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Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England is the first book combining literary, linguistic and historical evidence from Old English and Latin to offer a new account of who Anglo-Saxon poets were and how they worked, showing the crucial importance of poets' social roles and their engagement in poetic communities.

This wide-ranging study is the first to demonstrate how English literature continued to engage with crusading from the medieval tales of Richard the Lionheart all the way to Shakespeare. It provides a richer understanding of the impact of the crusades on narrative patterns and the beginning of the modern era.

D. H. Green challenges the prevailing view of the Middle Ages as a static period in which attitudes to women were uniformly negative. Focusing on the great German romances Erec, Tristan and Parzival he explores strategies used by vernacular writers to debate and challenge the undoubted antifeminism of the day.

This book is an extended investigation of the anticlericalism of the medieval English poem Piers Plowman.

In this book Nicole Rice analyses late medieval prose guides that disseminated the idea of religious discipline to a lay audience. By considering the themes of spiritual discipline, religious identity, and orthodoxy in Langland and Chaucer, the study also sheds new light on Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales.

The first full-length examination of the influential cultural and religious exchanges which took place between England and Bohemia following Richard II's marriage to Anne of Bohemia in 1382. This initially enabled new ideas of religion to flourish in both countries but eventually led the English authorities to suppress heresy.

This book explores the representation of artisans - masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, and more - in medieval English literature from c.1000-1483. It reveals that craft labor plays a central role in texts as varied as school-books, comic poems, spiritual literature, and works of political advice.

Explains how the late medieval Church encouraged the practice of fraternal correction, which involved the injured party confronting the wrong-doer directly and privately; and explores how John Wyclif and others expanded this established practice to authorize their own polemics against clerical authority and wealth.

This is a study of the love poetry of late medieval Europe, looking in particular at the ways in which the Ethics of Aristotle, newly translated, influenced the ideas and expressions of courtly love.

This book provides a new perspective on the extraordinary emergence of the Italian literary tradition through the close investigation of a single codex, written entirely in Boccaccio's hand, that preserves rare and unique texts of Dante, Petrarch and Cavalcanti. As such, it offers a major contribution to manuscript studies and a new portrait of Boccaccio.

A major study of translations into the vernacular in late medieval Italy, and their impact on literature and culture. Vernacular translation was a phenomenon with which all authors in this period - from Brunetto Latini to Giovanni Boccaccio - had to contend.

This book explores a wide range of English and Scottish court poetry of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, including work by Skelton, Dunbar and others, and examines the ways in which the desire of court poets for legitimation tended to subvert the authority they claimed for their poetry.

Analyzes fifteenth-century ideas about religious images, focusing on the period between the Wycliffite critique of images and Reformation iconoclasm. Shannon Gayk argues that many writers used vernacular writing to explain, mediate, and reform the use of religious images in lay devotion and education.

This book offers a historical survey of attitudes towards same-sex love during the centuries that gave us the Plantagenet court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, courtly love, and Arthurian lore. Though most texts of the period denounce sodomy, this book shows how some also endorse it.

Examining the concept of habitus - acquired patterns of thought, behaviour and taste that result from internalizing culture or objective social structures - Katharine Breen argues that the adaptation of elite, clerical forms of habitus for lay audiences established the conceptual foundations for a reading public in medieval England.

Chretien de Troyes was one of the most important medieval writers of Arthurian narrative. A key figure in reshaping the 'once and future fictions' of Arthurian story, he was instrumental in the late twelfth-century shift from written and oral legendary traditions to a highly sophisticated literary cultivation of the Old French verse romance.

This study will appeal to scholars interested in medieval religious and intellectual history.

Mary Carruthers's classic study of the training and uses of memory in European cultures during the Middle Ages has fundamentally changed the way scholars understand medieval culture. This fully revised and updated second edition considers afresh all the material and conclusions of the first.

The Romance of the Rose was one of the most important and influential works of medieval vernacular literature. In this book, Sylvia Huot investigates how medieval readers understood the text, assessing the evidence to be found in well over 200 surviving manuscripts.

A study of the Divine Comedy, this book offers an interesting perspective on Dante's representation of the afterlife. Alison Morgan departs from the conventional critical emphasis on Dante's place in relation to learned traditions by undertaking a thorough examination of the poem in the context of popular beliefs.

An analysis of the representation of the holy city in some of the fourteenth century's most popular works, including romances, political treatises and travel writings. This study will be of great interest to scholars working on medieval literature, cities, travel, crusades, and the history of Jerusalem.

This book focuses on three major poets - Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun - within the context of medieval commentaries on the origin and history of language.

This erudite but accessible account by a leading scholar of medieval literature shows why the poetry of praise was once so popular, and why it is still worth reading today.

Isabel Davis identifies a medieval discourse of masculine selfhood which is preoccupied with the ethics of labour and domestic living in readings of Langland, Usk, Gower, Chaucer and Hoccleve. Davis presents a genuinely fresh perspective on ideas about gender, labour and domestic life in medieval Britain.

This book first appeared in German in 1985, and set an agenda for the study of medieval literary theory. While Haug focuses primarily on medieval German writers, his arguments are equally relevant to medieval literature in any other European language.

Robert J. Meyer-Lee examines the tradition of Laureate verse as it develops from the fourteenth century to Tudor times. This study sheds light on the relationships between poets and political power and reveals the importance of this verse for the course of English literary history.

Bale examines the ways in which English writers, artists and readers used and abused the Jewish image in the period following the Jews' expulsion from England in 1290. He examines how anti-semitic images developed and came to endure far beyond the Middle Ages.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the number of female readers was far greater than is commonly assumed. This fascinating study opens up the world of the medieval woman reader to new generations of scholars and students.

Laura Ashe argues that a genuinely distinctive national character can be found in the writings of England in the century and a half following the Norman Conquest. This study opens up new ways of reading early Medieval texts in relation to their political and legal contexts.

Focusing on the major poets of the late fourteenth century such as Chaucer and Langland, this study investigates the close relationship between artistic and political developments at a time when poets and parliamentarians were very close to one another in practices, concerns, and themes.