among the Middle English texts most frequently copied before the advent of the printing press. The poem both follows and builds upon the model of fourteenth-century Christian confessions by shaping the lover’s account into a frame narrative for a collection of shorter poetic tales, pairing courtly-love reinterpretations of the seven deadly sins with moralizing narratives drawn from biblical, classical, and medieval sources. The first book of this three-volume edition presents the Prologue and Books 1 and 8 of Gower’s poem, including translations of Latin components, alongside a comprehensive bibliography, glosses, and explanatory notes. Volume 2 of this three-volume edition presents Books 2, 3 and 4 of Gower’s poem, including translations of Latin components, alongside a comprehensive bibliography, glosses, and explanatory notes. Volume 3 of this three-volume edition presents Books 5, 6 and 7, including translations of Latin components, alongside a comprehensive bibliography, glosses, and explanatory notes. 

Volume 1, Second Edition

ISBN 978-1-58044-102-5 (paperback),  978-1-58044-433-0 (PDF) © 2006

Volume 2, Second Edition

ISBN 978-1-58044-179-7 (paperback),  978-1-58044-455-2 (PDF) © 2013

Volume 3

ISBN 1-58044-092-4 (paperback),  978-1-58044-431-6 (PDF) © 2004

Ten Bourdes

Edited by Melissa M. Furrow

Adopting a fourteenth-century Middle English word referring to an amusing story or incident, Ten Bourdes collects ten humorous poems from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for enjoyment and study by a broader readership. Though not as well-attested or well-established as their French counterparts, the bawdy and often violent fabliaux of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the poems presented here demonstrate common features definitive of a potential genre: signaled demands for laughter from the audience, punishment for characters who exploit the innocent, and morality’s triumph over the wicked. In these corrective comedies, wandering spouses are returned to their marriages, adulterers punished, cruel stepmothers humiliated, victims defended, hospitality repaid, and virtue rewarded. This updated edition of Furrow’s poems, published earlier in Ten Fifteenth-Century Comic Poems, is designed specifically for students, pairing marginal glosses and a comprehensive Middle English glossary with extensive explanatory notes, textual notes, and contextual introductions for each work. 

ISBN 978-1-588044-192-6 (paperback), 9781580444583 (PDF) © 2013

Croxton Play of the Sacrament

Edited by John T. Sebastian

Despite its bloody and polemical content—or perhaps because of it—the late fifteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament continues to fascinate and shock. Its central scene dramatizes physical abuse of the Host, the bread believed to become Christ’s body when consecrated during Mass, by non-Christians mocking the doctrine of transubstantiation. However, because this Middle English play depicts these torturers as Syrian Jews who worship the Muslim prophet Muhammad, and because it was composed two centuries after England expelled its Jewish inhabitants in 1290, these figures likely served to reinforce Christian orthodoxy amid anxieties over transubstantiation rather than respond to contemporary Jewish practices. The Host’s miraculous responses to this abuse, including healing a dismembered hand and causing an oven to explode in the shape of the Christ Child, infuse the play with spectacle and reflect its East Anglian theatrical preferences for human, visible, and embodied forms of Christian devotion. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-181-0 (paperback), 978-1-58044-457-6 (PDF) © 2012

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 Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf (Dialogus Salomonis et Marcolfi) was a medieval literary bestseller; mentions of the poem begin as early as 1000 and are widespread by the thirteenth century, and various versions dated between 1410 and 1550 survive in some twenty-seven manuscripts, forty-nine early printed editions, and various translations into vernacular languages. Comprising five verbal contests incorporating distinct rhetorical forms and a variety of eclectic materials such as proverbs, riddles, and biblical wisdom literature, this lively and entertaining dialogue pits the wise Old Testament king Solomon, representing clerical authority, against the foulmouthed but quick-witted peasant Marcolf, representing commoners’ rustic wisdom, improvisational wit, and earthy, subversive humor. This edition juxtaposes two texts of the poem: a Latin version printed c. 1488 and a Middle English translation printed in 1492, supplemented by extensive glosses, explanatory and textual notes, and exchanges omitted from the proverb contest by previous abridged printed versions.

ISBN 978-1-58044-180-3 (paperback), 978-1-58044-456-9 (PDF) © 2012

Prik of Conscience

Edited by James H. Morey

Once attributed to the renowned English mystic Richard Rolle, the fourteenth-century Prik of Conscience appears in 130 separate medieval manuscripts—more than any other Middle English poem. This devotional and didactic work presents a penitential program that guides readers in the act of confession by emphasizing the psychosomatic qualities of this experience, beginning with contritio cordis—the contrition of the heart—from which the poem takes its title. In exploring the relationship of humanity to divinity, the poem’s erudite author considers scientific, geographic, and historical subjects as well as biblical and theological matters, all construed as sources of knowledge for understanding the Creator through Creation. In the first modern edition of the poem since 1863, James H. Morey reproduces the Prik of Conscience in its original northern dialect of Middle English alongside extensive notes and glosses, provided to support students, instructors, and researchers in their investigations of this influential work. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-172-8 (paperback), 978-1-58044-454-5 (PDF) © 2012

The York Corpus Christi Plays

Edited by Clifford Davidson

Medieval Christians observed the feast of Corpus Christi through not only solemn processions with the consecrated Host, but also pageants and plays depicting central moments from salvation history. These vernacular-language dramas inspired medieval audiences toward greater devotion and encouraged emotional participation in such events as the Creation of Adam and Eve, the Nativity, and the Crucifixion. This edition’s forty-seven plays, preserved exclusively in the fifteenth-century manuscript known as London, British Library, MS Add. 35290, form the only complete play cycle verifiably performed as part of the feast of Corpus Christi at a specific location in England. Performed by members of York’s craft and mercantile guilds on mobile wagon stages, these plays were an annual tradition observed continuously from the fourteenth century until their suppression amid anti-Catholic sentiment in 1569. Not performed again until the twentieth century, the York Corpus Christi Plays represent a unique, remarkable survival of Middle English drama. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-162-9 (paperback), 978-1-58044-453-8 (PDF) © 2011

The Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament

Edited and translated by Michael Livingston

Written, according to its anonymous poet, to motivate “sympyll men” toward a greater interest in Scripture, The Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament presents a deft, animated late-fourteenth-century translation and expansion of Peter Comestor’s twelfth-century Historia Scholastica, the single most authorized paraphrase of the Bible for much of the Middle Ages. However, to judge the Paraphrase a mere paraphrase is to undervalue its complexity and importance; it masterfully interweaves material from numerous sources, including an Old French metrical paraphrase, the Northumbrian Middle English poem Cursor Mundi, and several other Middle English texts. In a way few other texts can claim, the Paraphrase engages a breadth of core cultural issues definitive of late medieval England: vernacular translations of the Bible, the Bible’s influence upon medieval romance and vice versa, a trend toward realism in conceptions of individual and social circumstances, cultural heterogeneity, and greater sympathy toward women and Jews.

ISBN 978-1-58044-150-6 (paperback), 978-1-58044-451-4 (PDF) © 2011

The French Balades

John Gower
Edited and translated by R.F. Yeager

John Gower is distinct among medieval English poets in composing extensively in all three of late medieval England’s major languages: Middle English, Latin, and Anglo-Norman French. Moreover, Gower is unique in Western medieval poetry and music as the only native Englishman proven to have composed Anglo-French poems in the “fixed forms” genres of the balade, rondeau, and virelai, the verse forms in France most commonly set to music between the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. This edition presents both sets of Gower’s late fourteenth-century balades in their original Anglo-French verse alongside modern English translations: Traitié selonc les auctours pour essampler les amantz marietz, or “Treatise Following the Authorities as an Example for Married Lovers,” a staunch defense of married love comprising eighteen balades in rhyme royal; and his Cinkante Balades, or “Fifty Balades,” Gower’s title for a sequence of fifty-four balades addressing themes of loyalty, temptation, separation, and reconciliation in love. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-155-1 (paperback),  978-1-58044-452-1 (PDF) © 2011

The Complete Works

Robert Henryson
Edited by David J. Parkinson

Though definitive information about the fifteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson remains elusive, the quality of the poetry that bears his name is self-evident: consistently achieving what David J. Parkinson describes as “a rhetorical ideal of brevity replete with significance,” these Middle Scots works possess an interpretive richness, knowledge of classical and medieval authorities, and command of multilingual vocabulary befitting Henryson’s title of “master.” Composed amid Middle Scots’s consolidation into Scotland’s official language in the late Middle Ages, Henryson’s poetry reflects in language and theme this pivotal moment in Scottish history. This edition collects all works attributed to Henryson, including his adaptations and interpretations of Aesop’s Fables; his The Testament of Cresseid, an epilogue to Geoffrey Chaucer’sTroilus and Criseyde; Orpheus and Eurydice; and twelve shorter poems grouped by the available evidence for their attribution to Henryson, all accompanied by glosses, explanatory and textual notes, and a guide to Henryson’s language. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-139-1 (paperback),  978-1-58044-447-7 (PDF) © 2010

The Castle of Perseverance

Edited by David N. Klausner

The surviving Middle English morality plays comprise five texts dating from the late fourteenth to early sixteenth centuries, united by a shared interest in allegorizing the life of man and his struggle against sin. Of these five plays, the fifteenth-century Macro Manuscript (Folger Shakespeare Library MS. V.a.354) preserves three, including the only surviving copy of The Castle of Perseverance. The most comprehensive of these English morality plays,The Castle depicts the entire human experience, starting before Mankind’s birth and ending with his salvation after death, and features an unusually large cast of thirty-three players in diverse allegorical roles. It is also unique among medieval English plays in providing a detailed stage plan in the same manuscript, including stage directions and intended physical layouts for stage locations. David Klausner’s edition presents this remarkable play in its original alliterative verse and bob-and-wheel stanza format, along with extensive glosses and notes. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-149-0 (paperback),  978-1-58044-450-7 (PDF) © 2010

Mankind

Edited by Kathleen M. Ashley and Gerard NeCastro

One of the most interactive and theatrically sophisticated early English plays, the fifteenth-century Middle English morality play Mankind balances and complicates a conventional allegory of vice and virtue with a thematic emphasis on language. Associated with Lent and the pre-Lenten season of Carnival, it dramatizes a verbal battle waged for Mankind’s soul: it pits the stately, Latinate preaching of Mercy, who embodies Lent’s emphasis on penitence, confession, and piety, against the rhetorical tricks of the demon Titivillus and jokes, derision, and vulgarity from the four vices of worldly temptation, representing carnival themes of revelry, trickery, and social upheaval. Each side addresses the audience throughout the play, implicating them in their machinations for or against Mankind. Engaging with the late-medieval religious conflict between English-language Lollardy and a Catholic orthodoxy built on Latinate authority, Mankind demands that its audience distinguishes between virtuous and vicious uses of language, whether in Latin or English. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-140-7 (paperback),  978-1-58044-448-4 (PDF) © 2010

Mummings and Entertainments

John Lydgate
Edited by Claire Sponsler

John Lydgate, the Benedictine monk of Bury, was a prolific fifteenth-century poet. Though Lydgate is known for his longer literary works, this edition compiles fifteen of his Middle English mummings, folk dramas typically performed at festivals, holy days, and royal or civic ceremonies. They may include music, spoken word, costuming, and gesture or action to accompany occasions like pageants, royal processions, and pictorial representations. For example, Soteltes at the Coronation Banquet of Henry VI offers verses recited during themed subtleties (culinary conceits made of confectionary) at the titular king’s inaugural feast while The Legend of St. George dramatizes the eponymous hero to honor the building of a guild hall for London armorers. Some embrace a comic or ludic tone, inviting audience participation, while others suggest proper behavior through Classical and Biblical exempla. Written from the late 1420s to the early 1430s in Lydgate’s “aureate” style, these mummings provide rare insight into how performances were commissioned, created, and disseminated. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-148-3 (paperback),  978-1-58044-449-1 (PDF) © 2010

Two Moral Interludes: The Pride of Life and Wisdom

Edited by David N. Klausner

Set within the morality play tradition—in which allegorized man struggles against sin through temptation, fall, and redemption—this edition presents two of the Middle English dramas. The fragmentary Pride of Life dates from the late fourteenth century, the oldest of the five English morality plays (the others are The Castle of Perseverance, Mankind, and Everyman). It dramatizes a prideful King’s disdain of his wise counselors as he battles with Death, and is unique for addressing only one of the seven deadly sins. The fifteenth-century Wisdom portrays Anima (an allegory for the human soul) in her marriage to Wisdom (an avatar of Christ), and Lucifer’s subsequent attempts to corrupt Anima and her attendants, the five senses and three mental faculties. David Klausner’s edition supplements both plays with glosses, annotation, historical context, textual provenance, and dramaturgical discussions of costuming and staging. An appendix details the music that could have accompanied the plays in live performance.

ISBN 978-1-58044-134-6 (paperback), 978-1-58044-446-0 (PDF)© 2009

Poems and Carols (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 302)

John the Blind Audelay
Edited by Susanna Fein

Composed from 1425–1431, MS Douce 32 is otherwise known as the Audelay manuscript after its author John the Blind Audelay, a chaplain who served Lord Richard Lestrange in Shropshire. Nearly all of what is known of Audelay comes from this Middle English witness, which is unusually insistent in naming its author. Audelay repeatedly describes himself as “deaf, sick, and blind,” and thus reliant on his two scribes, probably monks at Haughmond Abbey. This codex edition, the first to present Audeley’s complete corpus, is organized into four sections: a miscellany of texts titled The Counsel of Conscience which thematizes the practice of penance; Salutations, which directs worship to holy women; Carols, which impart orthodox doctrine in Audelay’s distinctive seven-line stanza; and the Meditative Close, which confronts mankind’s mortality. Included are well-known titles like Solomon and Marcolf, the carol Dread of Death, and excerpts from Richard Rolle’s Form of Living.

ISBN 978-1-58044-131-5 (paperback),  978-1-58044-444-6 (PDF) © 2009

The Game and Playe of the Chesse

William Caxton
Edited by Jenny Adams

First printed in 1474, the English printer William Caxton’s The Game and Playe of the Chesse says little about the game of chess, despite its title. Instead, both Caxton’s Middle English translation and its Latin source, a thirteenth-century treatise by the Dominican friar Jacobus de Cessolis, use chess as an allegory for a political community whose citizens serve the common good. Assigning each chess piece to a real-world counterpart and a corresponding moral code, this example of the speculum regis, or “mirror for a prince,” genre envisions a kingdom not bound together by kinship, but organized by professional ties and governed by moral law. Moral exempla and maxims drawn from classical sources, which illustrate these principles while engaging the reader, comprise the bulk of the work until its final chapter finally introduces the playe of chess, using rules largely unchanged since the game’s introduction to Europe in the tenth century. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-130-8 (paperback), 978-1-58044-443-9 (PDF) © 2009

Chaucer and the Poems of "Ch"

Edited by James I. Wimsatt, Revised Edition

Although Chaucer is now best known for his English verse, he is believed to have composed a number of works in French early in his career. James Wimsatt proposes the fifteen lyrics in University of Pennsylvania MS 15, headed by the initials “Ch,” are likely by Chaucer. Composed around 1360, these French love lyrics employ three formes fixes song forms, most frequently the three-part balade, the five-stanza chanson royal, and the eight-line rondel. They feature highly conventional paeans, prayers, complaints, and advice about courtly love, including ample exempla from Classical, Biblical, and medieval romance sources. The “Ch” poet’s concentrated use of personification, striking extended metaphors, and elegant integration of the refrain comprise, according to Wimsatt, particularly Chaucerian touches. This edition presents the “Ch” poet’s lyrics in facing-page translation, and appendices offer the full contents of the Penn manuscript, related works, and an essay identifying Penn’s likely compiler as Oton de Granson, Chaucer’s French contemporary and fellow poet.

ISBN 978-1-58044-132-2 (paperback),  978-1-58044-445-3 (PDF) © 2009

Codex Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse

Edited by George Shuffelton

Among the surviving Middle English manuscripts produced in the fifteenth century, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61 stands out from a body of literary production otherwise dominated by professional scribes in London and other urban centers. The work of a lone scribe drawing on regional networks of literary circulation in the northern Midlands and Yorkshire, Codex Ashmole 61 belongs to a rising trend of “amateur productions” by individuals and families among the gentry and urban merchant classes in this period. Although this manuscript’s contents have been previously published in scattered and hard-to-find collections, the present edition by George Shuffelton collects these texts and extensive notes in one comprehensive volume. Gathering together a wide range of material including popular romances, saints’ lives, moral exempla, comic tales, and religious literature, Codex Ashmole 61 offers rare and valuable insights into the devotional habits, cultural values, and popular tastes of late medieval England.

ISBN 978-1-58044-129-2 (paperback),  978-1-58044-442-2 (PDF) © 2008

The Northern Homily Cycle

Edited by Anne B. Thompson

Probably composed from 1295-1306 by an unnamed Augustinian canon, the Northern Homily Cycle is one of the earliest sermon cycles written in the vernacular to help lay parishioners make sense of the Latin Gospel readings that accompanied every Sunday mass. Each sermon begins with a Latin rubric from the Gospel lesson and a Middle English paraphrase, followed by a related homily (or lesson) drawn from patristic exegesis, and an illustrative exemplum—with all the English versified in rhyme. Recurring themes include pity for the poor, anger at economic inequality, and condemnation of corrupt clergy. The cycle’s textual sources, twenty surviving manuscripts in three distinct recensions, attests to its enduring popularity. This volume presents selections from the first recension, edited from two of the earliest manuscripts whose Yorkshire dialect approximates the original text’s northern language. Anne Thompson’s introduction and notes provide historical context, an overview of the liturgical calendar, and sources for individual sermons.

ISBN 978-1-58044-126-1 (paperback),  978-1-58044-441-5 (PDF) © 2008

Amis and Amiloun, Robert of Cisyle, and Sir Amadace

Edited by Edward E. Foster, Second Edition

This edition brings together three anonymous Middle English romances, each of which offers a morally ambiguous exemplum. The fourteenth-century Amis and Amiloun present two friends, physically identical, who pledge eternal loyalty to each other, but their vow is challenged by an evil steward and their own worldly temptations. The fifteenth-century Robert of Cisyle introduces the eponymous king of Sicily, who suffers from such excessive pride that he denies the truth of Scripture and is divinely punished, stripped of his kingship while an angel takes his form and place; the hagiographic romance follows his humbling and eventual redemption. The fifteenth-century Sir Amadace follows the adventures of the titular spendthrift knight, who must leave his kingdom to avoid his debtors; his later generosity to a dead but unburied knight eventually helps him overcome adversity and regain his wealth. These texts explore sometimes contradictory demands of chivalry, courtly love, and Christianity, and thus raise questions about the complex morality of knighthood. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-125-4 (paperback), 978-1-58044-440-8 (PDF) © 2007

The Temple of Glas

John Lydgate
Edited by J. Allan Mitchell

Thought to be written in the first quarter of the fifteenth century, when the Benedictine monk and poet John Lydgate had relative freedom from his monastic duties, the Middle English Temple of Glas takes the form of a dream vision written for a dedicated, mystery-loving audience. The poem’s deceptively simple plot follows a woman’s desires for a man she cannot have and Venus’s advice to wait until an obstacle is removed before the couple can consummate their love. The unclear nature of the obstacle is the basis for much literary debate regarding the freedoms of women during that time. The poem is thought to be inspired by Chaucer’s House of Fame and features some Chaucerian influence, although Lydgate builds upon Chaucerian imagery to create a narrative with its own merit and novelty. A widely popular poem, The Temple of Glas exemplified the beginning of Lydgate’s lengthy literary career.

ISBN 978-1-58044-117-9 (paperback),  978-1-58044-439-2 (PDF) © 2007

The Book of John Mandeville

Edited by Tamarah Kohanski and C. David Benson

The Book of John Mandeville comprises a fourteenth-century bestseller of the Middle Ages, providing European readers with exoticized information regarding Constantinople, China, and the religious practices of Eastern Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. Despite the fact that its supposed author, Sir John Mandeville, is a fictional construct, hundreds of manuscript copies of the work still exist, testifying to its runaway popularity. Distributed in the original French as well as English and Latin, The Book of John Mandeville has had an outsized and enduring influence on later European orientalism, being consulted often by prominent figures like Christopher Columbus and Sir Walter Raleigh. This edition, based on British Library MS Royal 17 C., introduces readers to one of the most popular Middle English versions of the story, in a manner accessible to readers both new and familiar with medieval travel narratives. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-113-1 (paperback),  9781580444378 (PDF) © 2007

The N-Town Plays

Edited by Douglas Sugano with assistance by Victor I. Scherb

Unlike many famous medieval English drama cycles such as the York and Chester Plays, the late fifteenth-century N-Town Plays are neither associated with a specific town nor offer any concrete information about who compiled them, where, why, or for whom. They instead owe their name to an introductory template intended for announcing future performances on “a Sunday next… / At six of the belle…/ In N. town.” Although these biblical plays were likely never performed as a complete sequence from Creation to Doomsday, substantial textual evidence indicates that individual plays were performed apart from the rest of the compilation. The present edition highlights not only the N-Town Plays’ value for studying regional collaboration in drama production across East Anglia, but also their uniqueness within medieval English drama as an evolving, eclectic compilation integrating outside plays into an existing play cycle, particularly material dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

ISBN 978-1-58044-116-2 (paperback), 978-1-58044-438-5 (PDF) © 2007

Everyman and Its Dutch Original, Elckerlijc

Edited by Clifford Davidson, Martin W. Walsh and Ton J. Broos

Students of medieval English will be familiar with the Middle English version of Everyman, a staple of medieval drama courses. However, it is a lesser known fact that Everyman is a translation and adaptation of Middle Dutch Elckerlijc, a work regarded in the Low Countries as an important part of Dutch literary history. Everyman and Elckerlijc follow a young man—representative of humankind— through his pilgrimage of life; he is confronted by Death and must learn the art of dying. The timeless themes of death and spiritual life would have been of interest during the sixteenth century when the urban mortality rate exceeded the birth rate. Though Everyman and Elckerlijc are usually considered morality plays, editors Davidson, Walsh, and Broos reinterpret both as allegorical plays.This edition brings together the fifteenth-century Middle Dutch drama, its Middle English adaptation, and a modern English translation to document the play’s evolution.

ISBN 978-1-58044-106-3 (paperback), 978-1-58044-435-4 (PDF) © 2007

The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers

Edited by John William Sutton

Perhaps the first book ever printed in England (by William Caxton on November 18, 1477), The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers compiles lore collected from biblical, classical, and legendary philosophers, who present a series of proverbs to a receptive audience. Each sage is introduced with a biographical story before offering his wisdom. Written in the 1450s, this Middle English prose compendium emerged during a flourishing of wisdom literature in the second half of the fifteenth century. Its ultimate source was Egyptian emir Abu’l Wefa Mubeschschir ben Fatik’s eleventh-century Arabic Mokhtar el-hikam wa-mahasin al-kalim (Compendium of Maxims and Aphorisms), which traveled across many lands and languages; the most immediate source for our English version was Guillaume de Tignonville’s French Les Dits Moraulx des Philosophes. While other English adaptations are more famous—namely those by Stephen Scrope and Anthony Woodville—this anonymous adaptation provides readers with the most accurate and idiomatic English translation, according to John Sutton.

ISBN 978-1-58044-105-6 (paperback),  978-1-58044-405-7 (PDF) © 2006

Four Middle English Romances: Sir Isumbras, Octavian, Sir Eglamour of Artois, Sir Tryamour, Second Edition

Edited by Harriet Hudson

This volume highlights essential examples of Middle English family romance, which typically involves aristocratic families sundered and reunited by a combination of valor, divine favor, and happy chance. Sir Isumbras develops the classic riches-to-rags-to-riches trope, while its counterparts—Octavian, Sir Eglamour of Artois, and Sir Tryamour—all present some variant on the problematic trope of the calumniated queen. Composed in northeast Midlands of England between 1325 and 1375, these romances all exhibit tail-rhyme verse form, at the height of its popularity. This edition provides readers with a helpful introduction to the flowering of unique romances in fourteenth-century England since—with the lone exception of Octavian—these poems each find their origin in England. As a targeted survey of a romance sub-genre, Four Middle English Romances immerses readers in the development of Middle English romance during the middle of the fourteenth century. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-111-7 (paperback),  978-1-58044-436-1 (PDF) © 2006

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

These five texts by anonymous authors comprise a rich genre introduction to Middle English romance. Covering several texts surviving from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, Sentimental and Humorous Romances presents readers with tales both widely read and rare in their circulation, ranging from stories of Charlemagne’s ancestors to fringe Arthuriana, each with its own spin on the core theme of an unlikely love interest. Selections include a quintessential example of medieval European orientalism in Floris and Blancheflour, regional conflict in Sir Degrevant, the secrecy-driven lovers’ tale of The Squire of Low Degree, and two comic burlesques set at a tournament feast. This edition is well-suited to use by newcomers to Middle English romance, while providing more familiar readers with striking examples of the genre’s diverse thematic interests.

ISBN 978-1-58044-103-2 (paperback), 978-1-58044-434-7 (PDF) © 2006

The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Selection

Edited by Kathleen Forni

This edition samples from Chaucerian apocrypha, works wrongly attributed to, inspired by, or associated with Geoffery Chaucer, the father of English poetry. These fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English texts reflect the extent of Chaucer’s “brand name” appeal. The sixteen poems, united by courtly themes, are organized by Kathleen Forni into four sections. The Court of Love, an allegorical dream-vision, follows Philogenet who sues for the favor of Rosiall. Literature of Courtly Love includes John Lydgate’s Valentine poem Floure of Curtesye and The Lovers’ Mass, a satire that eroticizes Latin liturgy. The Antifeminist Tradition explores a misogynistic strain in Chaucerian poetry, including parodic catalogs of a woman’s faults rather than her charms. Good Counsel, Wisdom, and Advice depicts a preoccupation with traditional ethics and political guidance; a highlight is Scogan’s Moral Balade, which expands on Boethian ideas from Chaucer’s Gentillesse that nobility stems from one’s character, not birth. Forni brings to light a literary corpus which has long suffered critical neglect.

ISBN 1-58044-096-7 (paperback), 978-1-58044-399-9 (PDF)© 2005

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

Written in the last twenty years of John Gower’s career, these Latin poems—designated “minor” due to their relatively short length—are rescued from critical neglect by R. F. Yeager. The poems crystallize around the political turbulence of 1399-1400 when Henry Bolingbroke (later Henry IV) usurped Richard II’s throne, and shed light on Gower’s shifting allegiances, advice to princes, and famously moral principles on self-rule. Ranging from estates satire to prophecy, Gower’s lyrics include the “laureate group,” three poems written in support of Henry’s coronation, and Carmen super multiplici viciorum pestilencia (A Poem on the Manifold Plague of Vices), which depict sins plaguing the body politic. Facing-page translations and extensive notes allow readers to witness Gower’s experimentation with meter and rhyme. The volume finishes with Gower’s contemporary Middle English poem, In Praise of Peace. Michael Livingston calls it a “poetic proof,” a carefully constructed argument in which Gower offers advice to the new king on the virtues of peacekeeping. 

ISBN 1-58044-097-4 (paperback), 978-1-58044-432-3 (PDF) © 2005

The Kingis Quair and Other Prison Poems

Edited by Linne R. Mooney and Mary-Jo Arn

Prison poems, texts written in conditions of physical captivity or on the subject of imprisonment, flourished in the fifteenth century. This edition compiles five such poems, all of which draw on Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, the sixth-century philosophical treatise that preached against fickle Fortune and for the constancy of God. James I of Scotland and Charles D’Orleans—both royalty captured by political rivals—follow a Boethian trajectory in their poems (the Older Scots Kingis Quair and Middle English Fortunes Stabilnes, respectively), though they situate themselves as prisoners to love. George Ashby, a government clerk imprisoned for an unknown reason, pleads in his Complaint of a Prisoner in the Fleet 1463 for patience and purification of the soul against the vicissitudes of Fortune. Taken together, these poems consider prison not only as a physical condition but also as a literary trope that allows for both complaint and empowerment, providing avenues for escape through the pursuit of love, religious faith, or intellectual contemplation.

ISBN 978-1-58044-093-6 (paperback), 978-1-58044-403-3 (PDF)© 2005

Saints' Lives in Middle English Collections

Edited by E. Gordon Whatley, with Anne B. Thompson and Robert K. Upchurch

This collection brings together a dozen, mostly anonymous Middle English hagiographies about nine saints, dating from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. The edition is organized into seven parts, in which saints represent an era of Christian history: Andrew denotes the missionary apostles of the first century; the soldier George depicts a period of martyrdom and persecution; church father Jerome portrays the late antique age of patristic learning; the penitent prostitute Thais illustrates the desert hermits; abbot Benedict and the virgin Scholastica epitomize the monastic culture of the early Middle Ages; the bishop and missionary Austin exemplifies the establishment of national churches; and the mendicant Francis embodies a late-medieval evangelical revival of apostolic poverty. The only exception is the fictional Julian the Hospitaller. Most of these vernacular texts are excerpted from the popular South English Legendary, though some circulated independently, and they cover an impressive breadth of English dialects, from Older Scots and Anglo-Irish to London and the Midlands.

ISBN 978-1-58044-089-9 (paperback), 978-1-58044-407-1 © 2004

Siege of Jerusalem

Edited by Michael Livingston

The Siege of Jerusalem has long confounded readers with its graphic depictions of violence and the relish with which it describes the suffering of Jewish people. Despite the moral and emotional challenges this text presents, its participation in the longstanding “Vengeance of Our Lord” tradition, discussed throughout medieval Christendom and incorporating a combination of legend, miracle, historiography, and chivalric romance, provides modern readers with a wider window into this material’s reception and reuse in medieval England. This Middle English alliterative poem, written anonymously sometime in the fourteenth century, chronicles the Siege of Jerusalem in the year 70 C.E., beginning with the crucifixion of Jesus and culminating in the Romans’ destruction of the Second Temple, intended to symbolize the vengeance of Jesus. Michael Livingston’s edition and notes bring out a new dimension of this poem, exploring the ways in which it realizes, rather than glorifies, the brutalities of war.

ISBN 978-1-58044-090-5 (paperback), 978-1-58044-430-9 (PDF) © 2004

The Complete Works

William Dunbar
Edited by John Conlee

A Middle Scots poet or “Makar,” William Dunbar’s verses come to us from the turn of the sixteenth century. A talented lyricist and social critic, the cleric Dunbar possessed close associations to the court of James IV of Scotland, a fact which imbues his poetry with the vibrant color of the northern court. This volume covers Dunbar’s eighty-four still extant poems, covering poetic approaches ranging from courtly to comic to devotional to political, arranged thematically with notes for the reader unfamiliar to Middle Scots poetry. As the first edition of Dunbar’s work published in the twenty-first century, this volume provides readers new to Scots poetry with Dunbar’s complete corpus, making it a valuable first step into the world of satire, courtly lyrics, financial struggle, and moral meditation that characterized the court of James IV. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-086-8 (paperback), 978-1-58044-396-8 (PDF) © 2004

Chaucerian Dream Visions and Complaints

Edited by Dana M. Symons

This edition anthologizes four fifteenth-century Middle English poems—three of which were previously attributed to Chaucer—that use dream-vision conventions to explore the theme of romantic love. Each features an unhappy narrator who secretly spies on the speech of lovers to inform his assessment on love. John Clanvowe’s Boke of Cupide relates a love debate between two birds, a nightingale and a cuckoo. John Lydgate’s Complaynte of a Lovers Lyfe features a knight complaining about the failures of his romantic life. The anonymous, Scotticized Quare of Jelusy follows a female newlywed, who rants about the influence of Jealousy on her husband. La Belle Dame Sans Mercy, Richard Roos’ English translation of Alain Chartier’s French poem of the same name, observes a debate between two lovers. Dana Symons discusses the development of the English love vision both within and independent of Chaucerian reception, and argues for decentering the dominant Chaucerian aesthetic in evaluating the courtly poems’ literary merit.

ISBN 978-1-58044-087-5 (paperback), 978-1-58044-406-4 (PDF) © 2004

Stanzaic Guy of Warwick

Edited by Alison Wiggins

Preserved exclusively in the fourteenth-century Auchinleck Manuscript, the Stanzaic Guy of Warwick represents part of a piecemeal trilogy of Middle English romances that tell of the pious Guy of Warwick, one of the most celebrated national heroes of medieval England. Adapting one third of the grand thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman romance Gui de Warewic, the Stanzaic Guy of Warwick begins with Guy’s marriage to his beloved Felice, the earl of Warwick’s daughter and the original inspiration for the conquests in continental Europe that established him as a paragon of knighthood. The festivities are barely over when remorse strikes Guy for neglecting God while pursuing earthly glory, and he departs in disguise on a series of penitential pilgrimages overseas before returning to Warwick to live as a solitary hermit. Combining travel literature, pilgrimage, and chivalric romance, the Stanzaic Guy of Warwick helped cement its pilgrim-knight hero’s status as a late medieval cultural icon.

ISBN 978-1-58044-088-2 (paperback), 978-1-58044-429-3 (PDF) © 2004

Three Purgatory Poems: The Gast of Guy, Sir Owain, The Vision of Tundale

Edited by Edward E. Foster

The idea of Purgatory, codified by Aquinas’ doctrine of the Communion of Saints, dictates that human souls not directly consigned into Heaven or Hell experience a period of purification that allows for salvation; moreover, the living can offer suffrages (prayers, masses, and almsgiving) that assist the striving soul. This edition’s three fourteenth-century Middle English poems dramatize purgatorial visions. The ghost story The Gast of Gy describes the titular spirit’s haunting of his wife and subsequent conversation with a Dominican prior, emphasizing suffrages. Sir Owain and the Vision of Tundale, influenced by the Irish legend of St. Patrick’s purgatory, both follow their protagonists’ penitential journeys through Purgatory, where they witness and temporarily suffer torments for their sins, before reaching the Earthly Paradise and returning to lives of virtue. But where Owain volunteers for pilgrimage, Tundale commits mortal sins before “death.” Edward Foster, in discussing theological developments and founding texts, demonstrates how Purgatory offered medieval Christians both horror and hope.

ISBN 978-1-58044-082-0 (paperback), 978-1-58044-400-2 (PDF) © 2004

Concordia: The Reconciliation of Richard II with London

Richard Maidstone
Edited by David R. Carlson, with a verse translation by A.G. Rigg

Richard Maidstone, Carmelite friar and anti-Lollard activist, devoted his life to upholding orthodoxy. His Anglo-Latin Concordia, written in the last decade of the fourteenth century, details King Richard II’s royal entry into London, a spectacular event that officially ended his conflict with the city’s merchant-oligarchs. Richard had long abused his royal prerogative to extort vast sums of money from his subjects. Though violence erupted in protest, it concluded in the king’s 1392 “reconciliation” with London. Maidstone documents Richard’s procession, the lavish gifts presented, the speeches given in praise, culminating in his re-enthronement at Westminster palace. David Carlson focuses on the poem’s propagandistic features, highlighting Maidstone’s royalist agenda, his belief in using fear tactics to exercise control, and his “peculiarly Ricardian notion of ‘peace’ in the form of submission to royal authority,” no matter how cruel or arbitrary it might be. This is the first edition since the nineteenth century and offers a facing-page English translation from A.G. Rigg.

ISBN 978-1-58044-080-6 (paperback), 978-1-58044-428-6 (PDF) © 2003

The Wallace: Selections

Edited by Anne McKim

One of the very first books printed in Scotland, The Wallace is an imaginative verse chronicle, composed c. 1471-79, eulogizing the celebrated Scottish national hero William Wallace. He was a military leader during the Scottish Wars of Independence, and often portrayed as a national liberator. The Wallace follows the eponymous hero’s life and military career, and is structured around three “rescues” of Scotland from English domination. While it unsparingly depicts the brutality of war, the poem also includes humorous episodes, often at the expense of the English. Written in Older Scots by blind Hary, whose identity remains an enigma, The Wallace draws inspiration from John Barbour’s The Bruce (1375), a biography of the equally famous Scottish king Robert the Bruce. Other influences include Chaucerian works, Arthurian legend, chivalric romance, and folklore. Anne McKim’s edition provides key selections from the text, summaries of omitted sections, and extensive annotation.

ISBN 978-1-58044-076-9 (paperback),  978-1-58044-402-6 (PDF) © 2003

Middle English Legends of Women Saints

Edited by Sherry L. Reames, with the assistance of Martha G. Blalock and Wendy R. Larson

This collection of Middle English hagiographies presents readers with women saints’ lives in multiple retellings from the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Frideswide of Oxford was the Anglo-Saxon abbess of a well-endowed monastery who is presented as a victim of male persecution. Mary Magdalen’s story touches upon feminine authority while also offering three paradigms of sanctity—the repentant sinner, apostle, and contemplative—which could be emulated by both men and women. The virgin martyr legends of Margaret of Antioch, Christina of Tyre, and Katherine of Alexandria present these women as challengers to political tyrants. Finally, Anne’s vita popularized a new type of sanctity of holy motherhood that was not miraculously virginal but biologically and maritally typical. Sherry Reames introduces readers to relatively obscure female-centered hagiographies, the majority of which have never before been published or have not been edited since the nineteenth century. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-046-2 (paperback),  978-1-58044-422-4 (PDF) © 2003

The Trials and Joys of Marriage

Edited by Eve Salisbury

This edition collects twenty-four disparate Middle English texts, published between the late-thirteenth and early-sixteenth centuries, which all center around the theme of marriage. Eve Salisbury organizes them into three sections: satire and fabliaux, didactic prose and exempla, and secular lyrics. While a fabliau like Dame Sirith presents traditionally lusty lovers aided by trickery, others like A Talk of Ten Wives on Their Husbands’ Ware—in which a group of married women complain about their husbands’ lack of sexual skill—suggest more subversive viewpoints. Didactic texts enshrine orthodox, sometimes explicitly misogynist, attitudes about marriage; these include excerpts from the popular Gesta Romanorum, a Wycliffite sermon, and treatises on educating children. Secular lyrics move into the realm of comic and carnivalesque song, where conventional stereotypes of women and men could be overturned without threatening the status quo. Proto-feminist ideals such as consent between spouses, the value of domestic labor, and female sexuality are all explored throughout.

ISBN 978-1-58044-035-6 (paperback),  978-1-58044-421-7 (PDF) © 2002

Pearl

Edited by Sarah Stanbury

Though there is little evidence that the unknown poet who composed Pearl in the fourteenth century was celebrated in their time, Pearl and the poet’s other alliterative Middle English works—Patience, Cleanness, and the Arthurian masterpiece Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—rival the works of Chaucer and Langland for wit, erudition, and poetic skill. Pearl tells of a man mourning his lost “pearl,” swallowed by the earth before his eyes. Swooning in his grief, he dreams of a “pearl-maiden” just out of reach: his departed two-year-old daughter, now a heavenly queen. Reminding him that she is not lost, she answers his sorrowful questions with calm, occasionally chiding, theology, and though he cannot enter, she grants a glimpse of her heavenly home in New Jerusalem before he wakes. Pearl offers not only a timeless message about loss and acceptance, but also a masterwork of Western Europe’s rich dream vision tradition. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-033-2 (paperback), 978-1-58044-420-0 (PDF) © 2001

The Siege of Thebes

John Lydgate
Edited by Robert R. Edwards

John Lydgate, Benedictine monk and prolific author of Middle English poetry, finished writing The Siege of Thebes in the early 1420s. An apocryphal Canterbury Tale, The Siege is Lydgate’s counterpart to Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale and remains the only extant Middle English retelling of the struggle between Oedipus’s sons. Across its four parts, The Siege unfolds the aftermath of a paternal curse and the conflict between two brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, over their father’s throne. As the follow-up to Lydgate’s Troy Book, The Siege adopts some of the moralizing practices of that earlier text, as well as interrogating issues of poetic authority. It is Lydgate’s most political poem and boasts a lasting influence on Caxton’s printed edition of The Historie of Jason. This edition, based on MS Arundel 119, presents readers with an accessible approach to The Siege of Thebes.

ISBN 978-1-58044-074-5 (paperback), 978-1-58044-427-9 (PDF) © 2001

Ancrene Wisse

Edited by Robert Hasenfratz

The early thirteenth-century devotional guide Ancrene Wisse, or “Anchoresses’ Guide,” is a revision of an earlier work written to instruct three noblewomen enclosed as anchoresses in the West Midlands in their religious devotion; its readership had expanded to more than twenty anchoresses by the time of its revision. Its use of Middle English, uncommon as a medium for serious religious instruction in the thirteenth century, both attests to the state of language training among the laywomen who comprised the text’s intended audience, and reflects its composition within the West Midlands, a region with a strong tradition of English literary culture stretching back to the late Anglo-Saxon period. Ancrene Wisse gives modern readers a window into not only thirteenth-century English literary production, but also an unusual and striking form of medieval Christian devotion that held appeal for noblewomen seeking a pious life in the tradition of desert spirituality and asceticism. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-070-7 (paperback), 978-1-58044-426-2 (PDF) © 2000

The Scale of Perfection

Walter Hilton
Edited by Thomas H. Bestul

Augustinian canon Walter Hilton’s The Scale of Perfection maintains a secure place among the major mystical writings that flourished in fourteenth-century England. Composed between 1380 and 1396, The Scale of Perfection is addressed to a woman who has recently taken her religious vows, and defends Hilton’s orthodox beliefs with strikingly visual imagery. Written over two books of more than 40,000 words each, the titular Scale describes a stairway to heaven which the religious can ascend by following Hilton’s moral advice; his topics range from defining the contemplative life and overcoming the seven deadly sins to reforming the human soul in the divine image of God and opening one’s inner eye. A popular treatise, it circulated in 42 manuscripts, was translated into Latin, and was printed by Wynkyn de Worde. While there have been multiple translations of the Scale, this is the first complete edition of the Middle English text.

ISBN 978-1-58044-069-1 (paperback), 978-1-58044-393-7 (PDF) © 2000

Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Sothsegger

Edited by James M. Dean

This volume brings together two fragmentary Middle English poems, written in the alliterative style of William Langland’s Piers Plowman, that critique the crisis of kingship at the turn of the fourteenth century. Richard the Redeless, a mirror for princes, employs an elaborate beast allegory to describe Richard II’s reign as egregiously lawless, implicitly blaming him for the events of 1399 that ended with his rival, Henry Bolingbroke, usurping his throne. James Dean opines that “no [other] writer … was so critical of Richard.” Mum and the Sothsegger, which translates roughly to Silence (keeping mum) and the Soothsayer (or truth-teller), uses debate poetry to satirize the bureaucratic institutions of Henry IV. The narrator goes on a journey to determine which of the two titular courses of action is best; he discovers that Sothsegger’s pragmatic wisdom wins out over Mum’s spineless sycophancy. Both texts, written in a Midlands dialect, denounce agents of political instability in their hopes for more principled governance. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-068-4 (paperback),  978-1-58044-425-5 (PDF) © 2000

The Life of Saint Katherine

John Capgrave
Edited by Karen A. Winstead

Augustinian friar John Capgrave’s Middle English Life of Saint Katherine is possibly the longest and most intricate Katherine legend written during the Middle Ages. Written in the middle of the fifteenth century, The Life of Saint Katherine is a prime example of hagiography, or writings about the saints. Katherine’s legend follows that of the virgin martyr legend, a popular hagiographical formula, in which she is depicted as the young, learned Christian queen of Alexandria who confronts Emperor Maxentius as he presides over pagan ceremonies in her capital. The legend depicts Katherine’s ability to thwart Maxentius’s brutal series of torments, most notably upon a spiked wheel, until her eventual execution. Capgrave’s Life of Saint Katherine stands apart from other known Katherine narratives for his inclusion of complex social and philosophical issues in an attempt to reach a broad audience, including characters and plot details of interest to women.

ISBN 978-1-58044-053-0 (paperback),  978-1-58044-423-1 (PDF)© 1999

The Regiment of Princes

Thomas Hoccleve
Edited by Charles R. Blyth

Written in 1410–1411 by Thomas Hoccleve, a clerk of the Privy Seal and a prominent poet of his generation, The Regiment of Princes is a quintessential example in Middle English of the conduct manual genre. While popular during the century of its origin—43 manuscripts still survive today—it fell from both popular and scholarly attention until only recently. Dedicated to Henry V, then merely Prince Henry, The Regiment of Princes is notable for its clear identification of its source texts, its advice on living a virtuous life as a royal, and its early acclamation of Chaucer as “the first fyndere of our fair langage” of English. It offers remarkable insight into the challenges faced by Middle English poets as well, where Hoccleve appears as a character to lament his financial difficulties. This edition is the first to base its text on a comprehensive study and full collation of all extent Regiment manuscripts.

ISBN 978-1-58044-023-3 (paperback), 978-1-58044-023-3 (PDF)© 1999

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

A Middle English allegorical dream-vision,The Assembly of Gods was written in the late fifteenth century, c. 1478-83, and brings together Classical mythology, courtly love, debate poetry, and didactic moralism. Once attributed to John Lydgate, the poem is now considered anonymously authored, yet it bears striking similarities to the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and Christine de Pizan. Organized into three parts, the first introduces a dreamer who wants to bring Reason and Sensuality into agreement; in the second, Aeolus, Diana, and Neptune debate over the jurisdiction of their earthly realms; in the third, the gods’ argument escalates into a full-blown psychomachia, or battle for the human soul, captained by their associates Virtue and Vice. Ultimately, the dreamer renounces the pagan deities in favor of the Christian God. Jane Chance offers the first edition of the Assembly since the nineteenth century and suggests new exploration from a feminist standpoint.

ISBN 978-1-58044-022-6 (paperback),  978-1-58044-395-1 (PDF) © 1999

Four Romances of England: King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, Athelston

Edited by Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake and Eve Salisbury

The thirteenth-century and fourteenth-century romances in this volume contain some of the finest imaginative work of what has become known as the Matter of England: late medieval, non-Arthurian romances largely dealing with English subjects and locales. Partly based on the English oral folk culture that survived the Norman Conquest, yet anchored in Continental poetic genres and bearing signs of poetic influence from both traditions, they also reflect the blend of English and French literature and culture that defines Anglo-Norman literature’s unique character. Together these tales, each accompanied by an introduction and detailed notes, provide readers with a cohesive study of medieval English romances’s key themes: knightly adventure paired with romantic love, engaging social realism mixed with supernatural events, the disenfranchised hero’s valorous deeds abroad and triumphant return from exile, and an ending that rewards him with glory, marriage, and his rightful place on the throne. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-017-2 (paperback),  978-1-58044-418-7 (PDF) © 1999

Amoryus and Cleopes

John Metham
Edited by Stephen F. Page

Little is known about John Metham, save his noble lineage and the identity of his patrons. Written in an East Anglian dialect, Amoryus and Cleopes is one of only two of Metham’s surviving works. Composed in 1449, it portrays the titular star-crossed lovers as they face challenges of chivalry, aristocratic responsibility, and quests for fame. A Middle English adaptation of Ovid’s tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, the romance ends not with couple’s tragic suicide but their resuscitation through the prayers of a holy hermit. Metham blends standard romance elements with Chaucerian influence and features of hagiography, mirror for princes, and encomium. Stephen Page’s introduction pieces together Metham’s biography, contextualizes the poem in its social and literary milieu, and makes a case for Metham as the originator of the English sonnet. This edition, the first since 1916, is unique for including Amoryus and Cleopes’ last ten lines, which were recently discovered through multispectral imaging of the base manuscript. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-016-5 (paperback),   978-1-58044-417-0 (PDF) © 1999

Middle English Marian Lyrics

Edited by Karen Saupe

Marian devotion flourished as part of the affective piety movement in late medieval Europe. As Karen Saupe notes, “what was most important about Mary was her unique identity as the point of connection between the divine and the human.” Fulfilling the paradoxical roles of virtuous virgin, loving human mother, and queen of heaven, Mary became for her worshipers a powerful intercessor to Christ—to whom penitents could turn to beg forgiveness for their sins. This edition compiles 93 lyrics from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries to provide a representative sampling of Middle English Marian devotion. Saupe’s volume presents nine sections, beginning with iconic moments in Mary’s life (the Annunciation, Nativity, Crucifixion, and Assumption) and progressing into later categories of prayer and praise. While most of the lyrics remain anonymous, a handful are attributed to known authors, including Chaucer, Lydgate, Hoccleve, and Dunbar. Altogether, they express the efforts of the English populace to voice their anxieties and joys through Mary.

ISBN 978-1-58044-006-6 (paperback), 978-1-58044-415-6 (PDF) © 1998

Prose Merlin

Edited by John Conlee

This anonymously authored Middle English adaptation of the Old French Vulgate Cycle survives in one manuscript, Cambridge University Library MS Ff.3.11, and was written near the middle of the fifteenth century, making it the single earliest piece of prose Arthuriana in Middle English. A complete account of its titular character’s life, the Prose Merlin follows the sorcerer from birth to final imprisonment by his former apprentice, Nimiane. Although composed not long before Malory’s Arthurian epic Le Morte D’Arthur, the Prose Merlin provides a more focused and optimistic account of the Arthurian court, while also reveling in the supernatural themes of its subjects. This edition, accessible to the reader unfamiliar with Middle English prose, is the first complete edition of the romance published since the nineteenth century, making it a valuable resource for modern scholarship. 

ISBN 978-1-58044-015-8 (paperback),  978-1-58044-416-3 (PDF) © 1998

The Testament of Love

Thomas Usk
Edited by R. Allen Shoaf

Thomas Usk, a fourteenth-century bureaucrat and scrivener, is known primarily for his Testament of Love. Likely composed between 1385-86 after the author was imprisoned for his political alliances, the Testament follows a personified Love descending into Usk’s prison cell and engaging him in an extensive theological discussion. Chief among the protagonist’s complaints is his longing for Margarite, his lady love, though other topics include a quasi-feminist defense of women, the functions of the law, his political discontent, and the nature of free will. In his dream-vision, Usk draws inspiration from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, as well as Chaucer and Gower, in his prolific exploration of Christian sentimentality. R. Allen Shoaf presents the first edition since the nineteenth century, provides glosses and notes to render the Middle English text accessible, and rethinks the relationship between Usk and his more famous literary contemporaries—namely, William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer.

ISBN 978-1-58044-001-1 (paperback), 978-1-58044-404-0 (PDF) © 1998

Troy Book: Selections

John Lydgate
Edited by Robert R. Edwards

John Lydgate, Benedictine monk and prolific author of Middle English poetry, began writing the Troy Book in 1412 on commission from the future King Henry V. Taking some eight years to complete, the massive Troy Book adapted Latin and Old French accounts of the Trojan War into Middle English. Sweeping in content, grand in scale, the Troy Book exerted a powerful influence on countless later English writers such as Marlowe, Henryson, and Shakespeare. Like many of his contemporaries, Lydgate sees the Trojan War narrative both as historical truth and moral exemplar, a critical lens which transforms the story into an exhortation on the virtue of prudence. This edition presents selections from Lydgate’s much larger complete text, with prose summaries recapping omitted portions. Based on the Cotton Augustus A.iv manuscript, this abridged edition renders approachable Lydgate’s mammoth work to readers who might not otherwise encounter such an important text.

ISBN 978-1-87928-899-7 (paperback), 978-1-58044-398-2 (PDF) © 1998

Moral Love Songs and Laments

Edited by Susanna Greer Fein

This edition compiles seven obscure Middle English lyrics which each illustrate how Christian doctrine can channel high emotion. Susanna Fein argues that these lyrics were meant to be meditated over as devotional objects, which would help readers unlock a heartfelt response to God, through contemplation of the Incarnation or Passion. Dating from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, these poems explore various kinds of love: eroticized attraction to Christ, Mary’s maternal compassion for her suffering son, the Incarnation as a sign of God’s love for mankind, and divine mercy. Highlights include “cross-poems” like Thomas of Hales’ Love Rune, The Four Leaves of the Truelove, and The Dispute between Mary and the Cross, in which the crucifix becomes an enigma for readers to decipher. Fein ends with a newly discovered version of the penitential poem, The Sinner’s Lament. Taken together, these poems make the signs of God’s love visible, palpable, and affectively moving to the receptive soul.

ISBN 978-1-87928-897-3 (paperback), 978-1-58044-473-6 (PDF) © 1998

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

This comprehensive collection testifies to the enduring popularity of outlaw tales in medieval and early modern England, the legend of Robin Hood foremost among them. As figures of mischief, guile, anticlerical sentiment, and resistance to unjust authority, Robin Hood, Maid Marian, and “merry men” such as Little John, Friar Tuck, and Will Scarlet featured in numerous popular medieval and early modern ballads, plays, and carnivals, even garnering mentions in chronicles and legal records. This collection charts the evolution of this endlessly generative figure and his legend as both were adapted to various historical contexts and narrative mediums from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries. For greater literary context, it also provides historical parallels of the character in medieval English outlaw traditions, such as the eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon nobleman Hereward the Wake, the twelfth-century French nobleman Eustache the Monk, and the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman ancestral romance hero Fouke le Fitz Waryn.

ISBN 978-1-58044-067-7 (paperback), 978-1-58044-424-8 (PDF) © 1997; 2nd ed. ©  2000

The Book of Margery Kempe

Edited by Lynn Staley

Likely written in the late 1430s, The Book of Margery Kempe is a tale of spiritual awakening as remarkable for the literary traditions and conventions it invokes as for how it breaks with them. As a member of the powerful guild of the Holy Trinity in the prosperous East Anglian town of Bishop’s Lynn, Margery Kempe wrote from a secure position within a culture her Book comes to criticize; the literary persona she adopts first reflects her urban merchant class and its concerns with profit, prestige, and conventional gender roles, then increasingly rejects them in her growing commitment to her spiritual vocation. Bearing the hallmarks of hagiography and mystical literature, yet presented as what volume editor Lynn Staley terms “medieval female sacred biography,” the Book of Margery Kempe presents a tale of radical reversal whose protagonist’s uniquely intense affective piety is instrumental in gaining her personal, financial, and spiritual autonomy. 

ISBN 978-1-87928-872-0 (paperback), 978-1-58044-470-5 (PDF) © 1996

The Cloud of Unknowing

Edited by Patrick J. Gallacher

Drawing on the writings of St. Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, and other theologians across centuries of Christian mystical traditions, the anonymous, fourteenth-century spiritual guide known as The Cloud of Unknowing invites Christian readers to develop a stronger, more intimate relationship with God through intense contemplation and the abandonment of all mental images or concepts that are not God. Only after abandoning the intellect and the imagination can one then encounter a “nothing and a nowhere” that leads to the mysterious and unfathomable being of God himself, beyond the capacity of mental conception and without definitive image or form. Distilling a complex mystical theology and practice into engaging and approachable prose, The Cloud of Unknowing reflects a larger trend in medieval Christianity toward a more individual, passionate religious experience of God while achieving a directness and simplicity uncharacteristic of even the most popular examples of fourteenth-century Middle English mystical literature. 

ISBN 978-1-87928-889-8 (paperback), 978-1-58044-471-2 (PDF) © 1997

Medieval English Political Writings

Edited by James M. Dean

This selection of (mostly) anonymous texts reflects a variety of English political concerns from the turbulent fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Five sections introduce important themes: “Poems of Political Prophecy,” which foretell the imminent demise of England, include prophecies attributed to Merlin and Thomas of Erceldoune. “Anticlerical Poems and Documents,” which records complaints against corrupt clergy, focuses on the controversial Lollard movement. “Literature of Richard II’s Reign and the Peasants’ Revolt” documents the events of the 1381 rising, which began with protests against a royal poll tax; highlights include letters by the rebel priest John Ball. “Poems against Simony and the Abuse of Money,” which condemns greedy actors in the Church and courts of law, contains the “Sir Penny” lyrics. Finally, “Plowman Writings,” inspired by Langland’s Piers Plowman, idealize the poor hard-working farmer as a symbol of spiritual truth in the face of oppressive overlords. Discontent with the uneven distribution of wealth suffuses these Middle English works—an issue still relevant today.

ISBN 978-1-87928-864-5 (paperback), 978-1-58044-468-2 (PDF) © 1996

The Poems of Laurence Minot, 1333–1352

Edited by Richard H. Osberg

Little is known about fourteenth-century poet Laurence Minot, though his political convictions and proximity to military information suggest a position in the courts of King Edward III. Minot’s eleven Middle English poems celebrate a sequence of English victories on the Scottish border and the continent between 1333 and 1352, in a conflict that would become the Hundred Years’ War. Together, these poems—seemingly written immediately after the battles—form a propagandistic chronicle of military feats that ultimately glorify the English army. Minot’s verse is animated by an ardent patriotism that often manifests as denigration against the enemy Scots and French. Richard Osberg identifies the dialect as Lincolnshire, and links the texts’ alliteration, prosody, and lexicon to political lyrics found in MS Harley 2253. Osberg pieces together the extant evidence about Minot into a speculative biography and brings to light a series of poems that has been largely neglected.

ISBN 978-1-87928-867-6 (paperback), 978-1-58044-469-9 (PDF) © 1996

The Middle English Breton Lays

Edited by Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury

Written approximately between 1150 and 1450, the Middle English Breton Lays emulate the Lais of Marie de France, regarded as one of the first female writers to compose poetry in her own vernacular language. Following the lai genre, these Middle English poems are short, rhymed narratives of love, marriage, and chivalry, often involving encounters with fairies and other Celtic supernatural figures. Each of the eight poems in this volume—Sir Orfeo, Lay le Freine, Sir Degare, Emare, Sir Launfal, Sir Gowther, Erle of Tolous, and Sir Cleges—reveal differences in dialect that showcase the complexity of the Breton Lay genre as representative of different English regional areas and manuscripts, and the overarching themes of each lay offer insights into medieval English family values, interpersonal morals, and romantic ideals. This edition improves upon its predecessors by furnishing introductory readers with detailed introductory statements and notes for each of the lays. 

ISBN 978-1-87928-862-1 (paperback),  978-1-58044-467-5 (PDF) © 1995

Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales

Edited by Thomas Hahn

This edition provides the first modern collection of all eleven known Middle English Gawain tales composed or recorded in the fifteenth century or later. These romances highlight Gawain’s status as the most popular hero of Arthurian legend in medieval England, producing a tradition that discards Gawain’s roles of foil, rival, and even villain in Continental European romances to elevate him as the English flower of chivalry. Whether facing the supernatural in the wilderness, danger on the battlefield, or the perils of love, it is Gawain’s peerless courtesy, his “perfect composure in moments of crisis,” that reasserts social bonds and propriety, tames the socially or exotically monstrous, and brings the unruly under royal rule. Demonstrating that Gawain’s prominence in English romance extends far beyond Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, these tales cast this familiar character in a new light and offer valuable insights into English views on the chivalric ideal. 

ISBN 978-1-87928-859-1 (paperback), 978-1-58044-466-8 (PDF) © 1995

Sir Perceval of Galles and Ywain and Gawain

Edited by Mary Flowers Braswell

This edition brings together two very different Middle English Arthurian romances, fifteenth-century Sir Perceval of Galles and Ywain and Gawain, though they share similar origins. Both are supposedly inferior adaptations of Old French romances by the renowned twelfth-century poet Chrétien de Troyes, and both originate from the north-east Midlands of England. Sir Perceval of Galles follows the title character from his comically naive childhood, through his bumbling encounters with rival knights and love interests, to his gradual maturation into knighthood. In Ywain and Gawain, young Ywain, a knight of king Arthur’s court, is torn between his devotion to his hard-won wife Alundyne and his need to prove himself a worthy warrior, an anxiety spurred by his fraught friendship with Gawain. Mary Braswell recuperates both poems from historical obscurity, arguing against received wisdom for their literary value—Perceval for its deliberate parody of chivalric romance and Ywain and Gawain for its idealization of chivalric values.

ISBN 978-1-87928-860-7 (paperback), 978-1-58044-394-4 (PDF) © 1995

King Arthur's Death: The Middle English "Stanzaic Morte Arthur" and "Alliterative Morte Arthure"

Edited by Larry D. Benson, revised by Edward E. Foster

Though both of these Middle English romances focus on King Arthur’s final years at war abroad, Mordred’s rebellion in his absence, and the king’s death in battle, they reveal different aspects of the medieval Arthurian legend and differ sharply in tone, style, characterization, and plot. Drawn from chronicle history, the Alliterative Morte Arthure presents Arthur as a warrior king leading from the field, and its realistic depictions of fourteenth-century warfare and besieged European cities starkly contrast with Arthurian tradition’s usual fantasy and romanticism. The Stanzaic Morte Arthur, a condensation of the episodic French romance La Mort Artu, instead centers around the discovery of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guenevere’s affair and the dissolution of Arthur’s knights into warring factions. This volume of Larry D. Benson’s groundbreaking work, revised and updated by Edward E. Foster, incorporates recent scholarship and once again makes these important poems available for teaching and research alike. 

ISBN 978-1-87928-838-6 (paperback), 978-1-87928-838-6 (PDF) © 1994

Lancelot of the Laik and Sir Tristrem

Edited by Alan Lupack

Alan Lupack’s edition of Lancelot of the Laik and Sir Tristrem brings to light two lesser-known Middle English poems. The fifteenth-century, older Scots Lancelot of the Laik, an incomplete adaptation of the French Vulgate Lancelot, follows Lancelot as his chivalry in the war between Arthur and Galiot wins him Guinevere’s favor. The second book’s lengthy treatise on kingship was once considered political advice aimed at King James III of Scotland, though Lupack reassesses this interpretation. The thirteenth-century Sir Tristrem survives only in a single copy in the Auchinleck manuscript. A parodic retelling of Thomas d’Angleterre’s Anglo-Norman Tristan, it mocks courtly romance conventions. For example, Tristan’s dog Hodain laps up remnants of the infamous love potion, insults are exchanged, and traditional chivalric violence becomes grotesque physical comedy. This edition unites two overlooked Arthuranian romances in the insular tradition.

ISBN 978-1-87928-850-8 (paperback), 978-1-58044-465-1 (PDF) © 1994

The Shewings of Julian of Norwich

Edited by Georgia Ronan Crampton

Julian of Norwich was one of the most notable and influential Christian mystics of fourteenth-century England, renowned for her theological writing detailing her visions of divinity. In May of 1373, Julian experienced a number of vivid, dynamic, and even frightening spiritual visions on what she thought would be her deathbed. Of the two versions of the text that were made—the earlier, shorter version, and the longer version, written twenty years after the event—Georgia Ronan Crampton’s edition focuses on the longer version, which contains far more of Julian’s analyses and meditations about her experience. Presenting the full-length longer version, passages from the shorter version, and an account of a visit by Julian’s fellow mystic Margery Kempe, Crampton’s edition is a must-have for any medieval literature classroom, offering scholars and students alike the chance to read of Julian’s visions in her own Middle English. 

ISBN 978-1-87928-845-4 (paperback), 978-1-58044-464-4 (PDF)  © 1994

The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions

Edited by John M. Bowers

Geoffrey Chaucer famously left his Canterbury Tales unfinished; this volume, featuring five fifteenth-century Middle English texts, illustrates its enduring popularity and attempts to fill in its gaps. John Lydgate’s Prologue to his Siege of Thebes imagines the author as a new pilgrim, a Benedictine monk, who comes to Canterbury to recover from illness, and is invited by Chaucer’s Host to tell the first tale for the homeward journey. The Ploughman’s Tale, capitalizing on the popularity of William Langland’s Piers Plowman, offers an anti-Lollard perspective in a Miracle of the Virgin story. The Cook’s Tale follows the fortunes of the dissolute apprentice, Perkyn Reveloure. The Spurious Links section lists numerous prologues inserted between tales to bridge narrative gaps. Finally, the Canterbury Interlude and Merchant’s Tale of Beryn narrates the pilgrims’ arrival at the shrine of St. Thomas, the Pardoner’s fabliau misadventures with a cunning tavern hostess, and the story of a gambling merchant who encounters a series of legal troubles. 

ISBN 978-1-87928-823-2 (paperback), 978-1-58044-461-3 (PDF) © 1992

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.

ISBN 978-1-87928-825-6 (paperback), 978-1-58044-462-0 (PDF) © 1992

Wynnere and Wastoure and The Parlement of the Thre Ages

Edited by Warren Ginsberg

Anonymously composed during the mid-to-late fourteenth-century in alliterative verse, and later copied into the famous Thornton manuscript, Wynnere and Wastoure and The Parlement of the Thre Ages capture the moral, economic, and political struggles of medieval England. Once thought to share the same author, the two poems combine the genres of dream vision and poetic debate in the dialect of Midland England. Wynnere and Wastoure engages the two titular characters in an intellectual battle before a king over the proper use of money, between prudent expenditure and prodigality. The satirical commentary alludes to the fiscally frivolous reign of Edward III, as well as England’s struggle with a diminished labor force and sprawling crime following the Black Plague. The Parlement of the Thre Ages features a hunter’s vision of a debate between the three stages of man’s life: Youthe, Medill Elde, and Elde. Warren Ginsberg invites readers to reconsider the two allegorical poems in tandem. 

ISBN 978-1-87928-826-3 (paperback), 978-1-58044-401-9 (PDF) © 1992

Six Ecclesiastical Satires

Edited by James M. Dean

Written by anonymous Lollard authors, this edition compiles six Middle English anticlerical texts. Composed in the late-fourteenth to fifteenth centuries, each satirizes friars as greedy, disloyal, and hypocritical. The first two poems invoke Langland’s Piers Plowman, a humble farmer, as a spiritual ideal in contrast to corrupt clerics. The alliterative Piers the Plowman’s Crede follows a poor man trying to learn the Apostle’s Creed from friars, who try to swindle him. The Plowman’s Tale, imitating Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, gives voice to a heretofore silent pilgrim who narrates a debate between two creatures, a Papist Griffin and a Lollard Pelican. Jack Upland, Friar Daw’s Reply, and Upland’s Rejoinder deploy a fictional rustic and a chatterbox friar in a debate over the hypocrisy of clergy. Finally, in Why I Can’t Be a Nun, young Katerine yearns to enter a convent but is discouraged when she has a dream-vision of one infected by sin.

ISBN 978-1-87928-805-8 (paperback), 978-1-58044-397-5 (PDF) © 1991

Heroic Women from the Old Testament in Middle English Verse

Edited by Russell A. Peck

Written in the fifteenth century by anonymous authors, these four Middle English poems demonstrate admiration towards Old Testament Jewish heroines, during a time of antisemitic sentiment in England. The Storie of Asneth presents her life, from her marriage to Joseph to her conversion and visitation by an angel. The alliterative Pistel of Swete Susan follows the virtuous wife Susannah, as she is falsely accused of adultery by two lecherous elders. The last two tales, excerpted from the fourteenth-century Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament, give contrasting accounts of Hebrew female virtue. The Story of Jephthah and his Daughter narrates Jephthah’s foolish vow that forces him to sacrifice his daughter to God. The Story of Judith details her infiltration, seduction, and slaughter of enemy general Holofernes to save her city. Altogether, these tales celebrate Christian values of piety, chastity, faithfulness, and duty to one’s community. Russell Peck argues that they targeted an audience of aristocratic women.

ISBN 978-1-87928-811-9 (paperback), 978-1-87928-811-9 (PDF) © 1991

The Floure and the Leafe, The Assembly of Ladies, The Isle of Ladies

Edited by Derek Pearsall

An asset to any study of gender in medieval England, this volume contains three late-fifteenth-century allegorical dream visions that thematize the relations between the sexes. The Floure and the Leafe explores the courtly imagery of the flower and leaf, wherein the flower symbolizes the fickle, shallow attraction characteristic of men, compared to the evergreen persistence of the leaf, likened to the long-suffering of women. Meanwhile, The Assembly of Ladies recounts the activities of a group of women while describing the differences between the sexes. Finally, The Isle of Ladies details a male dreamer’s interactions with the ladies of an all-female island. The texts draw on tropes of French love visions, like those of Guillaume de Machaut or the authors of Le Roman de la Rose. Once attributed to Chaucer, all three Middle English texts are now thought to be anonymously authored in a Chaucerian style—as Derek Pearsall recounts.

ISBN 978-0-91872-043-6 (paperback), 978-1-58044-413-2 (PDF) © 1990

Three Middle English Charlemagne Romances

Edited by Alan Lupack

This volume provides an excellent introduction to the Middle English romances dealing with the Matter of France, narratives centering on Charlemagne and the fictional knightly figures of his court. The Sultan of Babylon compares and contrasts Charlemagne’s rule with that of Babylon’s sultan, Laban, to reveal the qualities inherent to the worlds each ruler represents. The Siege of Milan presents a variation on Charlemagne romances’ traditional themes by likening Charlemagne’s holy war to the religious struggles of saints’ legends. A latecomer to the Alliterative Revival in Middle English poetry, The Tale of Ralph the Collier is a lighthearted Charlemagne romance promoting political, religious, and interpersonal awareness. Counterbalancing anxieties about Muslims’ potential threat to the medieval West with curiosity about the exotic world beyond the West, these epic tales introduce modern readers to prejudices and values that characterized Western medieval culture in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. 

ISBN 978-1-87928-850-8 (paperback), 978-1-58044-465-1 (PDF) © 1990