Stephen Kruger considers previously neglected material and arrives at a new understanding of this literary genre, and of medieval attitudes to dreaming in general.

Ancient and medieval labyrinths embody paradox, according to Penelope Reed Doob. Their structure allows a double perspective—the baffling, fragmented prospect confronting the maze-treader within, and the comprehensive vision available to those without. Mazes simultaneously assert order and chaos, artistry and confusion, articulated clarity and bewildering complexity, perfected pattern and hesitant process. In this handsomely illustrated book, Doob reconstructs from a variety of literary and visual sources the idea of the labyrinth from the classical period through the Middle Ages. Doob first examines several complementary traditions of the maze topos, showing how ancient historical and geographical writings generate metaphors in which the labyrinth signifies admirable complexity, while poetic texts tend to suggest that the labyrinth is a sign of moral duplicity. She then describes two common models of the labyrinth and explores their formal implications: the unicursal model, with no false turnings, found almost universally in the visual arts; and the multicursal model, with blind alleys and dead ends, characteristic of literary texts. This paradigmatic clash between the labyrinths of art and of literature becomes a key to the metaphorical potential of the maze, as Doob's examination of a vast array of materials from the classical period through the Middle Ages suggests. She concludes with linked readings of four "labyrinths of words": Virgil's Aeneid, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, Dante's Divine Comedy, and Chaucer's House of Fame, each of which plays with and transforms received ideas of the labyrinth as well as reflecting and responding to aspects of the texts that influenced it. Doob not only provides fresh theoretical and historical perspectives on the labyrinth tradition, but also portrays a complex medieval aesthetic that helps us to approach structurally elaborate early works. Readers in such fields as Classical literature, Medieval Studies, Renaissance Studies, comparative literature, literary theory, art history, and intellectual history will welcome this wide-ranging and illuminating book.

Combines literary and historiographical scholarship to examine Scottish writers who created a literary-cultural nationalist project by appropriating and subverting English literary models.

Seamus Heaney's engagement with medieval literature constitutes a significant body of work by a major poet including a landmark translation of "Beowulf". This title examines both Heaney's direct translations and his adaptation of medieval material in his original poems.

The contributions concerned with Scottish Medieval and Renaissance literature focus (1) on literary structures considered specifically Scottish, (2) on the European context in which Scottish poetry of these periods must be understood and (3) on relevant components of the Scottish socio-cultural setting. Two papers deal with early Scottish Gaelic and Orkney Norse literature. The contributions devoted to language are concerned with problems pertaining to historical and current problems of Scottish lexicography, morphology, syntax, phonology, place names and language status, as well as to comparative Germanic linguistics and socio-linguistics, both in connection with Scotland.

William Dunbar is a poet whose virtuosity is often praised, but rarely analyzed. This first major study of his work to be published in over ten years examines his view of himself as a major poet, or "makar," and the way he handles various poetic genres. It challenges the over-simplified and reductive views purveyed by some critics, that Dunbar is primarily a moralist or no more than a talented virtuoso. New emphasis is placed on the petitions, or begging-poems, and their use for poetic introspection. There is also a particularly full study of Dunbar's under-valued comic poems, and of the modes most congenial to him--notably parody, irony, "flyting" or invective, and black dream-fantasy. Taking account of recent scholarship, Priscilla Bawcutt explores the complex literary traditions available to Dunbar, both in Latin and the vernaculars, including "popular" and alliterative poetry as well as that of Chaucer and his followers. This original, learned, and critically searching book is set to become the leading analysis of one of the most fascinating and accomplished of medieval poets.