Readers have noticed that the fifteenth century saw a remarkable flourishing of poems written in conditions of physical captivity or on the subject of imprisonment. The largest body of this poetry is from the pen of Charles of Valois, duke of Orleans, who was captured by the English at the battle of Agincourt in 1415 and not released until 1440. The longest single poem on the subject is James I of Scotland's The Kingis Quair, purportedly written at the time of his release from an eighteen-year imprisonment in England .This volume reflects the wide scope of these prison poems by bringing together a new edition of The Kingis Quair, a selection from Charles d'Orleans' Fortunes Stabilnes, a poem by George Ashby, who was imprisoned in London's Fleet prison, and the poems of two other poets, both anonymous, who wrote about physical and/or emotional imprisonment.

John Somer was one of the leading English astronomers of the late fourteenth century. Geoffrey Chaucer likely consulted Somer’s Kalendarium to relate dates, times, and movements of the stars and planets to events in his tales. In her introduction to this scholarly edition, Linne Mooney discusses not only Somer’s importance but also Chaucer’s use of the Kalendarium in composing his texts from The Parliament of Fowls through The Canterbury Tales. She examines the thirty-three complete and nine fragmentary copies of the work known today and explains Somer’s innovative and influential eclipse tables, adopted by some scribes in later copies of the Kalendarium of Nicholas of Lynn, a contemporary of Somer’s. Somer’s Kalendarium itself is presented in the original Latin text with English translation on facing pages. Mooney also provides full textual apparatus for the eleven complete manuscripts closest to the base text.

Remembering Boethius explores the rich intersection between the reception of Boethius and the literary construction of aristocratic identity, focusing on a body of late-medieval vernacular literature that draws on the Consolation of Philosophy to represent and reimagine contemporary experiences of exile and imprisonment. Elizabeth Elliott presents new interpretations of English, French, and Scottish texts, including Machaut's Confort d'ami, Remede de Fortune, and Fonteinne amoureuse, Jean Froissart's Prison amoureuse, Thomas Usk's Testament of Love, and The Kingis Quair, reading these texts as sources contributing to the development of the reader's moral character. These writers evoke Boethius in order to articulate and shape personal identities for public consumption, and Elliott's careful examination demonstrates that these texts often write not one life, but two, depicting the relationship between poet and aristocratic patron. These works associate the reception of wisdom with the cultivation of memory, and in turn, illuminate the contemporary reception of the Consolation as a text that itself focuses on memory and describes a visionary process of education that takes place within Boethius's own mind. In asking how and why writers remember Boethius in the Middle Ages, this book sheds new light on how medieval people imagined, and reimagined, themselves.