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.

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.

A range of essays on Lydgate and his work which challenge preconceived notions of the quality and nature of Lydgate's writing

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Originally published in 1967, The Poetry of John Lydgate presents a broad discussion of John Lydgate’s secular poetry. It reassesses much of the poetry through critical examination and suggests that Lydgate was not necessarily the master that the medieval ages proclaimed him to be, nor the plain poet that he is often seen as in modern analysis. Instead, the book suggest that he was a competent poetic craftsman that presents substantial literary form in his poetry. The analysis in the book looks at Lydgate as atypical of the Middle Ages, instead exhibiting traits currently linked to the Renaissance. The book provides a unique perspective on John Lydgate as a poet and will be of interest to medievalist and literary historians alike.

Medieval Venuses and Cupids analyses the transformations of the love deities in later Middle English Chaucerian poetry, academic Latin discourses on classical myth (including astrology, natural philosophy, and commentaries on classical Roman literature), and French conventions that associate Venus and Cupid with Ovidian arts of love. Whereas existing studies of Venus and Cupid contend that they always and everywhere represent two loves (good and evil), the author argues that medieval discourses actually promulgate diverse, multiple, and often contradictory meanings for the deities. The book establishes the range of meanings bestowed on the deities through the later Middle Ages, and draws on feminist and cultural theories to offer new models for interpreting both academic Latin discourses and vernacular poetry.

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. The known authors represented in the manuscript and the texts themselves have notable associations with England and with Chaucer. And intriguingly there are fifteen lyrics each headed by the initials Ch, very likely indications of authorship, neatly inserted between rubric and text. . . . [The] rubrics, together with other substantial manuscript evidence and the intrinsic worth of the poems, make them easily the best candidates among extant French lyrics for Chaucer's authorship, appropriate representatives of his French work. - from the Introduction