Short narrative poems, religious and secular lyrics, and moral, political, and comic verses are all included in this comprehensive collection of works from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Contains over 180 poems, songs, and carols of medieval England in Middle English with extensive linguistic and critical notes.

A wide-ranging survey of the most important medieval authors and genres, designed for students of English.

Reading Old English Biblical Poetry considers the Junius 11 manuscript, the only surviving illustrated book of Old English poetry, in terms of its earliest readers and their multiple strategies of reading and making meaning. Junius 11 begins with the creation story and ends with the final vanquishing of Satan by Jesus. The manuscript is both a continuous whole and a collection with discontinuities and functionally independent pieces. The chapters of Reading Old English Biblical Poetry propose multiple models for reader engagement with the texts in this manuscript, including selective and sequential reading, reading in juxtaposition, and reading in contexts within and outside of the pages of Junius 11. The study is framed by particular attention to the materiality of the manuscript and how that might have informed its early reception, and it broadens considerations of reading beyond those of the manuscript's compiler and possible patron. As a book, Junius 11 reflects a rich and varied culture of reading that existed in and beyond houses of God in England in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and it points to readers who had enough experience to select and find wisdom, narrative pleasure, and a diversity of other things within this or any book's contents.

This critical book studies in depth the transition from the 'medieval' to the 'Renaissance' periods in English literature.

The essays in this volume consider a range of poetic texts written in England between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, with the exception of works by Chaucer, and represent some of the exciting new developments in medieval studies over the last twenty years. The collection explores and interrogates the established canon of Middle English poetry and includes several studies of two major poems, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Piers Plowman, and essays on some less well-known works, including Havelok the Dane, The Owl and the Nightingale and The Flower and the Leaf. In a field that has been dominated by historical scholarship and conservative new criticism, Medieval English Poetry brings together some of the most controversial work currently being done in Middle English studies; this collection reveals the strength and depth of this research in feminist, Marxist, historicist, reader-response and deconstructionist method. It includes contributions from David Aers, Sheila Delany, Anne Middleton, and Lee Patterson. Stephanie Trigg's illuminating introduction examines some of the patterns that have emerged in the criticism of medieval literature this century, and pays particular attention to our constructions and definitions of the 'medieval'. The range of material covered, together with the detailed headnotes to each of the thirteen essays and the guide to further reading, make this book essential reading for all undergraduate and postgraduate students of Medieval English Literature.

This 1976 book is a study of the medieval English dream-poem set against classical and medieval visionary and religious writings.

First full-length study of birds and their metamorphoses as treated in a wide range of medieval poetry, from the Anglo-Saxons to Chaucer and Gower.

This book explores the anxious and unstable relationship between court poetry and various forms of authority, political and cultural, in England and Scotland at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Through poems by Skelton, Dunbar, Douglas, Hawes, Lyndsay and Barclay, it examines the paths by which court poetry and its narrators seek multiple forms of legitimation: from royal and institutional sources, but also in the media of script and print. The book is the first for some time to treat English and Scottish material of its period together, and responds to European literary contexts, the dialogue between vernacular and Latin matter, and current critical theory. In so doing it claims that public and occasional writing evokes a counter-discourse in the secrecies and subversions of medieval love-fictions. The result is a poetry that queries and at times cancels the very authority to speak that it so proudly promotes.

This volume brings together a selection of lectures and essays in which J.A. Burrow discusses the work of English poets of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries: Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and Hoccleve, as well as the anonymous authors of Pearl, Saint Erkenwald, and a pair of metrical romances. Six of the pieces address general issues, with some reference to French and Italian writings ('Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages', for example, or 'The Poet and the Book'); but most of them concentrate on particular English poems, such as Chaucer's Envoy to Scogan, Gower's Confessio Amantis, Langland's Piers Plowman, and Hoccleve's Series. Although some of the essays take account of the poet's life and times ('Chaucer as Petitioner', 'Hoccleve and the 'Court''), most are mainly concerned with the meaning and structure of the poems. What, for example, does the hero of Ipomadon hope to achieve by fighting, as he always does, incognito? Why do the stories in Piers Plowman all peter out so inconclusively? And how can it be that the narrator in Chaucer's Book of the Duchess so persistently fails to understand what he is told?