Middle English Texts

Medieval Institute Publications at Western Michigan University publishes the TEAMS Middle English Texts Series, which produces scholarly texts designed for research and classroom use. Its goal is to make available to teachers, scholars and students texts that occupy an important place in the literary and cultural canon but have not been readily available in print or online editions. The series does not include authors, such as Chaucer, Langland or Malory, whose English works are normally in print. The focus is, instead, upon Middle English literature adjacent to those authors that are needed for research or teaching. The editions maintain the linguistic integrity of the original work but within the parameters of modern reading conventions.

Learn more about current METS staff, board members and contributors.

In memoriam

We are deeply saddened by the passing of Russell Peck. As the founder and general editor of the Middle English Texts Series, Russell worked with us for decades on the production of dozens of volumes. His impact has been felt by countless scholars all over the world, and he will be dearly missed.

Submissions

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 board comprises:

• Thomas Hahn, University of Rochester, General Editor
• Anna Siebach-Larsen, University of Rochester, Executive Director
  
• Pamela Yee, University of Rochester, Managing Editor
• See current METS staff, board members, and contributors

Publications

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

Edited by Ben Parsons

This book is the first critical edition of two fascinating but overlooked devotional texts. Each shines its own light on medieval faith. The Holkham "Prayers and Meditations" (ca. 1410) is a rare example of female authorship, written by an unnamed woman to guide a “religious sustir.” Simon Appulby's "Fruyte of Redempcyon" (1514) is more popular in aim, composed by one of England’s last anchorites to serve his urban community. Both texts are accompanied by extensive notes and introductory essays to aid students and specialists alike.

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

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

William Caxton's Paris and Vienne and Blanchardyn and Eglantine

Edited by Harriet Hudson

These texts are English versions of romances well known in medieval and early Renaissance Europe, but outside the modern canon of early English literature. Unlike Caxton's other romances, they do not belong to the matters of the Nine Worthies; they are independent narratives of love and adventure presenting two differing but complementary accounts of chivalry and courtly love. Following fifteenth-century fashions, they treat conventional materials with a degree of realism and imbue characters with subjectivity. "Blanchardyn," published at the behest of Margaret, mother of Henry VII, is militaristic and attentive to governance, and notable for its affective, redundant narration and sophisticated style.  "Paris" features a linear plot, lively characters, and employs generic motifs to explore issues of social mobility, family dynamics, and female autonomy.  

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

Buy William Caxton's Paris and Vienne and Blanchardyn and Eglantine at ISD

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

Edited and translated by Susanna Fein

An edition of the early Middle English verse sequence contained in the thirteenth-century Oxford Jesus College MS 29 (II) with accompanying translations in Modern English and scholarly introduction and apparatus. The sequence is varied in subject, with poems of religious exhortation set beside others of secular pragmatism. Included are: "The Owl and the Nightingale," "Poema Morale," "The Proverbs of Alfred," Thomas of Hales’s "Love Rune," "The Eleven Pains of Hell," the prose "Shires and Hundreds of England," the lengthy "Passion of Jesus Christ in English," and twenty-one additional lyrics, most of them uniquely preserved in this manuscript. Made in the West Midlands, the Jesus 29 manuscript is the lengthiest all-English verse collection known to exist in the period between the Exeter Book and the Harley Lyrics.

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

Buy The Owl and the Nightingale at ISD

The Destruction of Jerusalem, or Titus and Vespasian

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

Marked by antisemitism, Christian nationalism, and violence, this Middle English poem was nonetheless intriguing to medieval and early modern readers.  Here presented in the most comprehensive edition to date, the poem will be of particular interest to 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 fall of Jerusalem narratives in later 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

Buy The Destruction of Jerusalem at ISD

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 into English verse. 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.” That work is here re-edited from all four surviving manuscripts, and presented with 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

Buy Of Knyghthode and Bataile at ISD

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 the two late 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 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

Buy Christine de Pizan's Advice for Princes at ISD

The Roland and Otuel Romances and the Anglo-Norman Otinel

Edited by Elizabeth Melick, Susanna Fein and David Raybin

This edition contains four 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. A translation of the romances' source, the Anglo-Norman Otinel, is also included. The romances center on conflicts between Frankish Christians and various Saracen groups. In addition to Charlemagne and Roland, each romance features a Saracen character: either the kind but loathsome giant Vernagu or Otuel, Vernagu's handsome and sharp-tongued nephew. The romances deal with issues of racial and religious difference, conversion, and faith-based violence.

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

Buy The Roland and Otuel Romances at ISD

John Lydgate's Dance of Death and Related Works

Edited by Megan L. Cook and Elizaveta Strakhov

This volume brings together new editions of both texts of John Lydgate’s fifteenth-century poem, The Dance of Death, with related Middle English verse from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It also includes a new translation of Lydgate’s French source, the Danse macabre. Together, 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

Buy John Lydgate's Dance of Death at ISD

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

A new edition of two of Machaut’s best known dits, the Remede de Fortune (Remedy for Fortune) and the Confort d’ami (Consolation from a Friend), with detailed commentaries on Machaut, these poetical works, the accompanying music, and the art program of the base manuscript.

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

Buy Guillaume de Machaut, vol. 2 at ISD

Gavin Douglas, The Palyce of Honour

Edited by David John Parkinson

At the end of the fifteenth century, Gavin Douglas devised his ambitious dream vision "The Palyce of Honour" in part to signal a new scope to Scottish literary culture. While deeply versed in Chaucer's writings, Douglas identified Ovid's "Metamorphoses" as a particularly timely model in the light of contemporary humanist scholarship. For all its comedy, "The Palyce of Honour" stands as a reminder to James IV of Scotland that poetry casts a powerful light upon the arts of rule.

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

Buy The Palyce of Honour at ISD

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

Edited by Rhiannon Purdie and Emily Wingfield

These six poems explore some of the courtly and chivalric themes that preoccupied late medieval Scottish society. The volume includes Sir David Lyndsay's "Historie and Testament of Squyer Meldrum," as well as his "Answer to the Kingis Flyting"; and three anonymous fifteenth-century poems: "Balletis of the Nine Nobles," "Complaint for the Death of Margaret, Princess of Scotland" and "Talis of the Fyve Bestes."

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

Buy Six Scottish Courtly and Chivalric Poems at ISD

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

A new edition of Machaut's twenty-three motets, based on manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque nationale fonds français 1584, with an introduction presenting a fresh appraisal of these works, an art-historical study of the manuscript illumination that accompanies them, as well as full commentaries for each motet and English translations of their lyrics.

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

Buy Guillaume de Machaut, vol. 9 at ISD

The Digby Mary Magdalene Play

Edited by Theresa Coletti

The "Digby Play of Mary Magdalene" is a rare surviving example of the Middle English saint play. It provides a window on the deep embedding of biblical drama and performance in late medieval devotional practices, social aspiration and critique, and religious discourses. Fully annotated and extensively glossed, this edition is an essential resource for the study of late medieval English religious drama.

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

Buy The Digby Mary Magdalene at ISD

The Towneley Plays

Edited by Garrett P. J. Epp

The Towneley plays are a collection of biblical plays in the Huntington Library's MS HM 1, a manuscript once owned by the Towneley family of Towneley Hall, Lancashire. Once thought to constitute a cycle of plays from the town of Wakefield in Yorkshire's West Riding, the collection includes some of the best-known examples of medieval English drama, including the much-anthologized "Second Shepherds Play."

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

Buy The Towneley Plays at ISD

Sir Torrent of Portingale

Edited by James Wade

"Sir Torrent of Portingale" is a romance written to entertain fifteenth-century audiences with action-packed tales of love and adventure. It is a story about the lovers Torrent, a young knight from Portugal, and Desonell, the feisty and resourceful daughter of a tyrannical king. Adventures include fights with dragons, giants, and savage beasts; perilous sea journeys; magic horses and swords; sieges and wars in the Holy Land. This new edition collates the surviving manuscript and print fragments with commentary and notes.

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

Buy Sir Torrent of Portingale at ISD

Lydgate’s Fabula duorum mercatorum and Guy of Warwyk

Edited by Pamela Farvolden

The "Fabula duorum mercatorum," a romance that in its Boethian sensibility and treatment of love and friendship bears comparison to Chaucer's great works "Troilus and Criseyde" and "The Knight's Tale," is one of Lydgate's most accomplished works. In "Guy of Warwick," Lydgate breaks with romance tradition, presenting the heroic English knight-pilgrim and his last great battle against the dread giant Colbrond from an historical point of view.

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

Buy Lydgate's Fabula Duorum Mercatorum and Guy of Warwick at ISD

The Katherine Group (Bodley MS 34)

Edited by Emily Rebekah Huber and Elizabeth Robertson

"The Katherine Group" brings together for the first time newly edited and translated versions of three dynamic saints' lives, The Lives of Saints Katherine, Margaret and Juliana; a quirky but rhetorically persuasive guide to virginity, "Hali Meidenhad"; and a psychologically astute sermon, "Sawles Warde" ("The Guardianship of the Soul"). These works are important witnesses to the development of Middle English writing after the Conquest and to the rigorous anchoritic spiritual life pursued by female recluses in medieval England.

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

Buy The Katherine Group at ISD

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 is the most important poet and composer of late medieval France. His unique and inventive output is the subject of this new, integrated edition of Machaut's complete poetry and music. Volume 1, The Debate Series, presents the two "judgment" poems, which are among his most important artistically in terms of their formal innovations and their influence on contemporaries, notably Geoffrey Chaucer, and the associated "Lay de plour," presented here with its music. This volume includes the French originals and facing English translations.

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

Buy Guillaume de Machaut, vol. 1 at ISD

John Hardyng, "Chronicle," Vol. 1

Edited by James Simpson and Sarah Peverley

 As one of only a handful of texts written in the twilight years of Henry VI's reign, John Hardyng's first "Chronicle," written in 18,782 lines of verse and seven folios of prose, offers a compelling insight into the taste, hopes, and anxieties of a late fifteenth-century gentleman who had witnessed, and all too often participated in, each of the key events that defined his era. Completed in 1457, Hardyng's initial Chronicle has previously been largely overlooked in comparison to the more condensed second version, written to promote Richard, Duke of York's claim to the throne.

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

Buy John Hardyng's Chronicle, vol. 1 at ISD

Richard Coer de Lyon

Edited by Peter Larkin

One of the most engaging Middle English crusading poems, "Richard Coer de Lyon" recounts in verse the exploits, both historical and fanciful, of Richard I, king of England. While Richard's participation in the Third Crusade serves as its main subject, the poem disrupts its historical narrative with a number of fabulous interpolations. With a substantial introduction and comprehensive explanatory and textual notes, this new edition of "Richard Coer de Lyon" signally contributes to the reappraisal and understanding of what became—during the centuries-long process of its composition—one of the most popular of medieval romances.

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

Buy Richard Coer de Lyon at ISD

The King of Tars

Edited by John H. Chandler

"The King of Tars" is a short Middle English poem that emphasizes ideas about race, gender and religion. It is neither a saint's life or a romance, nor a political drama or a miracle tale. Its role as entertainment is undeniable, but that entertainment thinly veils didactic intent that should be read through the lens of religious instruction.

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

Buy The King of Tars at ISD

Poems

Oton de Granson
Edited and translated by Peter Nicholson and Joan Grenier-Winther

Oton de Granson was first acknowledged for his poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer, who called him the "flour of hem that make in Fraunce" [the flower of those that write poetry in France]. Almost certainly a personal friend to both Chaucer and Eustache Deschamps, Granson was among the first and most successful of the poets who were also courtiers. Born to the highest nobility in his native Savoy, he was well known in the courts of both France and England, and he spent the better part of his career in the service of the English king.

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

Buy Oton de Granson's Poems at ISD

The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, Volumes 1–3

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

London, British Library MS Harley 2253 is one of the most important literary books to survive from the English medieval era. In rarity, quality and abundance, its secular love lyrics comprise an unrivaled collection. Intermingled with them are additional treasures for the student of Middle English: contemporary political songs as well as delicate lyrics designed to inspire religious devotion. And digging beyond these English gems, one readily discovers more prizes—less-well-known ones—in French and Latin: four fabliaux (the largest set from medieval England), three lives of Anglo-Saxon saints and a wealth of satires, comedies, debates, interludes, collected sayings, conduct literature, Bible stories, dream interpretations and pilgrim guides. Rich in texts in three languages, the book's overall range is quite astounding. The Ludlow scribe, compiler and copyist, shows himself to have been a man of unusual curiosity, acquisitiveness and discerning connoisseurship.

 Volume 1

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

Buy The Complete Harley 2253, vol. 1 at ISD 

Volume 2

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

Buy The Complete Harley 2253, vol. 2 at ISD

Volume 3

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

Buy The Complete Harley 2253, vol. 3 at ISD

Lybeaus Desconus

Edited by Eve Salisbury and James Weldon

"Lybeaus Desconus" (the Fair Unknown) is the mid-fourteenth-century Middle English version of the classic narrative of the handsome and mysterious young outsider who comes to the court of King Arthur to prove himself worthy of joining Arthur's knights. The young knight is tested in a variety of ways, and in the course of this testing he learns both chivalric codes of conduct and the truth of his parentage. Six extant manuscripts of the poem attest to its popularity, placing it in company with "Guy of Warwick," "Bevis of Hampton" and "Sir Isumbras" among the most popular of Middle English Romances. The current edition offers readers a chance to compare two manuscript versions of the poem, one preserved in Lambeth MS 306 and the other in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples.

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

Buy Lybeaus Desconus at ISD

Confessio Amantis

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

The complete text of John Gower's poem is a three-volume edition, including all Latin components—with translations—of this bilingual text and extensive glosses, bibliography and explanatory notes. Volume 1 contains the Prologue and Books 1 and 8, in effect the overall structure of Gower's poem. Volume 2 contains Books 2, 3 and 4, which follow in their structure the outline of Vice and its children found in the early French poem the "Mirour de l’Omme." Volume 3 contains Books 5, 6 and 7, which follow another kind of development as Gower shifts from romance banter and formulaic confession to philosophical inquiry.

Volume 1, Second Edition

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

Buy Confessio Amantis, vol. 1, at ISD

Volume 2, Second Edition

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

Buy Confessio Amantis, vol. 2, at ISD

Volume 3

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

Buy Confessio Amantis, vol. 3, at ISD

Ten Bourdes

Edited by Melissa M. Furrow

A "bourde" is an English comedic poem similar to a French fabliau but with a moralizing element and less of an emphasis on violence. In this fresh edition of ten Middle English bourdes, Melissa M. Furrow "aims to put funny (or would-be funny) Middle English poems under the eyes of a much broader readership" than the scholarly researchers she appealed to in her earlier edition of many of the same poems. This collection is specifically designed for students, and has contextualizing introductions, copious notes, glosses, and a glossary.

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

Buy Ten Bourdes at ISD

Croxton Play of the Sacrament

Edited by John T. Sebastian

The Croxton play, which survives in a single sixteenth-century copy, dramatizes the physical abuse by five Muhammad-worshipping Syrian Jews of a Host, the bread consecrated by a priest during the Christian Mass. The text is the work of a playwright possessed of a tremendous theatrical imagination, notwithstanding his choice of subject matter.

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

Buy Croxton Play of the Sacrament at ISD

The Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf: A Dual-Language Edition from Latin and Middle English Printed Editions

Edited by Nancy Mason Bradbury and Scott Bradbury

 The two texts of the dialogue presented here, a Latin version printed c. 1488 and a Middle English translation printed in 1492, preserve lively, entertaining and revealing exchanges between the Old Testament wisdom figure Solomon and Marcolf, a medieval peasant who is ragged and foul-mouthed but quick-witted and verbally astute. The "Dialogue" was a best-seller of its day; Latin versions survive in some twenty-seven manuscripts and forty-nine early printed editions, and the work was translated into a wide variety of late medieval vernaculars, including German, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, English and Welsh.

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

Buy The Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf at ISD

Prik of Conscience

Edited by James H. Morey

 In the first modern edition of the poem since 1863, James H. Morey presents The Prik of Conscience to a new audience of students of the Middle Ages. The famous fourteenth century poem leads its audience on a path of penance. Attributed to the mystic Richard Rolle, it became one of the most popular poems in medieval England and appears in about 130 manuscripts, more than any other Middle English poem. This edition is the first to offer extensive annotations and a gloss, making it accessible to students at all levels of proficiency in Middle English.

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

Buy the Prik of Conscience at ISD

The York Corpus Christi Plays

Edited by Clifford Davidson

The feast of Corpus Christi, celebrated annually on Thursday after Trinity Sunday, was devoted to the Eucharist, and the normal practice was to have solemn processions through the city with the Host, the consecrated wafer that was believed to have been transformed into the true body and blood of Jesus. In this way the "cultus Dei" thus celebrated allowed the people to venerate the Eucharistic bread in order that they might be stimulated to devotion and brought symbolically, even mystically into a relationship with the central moments of salvation history.

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

Buy The York Corpus Christi Plays at ISD

The Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament

Edited and translated by Michael Livingston

Like the Bible upon which it is based, the metrical paraphrase is unlikely to be a text read cover-to-cover by the faint-hearted. The paraphrase is, in several ways, a remarkable artifact of the Chaucerian period, one that can reveal a great deal about vernacular biblical literature in Middle English, about readership and lay understandings of the Bible, about the relationship between Christians and Jews in late medieval England, about the environment in which the Lollards and other reformers worked, about perceived roles of women in history and in society and even about the composition of medieval drama.

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

Buy The Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament at ISD

The French Balades

John Gower
Edited and translated by R.F. Yeager

Gower's "Traitié" and "Cinkante Balades" are the only extant formes fixes ("fixed forms," that is, fourteenth-century French lyrics, essentially the balade, rondeau and virelai, developed as literary styles from thirteenth-century dances) that we can be assured were written by a native Englishman, those of "Ch" (and Chaucer's "many a song and many a leccherous lay" - presumably in French) notwithstanding.

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

Buy The French Balades at ISD

The Complete Works

Robert Henryson
Edited by David J. Parkinson

In this new edition of the poems of Robert Henryson, David Parkinson offers editions of Henryson's "Fables," "The Testament of Cresseid," "Orpheus and Eurydice" and twelve shorter poems (grouped according to the strength of their attribution to Henryson), as well as the glosses and explanatory and textual notes characteristic of Middle English Texts series volumes.

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

Buy Robert Henryson: The Complete Works at ISD

The Castle of Perseverance

Edited by David N. Klausner

"The Castle of Perseverance," like the other surviving morality plays, deals allegorically with the life of man, his struggle against temptation and sin and his hope of final redemption. The play begins before Mankind's birth and concludes with his salvation after death (presented as a close call), and features the traditional three enemies of Mankind (the World, the Flesh and the Devil) and his two advisors (the Good Angel and the Bad Angel).

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

Buy The Castle of Perseverance at ISD

Mankind

Edited by Kathleen M. Ashley and Gerard NeCastro

"Mankind" is without a doubt the most amusing and controversial morality play surviving from fifteenth-century England. As an allegory about the vulnerable situation in which most people find themselves—torn between good judgment and the temptation to misbehave—the play's moral action is conventional.

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

Buy Mankind at ISD

Mummings and Entertainments

John Lydgate
Edited by Claire Sponsler

This book presents a large sampling of the dramatic texts of John Lydgate, the preeminent poet of fifteenth-century England. These verses are, as Claire Sponsler notes in her introduction, "of great importance for literary and theatrical history."

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

Buy Mummings and Entertainments at ISD

Two Moral Interludes: The Pride of Life and Wisdom

Edited by David N. Klausner

This volume completes the presentation of the five surviving Middle English morality plays. In addition to the texts of "The Pride of Life" and "Wisdom," Klausner's edition includes two appendices which provide the texts of primary sources for the two plays as well as appropriate music which may have accompanied performances, especially "Wisdom."

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

Buy Two Moral Interludes at ISD

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

John the Blind Audelay
Edited by Susanna Fein

[Audelay's] idiosyncratic devotional tastes, interesting personal life history, and declared political affiliations—loyalty to king, upholder of estates, anxiety over heresy—make him worthy of careful study beside his better-known contemporaries. The Audelay manuscript also contains unique copies of other alliterative poems of the ornate style seen in "Gawain and the Green Knight" and "The Pistel of Swete Susan."

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

Buy Poems and Carols at ISD

The Game and Playe of the Chesse

William Caxton
Edited by Jenny Adams

Despite its title, Caxton's "Game and Playe of the Chesse" does not, in fact, have much to say about a game or about playing it. Instead, the work uses the chessboard and its pieces to allegorize a political community whose citizens contribute to the common good.

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

Buy The Game and Playe of the Chesse at ISD

Chaucer and the Poems of "Ch"

Edited by James I. Wimsatt, Revised Edition

On several counts, one particular collection of French lyrics made in France in the late fourteenth century, University of Pennsylvania MS 15, is the most likely repository of Chaucer's French poems. It is the largest manuscript anthology extant of fourteenth-century French lyrics in the formes fixes (balade, rondeaux, virelay, lay and five-stanza chanson) with by far the largest number of works of unknown authorship.

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

Buy Chaucer and the Poems of "Ch" at ISD

Codex Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse

Edited by George Shuffelton

Since its rediscovery by nineteenth-century scholarship, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61 has never been ignored, though it has also not gained a great deal of notoriety beyond the scholars of Middle English romance. The manuscript has also been singled out as an example of the reading material popular with middle-class English families in the later Middle Ages.

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

Buy Codex Ashmole 61 at ISD

The Northern Homily Cycle

Edited by Anne B. Thompson

Composed in rhyming English verse, the Northern homily cycle is the earliest and most complete work of its kind (Gospel paraphrases with homilies on the theme of the Gospel texts), its widespread and enduring popularity witnessed by three distinct recensions and twenty surviving manuscripts ranging from the early fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth centuries. The collection was intended to accompany the Gospel lessons that were read every Sunday as part of the mass.

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

Buy The Northern Homily Cycle at ISD

Amis and Amiloun, Robert of Cisyle, and Sir Amadace

Edited by Edward E. Foster, Second Edition

In "A Manual of the Writings in Middle English," "Amis and Amiloun," "Robert of Cisyle" and "Sir Amadace" are classified by Lillian Herlands Hornstein as legendary romances of didactic intent, which does not mean that they are devoid of liveliness or interest.

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

Buy Amis and Amiloun, Robert of Cisyle, and Sir Amadace at ISD

The Temple of Glas

John Lydgate
Edited by J. Allan Mitchell

"The Temple of Glas" takes the form of an elusive and suspenseful—but for that reason all the more sensational—dream vision that demands close attention to detail and the dynamic way in which the meaning of events unfolds. Seducing readers with possibilities remains what the poem does best, and that special magnetism speaks not only to the provenance and textual history of Lydgate's text but also to its literary qualities.

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

Buy The Temple of Glas at ISD

The Book of John Mandeville

Edited by Tamarah Kohanski and C. David Benson

"The Book of John Mandeville" has tended to be neglected by modern teachers and scholars, yet this intriguing and copious work has much to offer the student of medieval literature, history and culture. [It] was a contemporary bestseller, providing readers with exotic information about locales from Constantinople to China and about the social and religious practices of peoples such as the Greeks, Muslims and Brahmins.

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

Buy The Book of John Mandeville at ISD

The N-Town Plays

Edited by Douglas Sugano with assistance by Victor I. Scherb

In the late 1400s in eastern England, a scribe was in the process of compiling a large dramatic manuscript of over two hundred vellum folios. The manuscript contains components of an independent Mary Play, parts one and two of an independent Passion Play and an independent Assumption of Mary Play, as well as ten play subjects that appear in no other English cycles.

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

Buy The N-Town Plays at ISD

Everyman and Its Dutch Original, Elckerlijc

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

Faced with death's certainty—and the uncertainty of the time of its coming, particularly in a historical period of widespread plague and other afflictions—as well as the inevitability of the hereafter, what is one to do? "Everyman" speaks to this dilemma.

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

Buy Everyman and Its Dutch Original, Elckerlijc at ISD

The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers

Edited by John William Sutton

At the forefront of the medieval wisdom tradition was "The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers," a long prose text that purports to be a compendium of lore collected from biblical, classical and legendary philosophers and sages. "Dicts and Sayings" was a well-known work that traveled across many lands and was translated into many languages.

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

Buy The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers at ISD

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

Edited by Harriet Hudson

"Sir Isumbras," "Octavian," "Sir Eglamour of Artois" and "Sir Tryamour" are important works in a major literary development of the fourteenth century: the flourishing of Middle English popular romance. These four narratives were among the most popular; all survive in multiple manuscripts and continued to circulate in print through the sixteenth century.

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

Buy Four Middle English Romances at ISD

Sentimental and Humorous Romances: Floris and Blancheflour, Sir Degrevant, The Squire of Low Degree, The Tournament of Tottenham, and The Feast of Tottenham

Edited by Erik Kooper

This volume presents a unique collection of Middle English romances, each with a different view of society, ranging from a tale of oriental wonders ("Floris and Blancheflour") to excellent examples of the burlesque ("The Tournament of Tottenham" and "The Feast of Tottenham").

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

Buy Sentimental and Humorous Romances at ISD

The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Selection

Edited by Kathleen Forni

The poems in this volume were prized and preserved because of their association with Chaucer’s name and have been, paradoxically, almost entirely ignored by modern readers for the same reason. The various genres represented in this sampler attest to the diversity of late medieval literary tastes and to the flexibility of the courtly idiom.

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

Buy The Chaucerian Apocrypha at ISD

The Minor Latin Works with In Praise of Peace

The Minor Latin Works, edited and translated by R.F. Yeager
In Praise of Peace, edited by Michael Livingston

Gower's achievement in writing substantially in all three primary languages of his time—Anglo-French, English and Latin—was a source of pride to others and, undoubtedly, to him too: into the final years of his life he continued to produce poetry in all three languages. "In Praise of Peace" [is] in the same position as the shorter Latin works edited and translated in this volume: ignored, neglected reduced or relegated to the dusty realm of footnotes.

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

Buy The Minor Latin Works with In Praise of Peace at ISD

The Kingis Quair and Other Prison Poems

Edited by Linne R. Mooney and Mary-Jo Arn

This volume reflects the wide scope of these "prison poems" by bringing together a new edition of "The Kingis Quair," a selection from Charles d'Orleans' "Fortunes Stabilnes," a poem by George Ashby, who was imprisoned in London's Fleet prison, and the poems of two other poets, both anonymous, who wrote about physical and/or emotional imprisonment.

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

Buy The Kingis Quair and Other Prison Poems at ISD

Saints' Lives in Middle English Collections

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

This volume is conceived as a complement to another Middle English Texts series text, Sherry Reames' "Middle English Legends of Women Saints." This selection "is intended to be broadly representative of saints' lives in Middle English and of the classic types of hagiographic legend as these were presented to the lay public and less-literate clergy of late medieval England."

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

Buy Saints' Lives in Middle English Collections at ISD

Siege of Jerusalem

Edited by Michael Livingston

The poem chronicles a historical war, and it is this historical quality that must stand out: the poem not only has resonances of the bloodshed that battle inevitably brings, but it also is, in a very literal sense, history. That is to say, the war is over. The vengeance of Jesus has been accomplished.

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

Buy Siege of Jerusalem at ISD

The Complete Works

William Dunbar
Edited by John Conlee

Dunbar's poems offer vivid depictions of late medieval Scottish society and serve up a striking pageant of colorful figures at the court of James IV (r. 1488-1513), with which he was associated for much of his adult life. The poems are remarkable both for their diversity and variability and for their multiplicity of voices, styles, and tones. The great variety of poems within Dunbar's canon includes religious hymns of exaltation, moral poems on a wide range of serious themes, comic and parodic poems of extreme salaciousness and scatological coarseness, general satires against the times, and satires with much more specific targets, often a single individual.

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

Buy William Dunbar: The Complete Works at ISD

Chaucerian Dream Visions and Complaints

Edited by Dana M. Symons

The poems in this volume were all attributed to Chaucer by early compilers or editors of his work in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and were not removed from the Chaucer canon until the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, when they became identified simply as Chaucerian.

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

Buy Chaucerian Dream Visions and Complaints at ISD

Stanzaic Guy of Warwick

Edited by Alison Wiggins

The poem, which survives only in the Auchinleck Manuscript, deals with the later years of Guy's life, beginning with his return to Warwick after having established himself on the Continent as a pre-eminent model of knighthood. After his marriage, however, he is stricken by remorse for the very actions that have brought him fame, and he sets out anonymously on a series of pilgrimages of atonement.

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

Buy Stanzaic Guy of Warwick at ISD

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

Edited by Edward E. Foster

Through these fourteenth-century Middle English poems, readers can experience something of the controversies that surfaced and resurfaced even after Aquinas had articulated his doctrine of the Communion of Saints. All three poems were quite popular, as was the doctrine of Purgatory itself.

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

Buy Three Purgatory Poems at ISD

Concordia: The Reconciliation of Richard II with London

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

The poem that Richard Maidstone wrote on the metropolitan crisis of 1392 reports information about the royal entry that concluded the crisis in greater detail than any other source. . . . [It] is above all an ideologically driven intervention . . . addressing a particular political circumstance.

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

Buy Concordia at ISD

The Wallace: Selections

Edited by Anne McKim

"The Wallace" catalogs the sheer brutality of war. We are regaled with such detailed accounts of the sacking of towns and the burning down of buildings full of screaming inhabitants that the smells and sounds, as well as the terrible sights, of war are graphically conveyed.

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

Buy The Wallace: Selections at ISD

Middle English Legends of Women Saints

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

This book presents a collection of saints' lives intended to suggest the diversity of possibilities beneath the supposedly fixed and predictable surfaces of the legends, using multiple retellings of the same legend to illustrate that medieval readers and listeners did not just passively receive saints’ legends but continually and actively appropriated them.

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

Buy Middle English Legends of Women Saints at ISD

The Trials and Joys of Marriage

Edited by Eve Salisbury

The disparate texts in this anthology, produced in England between the late thirteenth and the early sixteenth centuries, challenge, and in some cases parody and satirize, the institution of marriage. The texts bridge generic categories.

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

Buy The Trials and Joys of Marriage at ISD

Pearl

Edited by Sarah Stanbury

"Pearl" resists identification by author, date, occasion or place of composition; still it is almost unanimously hailed as one of the masterpieces of our literature, so skilled is its author, so eloquent its language.

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

Buy Pearl at ISD

The Siege of Thebes

John Lydgate
Edited by Robert R. Edwards

John Lydgate's "The Siege of Thebes," written c. 1421–22, is the only Middle English poetic text that recounts the fratricidal struggle between Oedipus's sons Eteocles and Polynices as they contend for the lordship of Thebes. The text reflects the problem of poetic authority and the political and ethical themes of Lydgate's poetic career in the 1420s, when he was writing as a Lancastrian propagandist and as unofficial royal poet.

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

Buy The Siege of Thebes at ISD

Ancrene Wisse

Edited by Robert Hasenfratz

"Ancrene Wisse" or the "Anchoresses' Guide" written sometime roughly between 1225 and 1240, represents a revision of an earlier work, usually called the "Ancrene Riwle" or "Anchorites' Rule," a book of religious instruction for three lay women of noble birth, sisters, who had themselves enclosed as anchoresses somewhere in the West Midlands, perhaps somewhere between Worcester and Wales.

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

Buy Ancrene Wisse at ISD

The Scale of Perfection

Walter Hilton
Edited by Thomas H. Bestul

Walter Hilton's "The Scale of Perfection" maintains a secure place among the major religious treatises composed in fourteenth-century England. This guide to the contemplative life, written in two books of more than 40,000 words each, is notable for its careful explorations of its religious themes and also as a monument of Middle English prose.

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

Buy The Scale of Perfection at ISD

Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Sothsegger

Edited by James M. Dean

The texts, both anonymous, are "Richard the Redeless," which concerns the governmental style of Richard II, and "Mum and the Sothsegger," which addresses social issues in the reign of Henry IV. Both works reveal that alliterative poetry in the "Piers Plowman" tradition continued to be the chief vehicle for political and social criticism at the turn of the fourteenth century.

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

Buy Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Sothsegger at ISD

The Life of Saint Katherine

John Capgrave
Edited by Karen A. Winstead

In telling the story of the life of the virgin martyr Katherine, Capgrave uses many of the tropes that mark the enormously popular genre of hagiography as it was written throughout the Middle Ages. Capgrave inserts digressions on Greek and Roman history; on just and unjust rule and justifiable vs. unjustifiable rebellion; on child care; on medieval English feasts, jousts and pageants; and on the role(s) of women.

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

Buy The Life of Saint Katherine at ISD

The Regiment of Princes

Thomas Hoccleve
Edited by Charles R. Blyth

"The Regiment of Princes," written about 1410–11, was composed at a time when England was still feeling the consequences of the deposition of Richard II. Essentially it is addressed to a prince on the subject of his governance, but it exhibits considerable generic instability and thus raises fundamental questions about how we should understand the tone of considerable portions of the poem.

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

Buy The Regiment of Princes at ISD

The Assembly of Gods: Le Assemble de Dyeus, or Banquet of Gods and Goddesses, with the Discourse of Reason and Sensuality

Edited by Jane Chance

"The Assembly of Gods" is an anonymous English dream vision allegory produced, probably, in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. Within the framework of the dream vision he blends didacticism with the mythological and the courtly, and seeks to bring Reson and Sensualyté into accord by means of an assembly of the classical gods that is called to adjudicate the relative merits of Discorde's desire to overthrow Vertu.

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

Buy The Assembly of Gods at ISD

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

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

The romances in this volume contain some of the finest imaginative work of what is known as the Matter of England, the non-Arthurian romances that deal largely with English subjects and locales. These romances span a broad period of the Middle Ages, from c. 1225 ("King Horn") to c. 1355–99 ("Athelston").

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

Buy Four Romances of England at ISD

Amoryus and Cleopes

John Metham
Edited by Stephen F. Page

John Metham's "Amoryus and Cleopes" can be seen as a key piece in the reception of Chaucer's works. Metham does not slavishly imitate Chaucer, however; instead, he adapts features of the master’s works to his own ultimately moral purpose, fusing them with elements of classical tale, courtly and popular romance, encyclopedic compendium, hagiography, mirror for princes and encomium, to create a tightly constructed late-medieval romance.

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

Buy Amoryus and Cleopes at ISD

Middle English Marian Lyrics

Edited by Karen Saupe

The poems selected for this volume provide a sampling of the rich tradition of Marian devotion as expressed in Middle English. They range widely in form, tone and aesthetic quality. Taken together, they express the full range of a people’s effort to voice its anxieties and joys through Mary.

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

Buy Middle English Marian Lyrics at ISD

Prose Merlin

Edited by John Conlee

The Middle English "Prose Merlin" gives students of medieval Arthurian literature access—though at one remove—to the Merlin section of the Old French Vulgate Cycle, an interconnected set of Arthurian works composed during the first half of the thirteenth century. Written in the latter half of the fifteenth century, it is a treasure trove of characters, incidents and motifs, many of which are found nowhere else in Arthurian literature.

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

Buy the Prose Merlin at ISD

The Testament of Love

Thomas Usk
Edited by R. Allen Shoaf

This edition of "The Testament of Love" is the first to be published since W. W. Skeat undertook the task in 1897. . . . [I]n this edition, a diplomatic transcription of Thynne [1532 edition] is printed with, contrapuntally, a pointed version of the text which represents the efforts of R. Allen Shoaf, the editor, to construe it.

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

Buy The Testament of Love at ISD

Troy Book: Selections

John Lydgate
Edited by Robert R. Edwards

"Troy Book" is one of the most ambitious attempts in medieval vernacular poetry to recount the story of the Trojan war. John Lydgate, monk of the great Benedictine abbey of Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, began composing the poem in October 1412 on commission from Henry, Prince of Wales, later King Henry V and he completed it in 1420.

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

Buy Troy Book: Selections at ISD

Moral Love Songs and Laments

Edited by Susanna Greer Fein

These moral love songs and laments illustrate how, in the devout medieval English sensibility, doctrine was vitally connected to affective receptivity. Narrative moods range from love-longing and passion to bitter grief and sorrowful lament, feelings that devolve from the intimately personal state of being God's created creature, individually answerable to divine law and love.

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

Buy Moral Love Songs and Laments at ISD

Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales

Edited by Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, with contributions by Thomas E. Kelly, Russell A. Peck, Michael Swanton and Paul Whitfield White

Here is a comprehensive collection of materials that deal with Robin Hood and such other "outlaw" figures as Hereward the Wake, Eustache the Monk and Fouke le Fitz Waryn. In this text the figure of Robin Hood can be viewed in historical perspective, from the early accounts in the chronicles through the ballads, plays and romances that grew around his fame and impressed him on our fictional and historical imaginations.

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

Buy Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales at ISD

The Book of Margery Kempe

Edited by Lynn Staley

Written probably in the late 1430s, "The Book of Margery Kempe" is one of the most astonishing documents of late medieval English life. Kempe examines the fundamental conflicts and tensions of that world by describing her gradual and voluntary movement away from worldly prestige.

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

Buy The Book of Margery Kempe at ISD

The Cloud of Unknowing

Edited by Patrick J. Gallacher

Since it was written "The Cloud" has attracted the attention of a diverse range of readers, from Robert Bateman, an influential seventeenth-century Baptist, to the novelist Aldous Huxley and the psychologist Ira Progoff. Here a new edition makes the work available to contemporary readers.

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

Buy The Cloud of Unknowing at ISD

Medieval English Political Writings

Edited by James M. Dean

The authors of the poems and documents, mostly anonymous or pseudonymous, speak in the traditional language of complaint and satire; but the outlines of their anxiety are fairly clear. This volume contains five sections: Poems of Political Prophecy; Anticlerical Poems and Documents; Literature of Richard II's Reign and the Peasants' Revolt; Poems against Simony and the Abuse of Money; and Plowman Writings.

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

Buy Medieval English Political Writings at ISD

The Poems of Laurence Minot, 1333–1352

Edited by Richard H. Osberg

The eleven extant poems attributed to Laurence Minot celebrate a sequence of English victories on the Scottish border and on the continent between 1333, the Battle of Halidon Hill, and the surrender of the French town of Guînes in 1352. The poems appear to have been written shortly after the events they commemorate.

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

Buy The Poems of Laurence Minot, 1333–1352 at ISD

The Middle English Breton Lays

Edited by Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury

Breton Lays—those poems produced by or after the fashion of Marie de France in the twelfth century and which claim to be "literary versions of lays sung by ancient Bretons to the accompaniment of the harp"—served many functions. The poems edited in this volume, were distinctly "English" Breton lays "largely because they point to a renewed interest in the nuclear English family and the shaping of distinctly English family values."

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

Buy The Middle English Breton Lays at ISD

Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales

Edited by Thomas Hahn

This volume is the first affordable, modern collection of all eleven of the known Middle English Gawain tales, and aims to make these texts accessible to a wider, contemporary audience. These poems—"The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle," "Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle," "The Avowyng of Arthur," "The Awyntrs off Arthur," "The Knightly Tale of Gologras and Gawain," "The Greene Knight," "The Turke and Sir Gawain," "The Marriage of Sir Gawain," "The Carle of Carlisle," "The Jeaste of Sir Gawain" and "King Arthur and King Cornwall"—are united by their common concern with the theme of chivalry. Sir Gawain was by far the most popular of Arthur’s knights in medieval England, and the verses collected here offer a window not only into English views on Gawain but also attitudes towards the knightly ideal and chivalry.

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

Buy Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales at ISD

Sir Perceval of Galles and Ywain and Gawain

Edited by Mary Flowers Braswell

This volume contains the only known English version of Chrétien de Troyes’s romance of the naïve knight Perceval, "Sir Perceval of Galles." The work uses Perceval’s ridiculous behavior as a late medieval satire of courtliness. Accompanying this tale is "Ywain and Gawain," a translation of a second Chrétien poem, "Le Chevalier au Lion." Unlike "Sir Perceval," this poem extols the virtues of chivalry and honor.

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

Buy Sir Perceval of Galles and Ywain and Gawain at ISD

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

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

Professor Benson's edition of the "Stanzaic Morte Arthur" and the "Alliterative Morte Arthure," has been long out of print. Now his edition of these important Middle English poems, revised and updated by Professor Edward E. Foster to take account of recent scholarship, is again made available to students.

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

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

Lancelot of the Laik and Sir Tristrem

Edited by Alan Lupack

This new edition makes the poems available to students of English romance and of the Matter of Britain and enables us to enrich our sense of the texture of English treatments of the vast body of legends that grew around the court of Arthur.

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

Buy Lancelot of the Laik and Sir Tristrem at ISD

The Shewings of Julian of Norwich

Edited by Georgia Ronan Crampton

This first-person account of the visions experienced by Julian of Norwich in May of 1373 is remarkable for its vivid prose and as an example both of early autobiographical writing in the vernacular and of a spiritual document.

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

Buy The Shewings of Julian of Norwich at ISD

The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions

Edited by John M. Bowers

When Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400, his massive project "The Canterbury Tales" lay unfinished and unpublished. This volume includes five such works that date from the fifteenth century and survive in at least one manuscript collection of Chaucer's Tales: John Lydgate's Prologue to the Siege of Thebes, The Ploughman's Tale, The Cook's Tale, Spurious Links and The Canterbury Interlude and Merchant's Tale of Beryn.

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

Buy The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions at ISD

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

This volume has been superseded by The Palyce of Honour (2018).

Wynnere and Wastoure and The Parlement of the Thre Ages

Edited by Warren Ginsberg

The poems are complex and provide insight into fourteenth-century culture. As the editor observes, "the poem's perspectives are truly dizzying: on the one hand, economics, politics, ethics and social relations are seen as an interrelated set of universal, timeless principles; on the other, they appear as actual, contingent conditions that have resulted from specific acts in history."

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

Buy Wynnere and Wastoure and The Parlement of the Thre Ages at ISD

Six Ecclesiastical Satires

Edited by James M. Dean

The six Middle English poems included here attack ecclesiastical corruption; most of the poems were written by disgruntled Lollards about clerics and friars in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. "Piers the Plowman's Crede" deals with a poor man trying to learn the Apostle's Creed from friars, who cannot teach him and only want his money; eventually the man can only learn the creed from Piers the Plowman. "The Plowman's Tale" casts an anticlerical tale in the mold of one of the Canterbury Tales. "Jack Upland," "Friar Daw's Reply," and "Upland's Rejoinder" comprise a debate over the hypocrisy of friars. Meanwhile, "Why I Can't Be a Nun" decries the sins of nuns in convents.

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

Buy Six Ecclesiastical Satires at ISD.

Heroic Women from the Old Testament in Middle English Verse

Edited by Russell A. Peck

This volume makes accessible for students of the Middle Ages Middle English verses about heroic women from the Old Testament. Included are "The Storie of Asneth," "The Pistel of Swete Susan," "The Story of Jephthah and his Daughter," and "The Story of Judith." These poems exhibit the attitudes of Late Medieval England towards heroic women, and offer an unusually positive depiction of Judaism.

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

Buy Heroic Women from the Old Testament in Middle English Verse at ISD

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 poems that complement each other in their treatments of relations between the sexes. "The Floure and the Leafe" explores the courtly imagery of the flower and leaf, wherein the flower symbolizes the fickleness and 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 dream poem "The Isle of Ladies" tells of a male dreamer's interactions with the ladies of an all-female island.

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

Buy The Floure and the Leafe, The Assembly of Ladies, The Isle of Ladies at ISD

Three Middle English Charlemagne Romances

Edited by Alan Lupack

This volume serves as an excellent introduction to the tradition of romances dealing with the matter of France—that is, Charlemagne and his Twelve Peers. Of the three groups of English Charlemagne romances, the Ferumbras group, the Otuel group and "detached romances," the editor has selected one of each: "The Sultan of Babylon," "The Siege of Milan," and "The Tale of Ralph the Collier."

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

Buy Three Middle English Charlemagne Romances at ISD