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While poets have traditionally inhabited cultural margins, prophets have brought poetic language to the center of cultural debate, not foretelling the future so much as diagnosing the present. This exciting collection of nine essays examines the range of social and political implications that inflects poetic discourse, from the Old English and Latin texts of the Anglo-Saxon world to the Scotland and England of the Renaissance. Whether saints¿ lives, Germanic heroic epics, chronicles, or satiric poems, the works discussed in this book retain their verbal power, if not their political influence, into our own time.

Beautiful ladies, dashing chevaliers, injuries, and death; how were these part of the literary tournament? This schematic analysis examines these and numerous other aspects of the knightly tournament as they were presented in works of the late twelfth to early thirteenth centuries, and also identifies the role the tournament played in the literature of the day. This analysis of Old French narratives views the sport in its infancy, and in the process reveals contrasts with the more colorful and better-known tournament of the fifteenth century.

Literary individualism first manifests itself in the twelfth century in word puzzles and overt self-naming, as well as in discussions about the nature of writing and the role of the poet in the world. Guillem IX, Marcabru, Dante, Chaucer, and Langland were poets and intellectuals. This engaging study traces their claims of authorship, not to a need for what modernity views as self-promotion, but rather to their interests in contemporary philosophical debates. Yet in their creations of both history and fiction, these poets anticipated modern narrative and its literary persona.

Between 1125 and 1135, it is generally agreed, a sculptor of genius usually referred to as Gislebertus carved a tympanum and a series of capitals for the cathedral dedicated to Saint Lazarus at Autun. The capital depicting the suicide of Judas is unique in the Romanesque repertoire both for its beauty of technique and for its execution of subject matter. The iconography is at once baffling and rich in possibilities of interpretation, which extend far beyond a simple image of a hanged man. One of the possibilities explored is that this is an image of a man realizing in extremis that he could and should have been remembered throughout history as Saint Judas, Apostle and Martyr, rather than as the paradigmatic traitor. There are objects in the image that demand ¿ and receive ¿ explanations, albeit tentative: the protuberance on Judas¿ back; the «strap» from which he is hanging; the position of his hands and feet. The interpretation is set firmly in its historical period, but the image is also discussed as an object whose significance transcends the time and the place in which it was conceived and produced.

Two Natures Met addresses the spiritual conflicts depicted in George Herbert's The Temple from the perspective of Herbert's engagement with the mystery of the Incarnation. Herbert's commitment to his art develops as his apprehension of the fullness of the Incarnation advances. Against the iconoclasm of the Puritans, Herbert praises the stained glass windows, the vestments, and the perfumes that lead the poet to appreciate the bruised and broken body that gives him poetic lines and eternal life.