Ethan Campbell argues that a central feature of the Gawain-poet's Middle English works' moral rhetoric is anticlerical critique. Written in an era when clerical corruption was a key concern for polemicists such as Richard FitzRalph and John Wyclif, as well as satirical poets such as John Gower, William Langland, and Geoffrey Chaucer, the Gawain poems feature an explicit attack on hypocritical priests in the opening lines of Cleanness as well as more subtle critiques embedded within depictions of flawed priest-like characters.

A new analysis of the neglected genre of medieval Biblical poetry.Medieval England had a thriving culture of rewriting the Bible in art, drama, and literature in Latin, French and English. Middle English biblical poetry was central to this culture, and although these poems have suffered from critical neglect, sometimes dismissed as mere "paraphrase", they are rich, innovative and politically engaged. Read in the same gentry and noble households as secular romance, biblical poems borrow and adapt romance plots and motifs, present romance-inflected exotic settings, and share similar concerns: reputation, order, family and marriage. This book explores six poems from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that retell episodes from the Old Testament: the ballad-like Iacob and Iosep, two lives of Adam and Eve; an alliterative version of the Susanna story, the Pistel of Susan; and the Gawain-poet's Patience and Cleanness. Each chapter identifies new sources and influences for the poems, including from biblical glosses and manuscript illustration. The book also investigates the poems' relationships with contemporary cultures of literature and religion, including with secular romance, and offers new readings of each poem and its cultural functions, showing how they bridge the chasm between medieval Christian England and the Jews and pagans of the pre-Christian Mediterranean world. It also considers reading contexts, arguing that the poems and their manuscripts offer hints about the social class and gender of their household audiences.sses and manuscript illustration. The book also investigates the poems' relationships with contemporary cultures of literature and religion, including with secular romance, and offers new readings of each poem and its cultural functions, showing how they bridge the chasm between medieval Christian England and the Jews and pagans of the pre-Christian Mediterranean world. It also considers reading contexts, arguing that the poems and their manuscripts offer hints about the social class and gender of their household audiences.sses and manuscript illustration. The book also investigates the poems' relationships with contemporary cultures of literature and religion, including with secular romance, and offers new readings of each poem and its cultural functions, showing how they bridge the chasm between medieval Christian England and the Jews and pagans of the pre-Christian Mediterranean world. It also considers reading contexts, arguing that the poems and their manuscripts offer hints about the social class and gender of their household audiences.sses and manuscript illustration. The book also investigates the poems' relationships with contemporary cultures of literature and religion, including with secular romance, and offers new readings of each poem and its cultural functions, showing how they bridge the chasm between medieval Christian England and the Jews and pagans of the pre-Christian Mediterranean world. It also considers reading contexts, arguing that the poems and their manuscripts offer hints about the social class and gender of their household audiences.nder of their household audiences.

"From Becoming the Pearl-Poet, students and scholars alike can learn about the Pearl-poet and the five poems attributed to him, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and St Erkenwald, exploring key ideas that will inform a deeper understanding and appreciation of this medieval English writer's work"--

Hybridity in the Literature of Medieval England offers a wide-ranging exploration of hybridity in medieval English literature. Anxiety about hybridity surfaces in characters of mixed ethnic identity in the romances. But anxiety is found also in the intersection of the natural and the supernatural and its site can be located inside the human body’s unstable physical frame, living and dead, as much as in the cultural and social forces at work upon the human body politic at large. Hybridity is unlike other constructs of difference in that, while it is grounded in difference, hybridity points toward sameness. The four types of hybridity studied in medieval English literature show that hybridity can resolve the problems caused by difference. Understanding medieval hybridity can help us to deal with our own contemporary struggles with the mixtures of our own lives and societies.

The Historical Arthur and The Gawain Poet: Studies on Arthurian and Other Traditions delves into the origins of Arthur and reveals the author of the famous Gawain Manuscript. Its first part contains evidence for the Arthur of film and legend as a real person, a Celtic commander (not a king) who fought battles in North Britain during the terrible volcanic winter of 536-7, before dying a hero's death in a conflict on Hadrian's Wall. Its second part moves on to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an Arthurian poem on magic, near-death, and near-seduction. Its author has always been unknown, but Dr. Breeze uses arguments of the US scholar Ann W. Astell to date the text to 1387 and name the poet as Sir John Stanley (d. 1414), a Cheshire and Lancashire grandee. He can now be recognized as an artist of genius, comparable to Chaucer himself. What is said in this book on John Stanley and his circle thus allows the greatest advance in Arthurian Studies since 1934, when Walter Oakeshott discovered the Winchester Malory amongst manuscripts of an English school library.

Marie Borroff is a literary critic, poet and philologist as well as mediaevalist, with a particular interest in the powers and effects of poetic language. In this collection of essays she explores problems of central importance in the poetry of Chaucer and his nameless contemporary, the Gawain - or Pearl - poet. The work should be useful in the study of late-Middle English literature.

Reinvigorating the scholarly debate surrounding approaches to one of Chaucer's most notorious tales

The study of medieval literature has experienced a revolution in the last two decades, which has reinvigorated many parts of the discipline and changed the shape of the subject in relation to the scholarship of the previous generation. 'New' texts (laws and penitentials, women's writing, drama records), innovative fields and objects of study (the history of the book, the study of space and the body, medieval masculinities), and original ways of studying them (the Sociology of the Text, performance studies) have emerged. This has brought fresh vigour and impetus to medieval studies, and impacted significantly on cognate periods and areas. The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English brings together the insights of these new fields and approaches with those of more familiar texts and methods of study, to provide a comprehensive overview of the state of medieval literature today. It also returns to first principles in posing fundamental questions about the nature, scope, and significance of the discipline, and the directions that it might take in the next decade. The Handbook contains 44 newly commissioned essays from both world-leading scholars and exciting new scholarly voices. Topics covered range from the canonical genres of Saints' lives, sermons, romance, lyric poetry, and heroic poetry; major themes including monstrosity and marginality, patronage and literary politics, manuscript studies and vernacularity are investigated; and there are close readings of key texts, such as Beowulf, Wulf and Eadwacer, and Ancrene Wisse and key authors from Ælfric to Geoffrey Chaucer, Langland, and the Gawain Poet.

Offers a novel interpretation of Chaucer as a "fuzzy Jew", a conflicted descendant of Conversos, who created the complex antisemitic character of the Prioress. Following a psycho-historical approach, suggests that the Prioress was raped as a child by a father-figure and that she projects the blame onto the Jews, who were demonized by her society. Associates child victimization with the alleged victimization felt by Chaucer for his own suffering as a child belonging to a group that had to conceal its identity. In view of Chaucer's putative Jewish heritage, offers kabbalistic perspectives on his work.

This new volume in Genji studies comprises a collection of six individual essays by leading international scholars addressing the Tale of Genji Scrolls and the Tale of Genji texts in the context of new critical theory relating to cultural studies, narrative painting, narratology, comparative literature and a global view of medieval romance. Uniquely, it also links new critical theory with multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary interests. Increasingly, scholarly research views ‘reading’ The Tale of Genji Scrolls as an inseparable part of ‘reading’ the Tale of Genji itself. Hence this book, which is subdivided into three sections: Reading the Genji Scrolls; Reading the Genji Texts; Reading the Genji Romance. The contributors are Yukio Lippit (Harvard), Sano Midori (Gakushuin), Richard Okada (Princeton), Murakami Fuminobu (Hong Kong), Jeremy Tambling (Manchester) and Richard Stanley-Baker (formerly Hong Kong)