Middle English Texts Series

The Middle English Texts Series, launched in 1990, is designed to make available texts that occupy an important place in the literary and cultural canon but have not been readily obtainable in student editions. The series does not include such authors as Chaucer, Langland, or Malory, whose English works are normally in print in good student editions. Rather, the focus is on Middle English literature adjacent to those authors, literature that teachers need to construct the syllabuses they wish to teach.

The editions maintain the linguistic integrity of the original work but remain within the parameters of modern reading conventions. The texts are printed in the modern alphabet and follow the practices of modern capitalization and punctuation. Manuscript abbreviations are expanded, and u/v and j/i spellings are regularized according to modern orthography. Hard words, difficult phrases, and unusual idioms are glossed, either in the right margin or at the foot of the page. Textual notes and a glossary appear at the end of the text. The editions include short introductions on the history of the work, its merits and points of topical interest, and brief annotated bibliographies. Perhaps best of all, the volumes are priced affordably.

"The Middle English Texts series . . . has been this generation's most beneficial pedagogical tool for studying medieval English. . . . Designed for students, these texts are genuine scholarly achievements. Helpfully annotated and glossed, they are affordable, practical, and handsome."—from Speculum 77 (Apr. 2002)

“Composed in rhyming English verse, [the Northern Homily Cycle] is the earliest and most complete work of its kind [Gospel paraphrases with homilies on the theme of the Gospel texts], its widespread and enduring popularity witnessed by three distinct recensions and twenty surviving manuscripts ranging from the early fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth centuries. . . . The collection was intended to accompany the Gospel lessons that were read every Sunday as part of the mass.”—from the Introduction

“[Derek Pearsall, reviewing the first edition] An excellent edition and a worthy addition to the TEAMS series.”—Arthuriana 7 (Winter 1997)

In A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, "Amis and Amiloun," "Robert of Cisyle," and "Sir Amadace" are classified by Lillian Herlands Hornstein as Legendary Romances of Didactic Intent, which does not mean that they are devoid of liveliness or interest.

" Amis," produced in the East Midlands in the late thirteenth century, "was popular in many versions throughout Europe, but the Middle English version," according to Edward Foster, "is especially lively, entertaining, and perplexing. The pace of the narrative, despite its frequent formulaic language, has a forward impulse that drives the characters from one moral dilemma to another with speed and clarity."—from the Introduction

" Robert of Cisyle" was also a common and popular story. Like the medieval tragedies recounted in Chaucer's The Monk's Tale, it recounts the story of the fall of a great man and his ultimate triumph once he has been thoroughly humiliated. It is, thus, certainly didactic, "but it is not a slender or careless redundancy. It is a lively, powerful, and sometimes charmingly playful statement of a fundamental and gratifying Christian principle."—from the Introduction

The stress in "Sir Amadace" is on material things: "Amadace's original plight is material, his succor of the unburied knight is material, the white knight's assistance to him is material, his redemption is material . . . , and his ultimate happiness is material." "[I]ts lesson," Professor Foster concludes, "may be more commercial than spiritual and therein lies its special fascination."—from the Introduction

“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. It also requires some detective work. Leaving aside complications generated by the framing fiction and the presence of the dreamer, the “plot” of the dream vision is deceptive in its simplicity. In it a lady is seen confessing to a secret desire for a man she is forbidden or unable to love but with whom, in the latter stages of the vision, she becomes joined in a cryptic extramarital ceremony conducted by Venus. The goddess instructs the couple to wait until some unspecified obstacle is removed, which will eventually allow them to consummate their love. What holds them back until then? . . .
“ Seducing readers with possibilities remains what The Temple of Glas does best, and that special magnetism speaks not only to the provenance and textual history of Lydgate’s poem but also to its literary qualities.”—from the Introduction

“The Book of John Mandeville has tended to be neglected by modern teachers and scholars, yet this intriguing and copious work has much to offer the student of medieval literature, history, and culture. [It] was a contemporary bestseller, providing readers with exotic information about locales from Constantinople to China and about the social and religious practices of peoples such as the Greeks, Muslims, and Brahmins. The Book first appeared in the middle of the fourteenth century and by the next century could be found in an extraordinary range of European languages: not only Latin, French, German, English, and Italian, but also Czech, Danish, and Irish. Its wide readership is also attested by the two hundred fifty to three hundred medieval manuscripts that still survive today. . . . Chaucer borrowed from it, as did the Gawain-poet in the Middle English Cleanness, and its popularity continued long after the Middle Ages.”—from the Introduction

“In the late 1400s in eastern England, a scribe was in the process of compiling a large dramatic manuscript of over two hundred vellum folios. No one knows who compiled them nor where, why, or for whom this work was done. . . . The manuscript contains components of an independent Mary Play, parts one and two of an independent Passion Play, and an independent Assumption of Mary Play, as well as ten play subjects that appear in no other English cycles—the killing of Lamech in the Noah Play, the Root of Jesse, the story of Joachim and Anne, the Presentation of Mary in the Temple, the Parliament of Heaven, the Trial of Mary and Joseph, the scene of Mary and the cherry tree in the Nativity Play, the Death of Herod, the scene of Veronica’s handkerchief in the Procession to Calvary, and the appearance of the risen Christ to the Virgin Mary in her Assumption Play. . . . This edition acknowledges the N-Town compiler who took plays from various contexts and integrated them into an existing cycle of plays, thus treating the manuscript as if it were a superstructure whose parts could be replaced, renovated, and supplemented without altering the fundamental coherence of the overarching design.”—from the Introduction

“Faced with death’s certainty—and the uncertainty of the time of its coming, particularly in a historical period of widespread plague and other afflictions—as well as the inevitability of the hereafter, what is one to do? Everyman speaks to this dilemma. . . . The protagonist is one who, because he has laid up treasures on earth, has been in a position to do good deeds, but he has been very lax about it and instead has pursued enjoyment and wealth, the latter hoarded instead of being shared with the poor and needy. . . . Now he must, as the medieval mystics knew, endure the solitariness of leaving behind all that has given him comfort in this world. . . .
“Though it is derived from the Dutch Elckerlijc, we can still say that Everyman is a superb work. . . . We feel that it fully deserves its high reputation, but we also think that its origin in Continental theater deserves attention in the classroom, in anthologies, and in general in theater studies. . . . For this reason we have provided the original Dutch text, with translation, and the English Everyman on facing pages in the present edition.”—from the Introduction

“At the forefront of the medieval wisdom tradition was The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers, a long prose text that purports to be a compendium of lore collected from biblical, classical, and legendary philosophers and sages. Dicts and Sayings was a well-known work that traveled across many lands and was translated into many languages. It became popular in England in the fifteenth century, and cemented its place in English literary history on 18 November 1477, when William Caxton printed an edition of Dicts and Sayings that was perhaps the first book ever printed in England. . . . Dicts and Sayings is presented as a series of truisms handed down from a wise speaker to a receptive audience. The text introduces its audience to a long series of eminent wise men, with each philosopher’s words of wisdom being preceded by a biographical story that ranges from a few words to several manuscript pages.” —from the Introduction

“Sir Isumbras, Octavian, Sir Eglamour of Artois, and Sir Tryamour are important works in a major literary development of the fourteenth century: the flourishing of Middle English popular romance. These four narratives were among the most popular; all survive in multiple manuscripts and continued to circulate in prints through the sixteenth century. All were composed in the northeast Midlands in the fifty years between 1325 and 1375, and they appear together in several manuscripts. . . . The tale the romances tell—of exiled queens, orphaned children, and penitent fathers—was one of the most prevalent medieval stories. Sometimes called the Constance/Eustace legend (after two well-known pious versions), its influence can be seen in numerous romances. . . . Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century audiences must have found the story compelling.” —from the Introduction

Volume 1 contains the Prologue and Books 1 and 8, in effect the overall structure of Gower's poem. Volume 2 contains Books 2, 3, and 4, which follow in their structure the outline of Vice and its children found in the early French poem the Mirour de l'Omme. Volume 3 contains Books 5, 6, and 7, which follow another kind of development as Gower shifts from romance banter and formulaic confession to philosophical inquiry.

The Confessio Amantis is written to provide a bridge between the past and an anticipated future, a bridge that gives its audience a better sense of the present. It is a bookish poem, rooted in old texts, but it is also fiercely directed toward the welfare of late fourteenth-century England. In the tales it tells moral assessment takes place through the nuances of fiction and testimonial confession: the tales stand as ensamples for stocktaking and are central to the poem's overall strategy of using entertainment for the winning of social and mental health, and in hope of God's pardon.

Volume 1, Second Edition
Copyright 2006, pp. xii + 334
ISBN 978-1-58044-102-5 (paperbound only) $22.00

Volume 2
Copyright 2003, pp. viii + 418
ISBN 1-58044-047-9 (paperbound only) $20.00

Volume 3
Copyright 2004, pp. x + 546
ISBN 1-58044-092-4 (paperbound only) $20.00

This volume presents a unique collection of Middle English romances, each with a different view of society. One of the oldest English romances, Floris and Blancheflour, presents a tale of oriental wonders: a harem, an emir who never lacks a wife, eunuchs, and a garden housing a magical tree and spring. Sir Degrevant relates a tale of country nobility and marriage between the low and high ranks, while realistically illustrating their status and the ever-present issues of love and battle; The Squire of Low Degree is a poem about social mobility and the difference between reputation and wealth. The Tournament of Tottenham and its likely continuation, The Feast of Tottenham, are excellent examples of burlesque where “the humor is inescapable: the bumpkin heroes in their stuffed sheepskins fighting with flails for the reeve’s daughter, who is watching them with her pet hen on her lap, are a spectacle not easily forgotten.”—from the Introductions

“The poems in this volume were prized and preserved because of their association with Chaucer’s name and have been, paradoxically, almost entirely ignored by modern readers for the same reason. . . . [M]any of these pieces are worthy of study, not only in the context of Chaucerian reception, but also as specimens of the kinds of vernacular poetry that circulated in late medieval manuscripts and which remained in print, largely by the accidental virtue of their association with Chaucer, throughout the Renaissance and well into the nineteenth century. The various genres represented in this sampler—the dream vision, good counsel, female panegyric, mass parody, proverbial wisdom, lover’s dialogue, prophecy, advice to princes, elegiac complaint, courtly parody, and anti-feminist satire—attest to the diversity of late medieval literary tastes and to the flexibility of the courtly idiom. . . . [I]n the sixteenth century both Chaucer’s poetry and the diverse works with which it circulated appear to have continued to have been valued for their perceived courtly qualities. . . . Chaucer’s early scribal and print editors also appear to have prized his sphere of influence (attested to by imitation, continuation, and emendation) and his adaptability to contemporary social and political needs.”—from the Introduction

“That John Gower’s minor Latin poems should be among the last of his works to be translated into his native English in a way is apt, since they seem to have been among the last poetry he wrote. . . . Gower’s achievement in writing substantially in all three primary languages of his time —Anglo-French, English, and Latin—was a source of pride to others and, undoubtedly, to him too: into the final years of his life he continued to produce poetry in all three languages. . . . Certainly there is reason to know these poems for the light they shed on the intense partisanship and events of great moment surrounding the usurpation 1399-1400, . . . it was during these parlous times that Gower composed most of the poems included here. . . . All are important documents historically; but they are also poems admirable equally for their skill and craft.”

“In Praise of Peace [is] in the same position as the shorter Latin works edited and translation in this volume: ignored, neglected, reduced, or relegated to the dusty realm of footnotes. But there is far more at work in this complex poem, as Gower’s verse deftly weaves in and out of the historical, political, social, and religious contexts and controversies of its day. . . . The literal refashioning of lines, which even extends to Gower’s Latin works, corresponds to the general recapitulation of his career themes in this poem, and reveals various levels at which Gower’s revisionary process unfolds. . . . The tone of . . . In Praise of Peace is, if not triumphant, determinedly optimistic. In this light, we might view the poem as a coda to Gower’s long career, restating and reinvigorating his famously moral principles about just rule of self and society.”—from the Introductions

THE KINGIS QUAIR AND OTHER PRISON POEMS
edited by Linne R. Mooney and Mary-Jo Arn

“Readers have noticed that the fifteenth century saw a remarkable flourishing of poems written either 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 Orléans, 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’Orléans’ 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. . . . In the hands of a good writer [prison poetry] was a vibrant and flexible literary tool for organizing and giving power to the thought of a poet, whether on the vagaries of the pursuit of love, on fortune, on the nature of this world, or on faith in God.”—from the Introduction

SAINTS' LIVES IN MIDDLE ENGLISH COLLECTIONS
edited by E. Gordon Whatley,
with Anne B. Thompson and Robert K. Upchurch

This volume is conceived as a complement to another METS text, Sherry Reames' Middle English Legends of Women Saints, concentrating chiefly on the lives of male saints (Andrew, George, Jerome, Benedict, Austin [Augustine of Canterbury], Francis, and Julian), through two women saints are included—Thaïs and Scholastica. As the introduction notes, this selection "is intended to be broadly representative of saints' lives in Middle English and of the classic types of hagiographic legend as these were presented to the lay public and less-literate clergy of late medieval England." The legends themselves are drawn both from collections of saints' lives such as the South English Legendary and the Scottish Legendary and from independently composed lives such as Simon Winter's Life of Saint Jerome, and arranged "so as to constitute a 'legendary history' of post-New Testament Christianity in seven parts." And although hagiography is notoriously unreliable as history, the introduction notes that "[l]egends such as those printed here . . . provided generations of medieval people, both lay and clerical, with a stately procession of figures that constituted the Christian past, as well as being still 'present' as glorious members of the body of Christ, the communion of saints."

SIEGE OF JERUSALEM
edited by Michael Livingston

The fourteenth-century Siege of Jerusalem has been called by Ralph Hanna "the chocolate-covered tarantula of the alliterative movement" for its apparent anti-Semitism and is, as Livingston notes in his introduction, "simply difficult for twenty-first-century readers to like." The poem, which describes the destruction of the Second Temple by Roman forces in AD 70, is graphic in detail and unpleasant in its relish of the suffering of the Jews. But as Livingston points out, "Like the gritty violence of Alliterative Morte Arthure, the gore in Siege is perhaps best read as a grim awareness of the terrible realities of war, not as a bloodthirsty and berserk cry for further bloodshed. The poem chronicles a historical war, and it is this historical quality that must stand out: the poem not only has resonances of the bloodshed that battle inevitably brings, but it also is, in a very literal sense, history. That is to say, the war is over. The vengeance of Jesus has been accomplished. The Siege-poet's answer to the social-political-religious question of whether there is such a thing as a just war is that there was one: Titus and Vespasian's vengeance for the death of Christ. . . . Further efforts to avenge Christ were unnecessary. . . . That the poem is a call to action and to crusade, then, seems to be a claim that is far less sustainable than its opposite: a call to peace and to remembrance."

Scottish poet William Dunbar is usually considered one of the most important figures in fifteenth-century British literature, and may lay claim to being the finest lyric poet writing in English in the century and a half between the death of Chaucer in 1400 and the appearance of Tottel’s Miscellany in 1557. Dunbar’s poems offer vivid depictions of late medieval Scottish society and serve up a striking pageant of colorful figures at the court of James IV (r. 1488–1513), with which he was associated for much of his adult life. The poems are remarkable both for their diversity and variability and for their multiplicity of voices, styles, and tones. The great variety of poems within Dunbar’s canon includes religious hymns of exaltation, moral poems on a wide range of serious themes, comic and parodic poems of extreme salaciousness and scatological coarseness, general satires against the times, and satires with much more specific targets, often a single individual. — from the Introduction This edition of eighty-four poems attributed to Dunbar includes extensive background material and explanatory notes that are sure to be of interest to students and Dunbar enthusiasts alike. The edition is rounded out with textual notes, an index of first lines, and a glossary.

Copyright 2004, pp. x + 478
ISBN 1-58044-086-X (paperbound only) $25.00

“With the exception of the Scottish Quare of Jelusy, the poems in this volume [The Boke of Cupid, God of Love; A Complaynte of a Lovers Lyfe; The Quare of Jelusy; La Belle Dame sans Mercy] were all attributed to Chaucer by early compilers or editors of his work in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and were not removed from the Chaucer canon until the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, when they became identified simply as Chaucerian. Yet despite the use of “Chaucerian” in the title, this volume seeks to reassess the appropriateness of examining late-medieval poetry mainly in terms of its debt to Chaucer. . . . Focusing on resemblances to Chaucer often demotes works to the status of imitation and directs attention away from invention, variation, or other aspects of late-medieval generic and formal developments.”—from the Introduction

Copyright 2004, pp. viii + 298
ISBN 1-58044-087-8 (paperbound only) $22.00

The Stanzaic Guy of Warwick, which survives only in the Auchinleck Manuscript, deals with the later years of Guy’s life, beginning with his return to Warwick after having established himself on the Continent as a pre-eminent model of knighthood. After his marriage, however, he is stricken by remorse for the very actions that have brought him fame, and he sets out anonymously on a series of pilgrimages of atonement during which he will have to fight three last battles before he can return home to die as a hermit. As Wiggins notes in her introduction, these battles represent “the obstacles or temptations that the Christian pilgrim must overcome on the path of life.” Over the course of the poem, we see Guy’s pilgrimage as a physical journey, from Warwick to the Holy Land and back, but also as a moral journey in which Guy fulfills his social role as a crusading knight and an interior journey during the course of which Guy draws ever closer to union with God.

Though our modern understanding of the medieval doctrine of Purgatory is generally shaped by its presentation by Dante in the Divine Comedy, there is a lenthy history of speculation about the nature of such a place of purgation. Through these fourteenth-century Middle English poems, readers can experience something of the controversies that surfaced and resurfaced even after Aquinas had articulated his doctring of the Communion of Saints. The Gast of Guy, as Foster notes, "puts a human face on the doctring of Purgatory, not only in the amiable, logical, and patient person of the Gast of Guy himself, …but also in the careful and cautious dialogue between the Gast and the Pryor who questions him." Sir Owain and The Vision of Tundale present two accounts of the purgatorial journeys of living individuals who are offered a chance to see the torments they have brought upon themselves by their less-than-perfect lives along with the opportunity to return and amend those lives. All three poems were quite popular, as was the doctring of Purgatory itself. And why not? As Foster notes in his general introduction, "it [the doctrine of Purgatory] had everything: adventure and adversity, suffering and excitement, and, most importantly, a profound theological warning wrapped in the joyful solace of communion with the departed and hope for our own sinful selves."

Long before the movie Braveheart, William Wallace's ferocious pursuit of independence for Scotland was chronicled by a Scottish poet known only as Hary or Blind Hary. As Anne McKim notes in her introduction, "The Wallace catalogues the sheer brutality of war. We are regaled with such detailed accounts of the sacking of towns and the burning down of buildings full of screaming inhabitants that the smells and sounds, as well as the terrible sights of war, are graphically conveyed... [in language which] seems designed not only to express Wallace's rage and Hary's antipathy but also to incite hatred of the English in his readers."

Middle English Legends of Women Saints presents a collection of saints' Lives intended to suggest the diversity of possibilities beneath the supposedly fixed and predictable surfaces of the legends, using multiple retellings of the same legend to illustrate that medieval readers and listeners did not just passively receive saints' legends but continually and actively appropriated them. The collection opens with legends about two royal (or supposedly royal) women, Frideswide and Mary Magdalen, and continues with those of three popular virgin martyrs, Margaret of Antioch, Christina of Tyre, and Katherine of Alexandria. The final portion of the collection is devoted to St. Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary. The collection includes a number of relatively unknown texts that have not appeared in print since Horstmann's transcriptions in the nineteenth century and a few that have never before been published.

The disparate texts in this anthology, produced in England between the late thirteenth and the early sixteenth centuries, challenge, and in some cases parody and satirize, the institution of marriage. "In so doing," according to the Introduction, "they allow us to interrogate the traditional assumptions that shape the idea of the medieval household. The trials of marriage seem to outweigh its joys at times and, as some of these texts suggest, maintaining a sense of humor in the face of what must have been great difficulty could have been no easy task."

The texts bridge generic categories. Some are obscure, written by anonymous authors; others are familiar, written by the likes of John Lydgate, John Wyclif, and William Dunbar. Taken together they suggest that, despite the fact that marriage had become a sacrament in the twelfth century and was increasingly recognized by ecclesiastical and secular authorities as a valuable social institution, it was not always a stabilizing and orderly social force.

Pearl resists identification by author, date, occasion, or place of composition; still it is almost unanimously hailed as one of the masterpieces of our literature, so skilled is its author, so eloquent its language.

It is a story, according to Sarah Stanbury, "of crossing-over, the stepping out from the ordinary life into a parallel universe where things operate by different natural laws: down the rabbit hole, through the wardrobe or looking glass, across the ocean to be shipwrecked on Prospero's island or, more recently, across a bridge to the island of Willow Springs in Gloria Naylor's haunting novel, Mama Day, where the crossing-over moves into a place of memory and hope, the nostalgic space of home as well as Beulah or Eden, the earthly paradise."

John Lydgate's The Siege of Thebes, written c. 1421-22, is the only Middle English poetic text that recounts the fratricidal struggle between Oedipus's sons Eteocles and Polynices as they contend for the lordship of Thebes. It is consciously presented as an added Canterbury Tale and, as such, is represented as the structural counterpart to Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale."

The Siege of Thebes reflects the problem of poetic authority and the political and ethical themes of Lydgate's poetic career in the 1420s, when he was writing as a Lancastrian propagandist and as unofficial royal poet.

"Ancrene Wisse or the 'Anchoresses' Guide' (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402), written sometime roughly between 1225 and 1240, represents a revision of an earlier work, usually called the Ancrene Riwle or 'Anchorites' Rule,' a book of religious instruction for three lay women of noble birth, sisters, who had themselves enclosed as anchoresses somewhere in the West Midlands, perhaps somewhere between Worcester and Wales. The author was apparently either an Augustinian canon or a Dominican friar, and by the time of the revision, Ancrene Wisse's readership had expanded to include a much wider community of anchoresses, over twenty in number according to the text, scattered mainly in the west of England.

"This edition aims to provide a reading text of the Corpus version of AW, though it is not a full critical edition in one important sense: it is not based on a full collation . . . of all the versions. Instead, other manuscripts are consulted only when Corpus has gone wrong in some way, either by recording a mistaken form or by omitting text inadvertently."—from the Introduction

Walter Hilton's The Scale of Perfection maintains a secure place among the major religious treatises composed in fourteenth-century England. This guide to the contemplative life, written in two books of more than 40,000 words each, is notable for its careful explorations of its religious themes and also as a monument of Middle English prose. Its popularity is attested by the fact that some forty-two manuscripts containing one or both of the books survive, with a relatively large number of manuscripts with Book I alone, which suggests it may have been the more popular of the two.

Hilton (born c. 1343) was a member of the religious order known as the Augustinian Canons. There is reason to believe that he was trained in canon law and studied at the University of Cambridge. He was the author of a number of works in English and Latin, all much shorter than The Scale. He died at the Augustinian Priory of Thurgarton in Nottinghamshire in 1396. On the basis of the content of certain of his works it can be safely inferred that he was actively involved in some of the religious controversies current in England in the 1380s and 1390s, and his principal concern, evident in The Scale, is to defend orthodox belief, especially in the conduct of the contemplative life.

"This volume makes available two somewhat neglected yet significant and instructive Middle English alliterative texts that are usually read in conjunction with William Langland's Piers Plowman. The texts, both anonymous, are Richard the Redeless, which concerns the governmental style of Richard II (1367-1400; reigned 1377-99), and Mum and the Sothsegger, which addresses social issues in the reign of Henry IV (1367-1413; reigned 1399-1413). They should be assigned reading not only for those interested in the later reception of Piers Plowman but also for those seeking to understand literary and historical forces in late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England. Richard the Redeless-focusing on events in and around 1399-offers an often regretful, sometimes sharp critique of Richard's kingship under the guise of advice; Mum and the Sothsegger provides a satirical look at bureaucratic institutions during Henry's regime. Both works reveal that alliterative poetry in the Piers Plowman tradition continued to be the chief vehicle for political and social criticism at the turn of the fourteenth century."—from the Preface

John Capgrave's The Life of Saint Katherine, written c. 1463 in Lynn in Norfolk, is, according to the editor, ". . . the longest and most intricate Katherine legend written during the Middle Ages, either in Latin or in any vernacular."

In telling the story of the life of the virgin martyr, Katherine, Capgrave uses many of the tropes that mark the enormously popular genre of hagiography as it was written throughout the Middle Ages. Given his learning, however, and his evident acquaintance with the works of Chaucer, Lydgate, and Osburn Bokenham, and his knowledge of medieval drama, and the possibility that he knew of The Book of Margery Kempe, this saint's life should be particularly interesting to students of late Middle English culture, especially literature.

In the course of his encyclopedic narrative, in which he evidently sought to appeal to a broad audience in sophisticated, if provincial, Norfolk, Capgrave inserts digressions on Greek and Roman history; on just and unjust rule and justifiable vs. unjustifiable rebellion; on child care; on medieval English feasts, jousts, and pageants; and on the role(s) of women.

Thomas Hoccleve was born in 1367 and entered government service as clerk in the office of the Privy Seal in 1387, an office that he held until his death in 1426. His earliest datable poem—the Epistle of Cupid, a free translation of Christine de Pisan's "Epistre au Dieu d'Amour"—was completed about 1402.

The Regiment of Princes, written about 1410-11, was composed at a time when England was still feeling the consequences of the deposition of Richard II. Essentially it is addressed to a prince on the subject of his governance, but it exhibits considerable generic instability and thus raises fundamental questions about how we should understand the tone of considerable portions of the poem.

For all the problems it presents, The Regiment shows that Hoccleve has strengths as a poet. At times he could be a very talented prosodist. In autobiographical sections of the poem he creates a most interesting early-modern subjectivity. He has distinctive observations to make about his time, and, in his self-critical awareness, probes the limits of what it means to be a poet writing in the wake of Chaucer.

The Assembly of Gods is an anonymous English dream vision allegory produced, probably, in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. Its author owes much to the "traditions" of English poetry that Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate introduced. Within the framework of the dream vision he blends didacticism with the mythological and the courtly, and seeks to bring Reson and Sensualyté into accord by means of an assembly of the classical gods that is called to adjudicate the relative merits of Discorde's desire to overthrow Vertu.

The Assembly of Gods is unusual in its combination of classical and Christian images, but, despite its association with Chaucer and its popularity as a printed text in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries it has received little critical attention during the twentieth century. The present edition replaces that of Oscar Lovell Triggs which was published by the Early English Text Society in 1896 and reprinted by Oxford University Press in 1957.

The romances in this volume contain some of the finest imaginative work of what is known as the Matter of England, the non-Arthurian romances that deal largely with English subjects and locales.

They are notable for the attention they pay to the socio-political issues contained within folktale motifs rather than for their interest in the nuances of courtly behavior, and they and other manuscript evidence suggest that romance reading in England was hardly confined to the nobility but became part of the effort of an increasingly prosperous and literate middle class to model itself after the upper class.

These romances span a broad period of the Middle Ages, from c. 1225 (King Horn) to c. 1355-99 (Athelston). They combine social realism with superhuman or supernatural events in forms that offer their heroes potentialities for expression and possibilities for transformation that few, if any, other genres provide.

How the works of Geoffrey Chaucer were read and interpreted by his near contemporaries in the fifteenth century has become a central focus of Chaucer scholarship in the past two decades. John Metham's Amoryus and Cleopes can be seen as a key piece in the reception of Chaucer's works.

Written about 1449, it was produced just at the time of the death of John Lydgate, Chaucer's most prolific English follower, and before the rise of Scottish Chaucerians. In the poem Metham adopts Chaucer's tone and borrows narrative strategies and details of scenes from such Ovidian tales as The Book of the Duchess and from the romance-epic masterpiece Troilus and Criseyde.
Metham does not slavishly imitate Chaucer, however; instead, he adapts features of the master's works to his own ultimately moral purpose, fusing them with elements of classical tale, courtly and popular romance, encyclopedic compendium, hagiography, mirror for princes, and encomium, to create a tightly constructed late-medieval romance.

Of special interest is an embedded fourteen-line love lyric that has a rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg and that anticipates any other extant English sonnet by eighty years.

The mother of Jesus was a beloved, central figure in the hearts and minds of medieval Christians. Non-judgmental, gracious, and kind, she served as an ever-available mediator and model for believers who sought to reconcile guilt and hope.

The poems selected for this volume provide a sampling of the rich tradition of Marian devotion as expressed in Middle English. Some of these lyrics survived in commonplace books, on flyleaves, or as incidental pieces in longer works; other appeared in liturgical manuscripts, hymnals, or sermon notebooks. They range widely in form, tone, and aesthetic quality. Taken together, they express the full range of a people's effort to voice its anxieties and joys through Mary.

The Middle English Prose Merlin gives students of medieval Arthurian literature access—though at one remove—to the Merlin section of the Old French Vulgate Cycle, an interconnected set of Arthurian works composed during the first half of the thirteenth century.

Written in the latter half of the fifteenth century, it is a treasure trove of characters, incidents, and motifs, many of which are found nowhere else in Arthurian literature. Students of English Arthurian literature will find it particularly important since it stands in dramatic literary counterpoint to the story of Merlin that Sir Thomas Malory tells in his nearly contemporaneous Morte D'Arthur.

This edition of The Testament of Love is the first to be published since W. W. Skeat undertook the task in 1897. Since the work does not exist in any copy from Usk's lifetime but only in William Thynne's 1532 edition of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and Others, produced nearly 150 years after Usk's death, "traditional" editing was impossible. Instead, in this edition, a diplomatic transcription of Thynne is printed with, contrapuntally, a pointed version of the text which represents the efforts of R. Allen Shoaf, the editor, to construe it.

In Professor Shoaf's words: "I offer the contemporary reader the constant choice, in the absence of any other choice, between the sixteenth-century editor's, Thynne's, construction of Usk and the twentieth-century editor's construction of Usk, mine."—from the Introduction

"Troy Book is one of the most ambitious attempts in medieval vernacular poetry to recount the story of the Trojan war. John Lydgate, monk of the great Benedictine abbey of Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, began composing the poem in October 1412 on commission from Henry, Prince of Wales, later King Henry V, and he completed it in 1420. Lydgate's poem is a translation and expansion of Guido delle Colonne's Historia destructionis Troiae, a Latin prose account written in 1287 but based, without acknowledgement, on Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Old French Roman de Troie (c. 1160). Troy Book presents the full narrative and mythographic sweep that the Middle Ages expected for the story of Troy's tragic downfall. Though Lydgate wrote the poem some three decades after Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, it furnishes the essential background that educated medieval readers would have brought to Chaucer's poem and to Chaucer's source, Boccaccio's Filostrato. It is background as well for the myths of origins adopted by medieval nations and regions, which claimed descent from the heroes driven to new lands by Troy's fall."—from the Introduction

Editions of Thomas of Hales' Love Rune; In a Valley of This Restless Mind; The Dispute between Mary and the Cross; The Four Leaves of the Truelove; The Bird with Four Feathers; Pety Job; and The Sinner's Lament.

"These moral love songs and laments . . . illustrate how, in the devout medieval English sensibility, doctrine was vitally connected to affective receptivity. One may grasp intellectually the theology of redemption and grace, but only through one's heart-felt response to God's offering of love (in Incarnation and Passion) may one gain these rewards. High emotionalism marks these poems' penitential lyricism. Narrative moods range from love-longing and passion to bitter grief and sorrowful lament, feelings that devolve from the intimately personal state of being God's created creature, individually answerable to divine law and love. Whatever emotion holds sway, these lyric songs anatomize the human side of love and raise its expression to the godly sphere, either as one's yearning for God or as God's reciprocal love for human-kind."—from the Introduction

"Robert Henryson is a significant poetic voice of the late Middle Ages and the most important writer of fifteenth-century Scotland."—from the Introduction

One of the so-called "Scottish Chaucerians," Robert Henryson was a master of forms and tones, from the sometimes antic, sometimes satiric wit of The Morall Fabillis to the painful dignity of The Testament of Cresseid.

Here all of Henryson's work is freshly edited, including Orpheus and Eurydice and the shorter lyrics. An Introduction and Select Bibliography are provided for each work, and Notes and Glossary are included to help students with the vagaries of Middle Scots.

In an Appendix, Anne McKim edits The Laste Epistle of Creseyd to Troyalus, which is not by Robert Henryson but which complements The Testament and the great tale that Chaucer tells.

Here, for the first time, is a comprehensive collection of materials that deal with Robin Hood and such other "outlaw" figures as Hereward the Wake, Eustache the Monk, and Fouke le Fitz Waryn. The anthology is divided into the following sections: General Introduction and Select Bibliography; the Chroniclers' Robin Hood; Early Ballads and Tales; Robin Hood Plays; Later Ballads; Other Outlaw Tales in Prose Translation.

In this text the figure of Robin Hood can be viewed in historical perspective, from the early accounts in the Chronicles through the ballads, plays, and romances that grew around his fame and impressed him on our fictional and historical imaginations. He becomes, thus, a figure who is interesting in himself and in what his depiction tells us about changing cultural times and values.

"Written probably in the late 1430s, The Book of Margery Kempe is one of the most astonishing documents of late medieval English life. Its protagonist, who represents herself as its ultimate author, was not simply a woman but a woman thoroughly rooted in the world. She evinces the manners and the tastes neither of the court nor of the nunnery, but the piety, the culture, the profit-oriented values, and the status-consciousness of the late medieval town. As a member of the powerful guild of the Holy Trinity in the prosperous East Anglian town of Bishops Lynn, Margery Kempe wrote from a secure position within the very world she subjects to such careful scrutiny. Kempe examines the fundamental conflicts and tensions of that world by describing her gradual and voluntary movement away from worldly prestige. Margery's disengagement from conventional female roles and duties-and consequently her daring rejection of the values of her fellow townspersons-is a response to her growing commitment to her spiritual vocation. Her attempt to gain personal, financial, and spiritual autonomy is a tale of radical reversal that touches us on many different levels. Margery does what very few are able finally to do, and the fact that she does so as a woman enhances the force of her story-she breaks away."—from the Introduction

"The beauty of the universe is where Augustine begins his account of mystical experience . . . , and this preoccupation with the beautiful continues in Bonaventure and the Victorines. . . . [A]s even Augustine says, all of these beautiful things are signs that must grow silent in order to allow that which is most beautiful, the course and cause of all beauty, to speak from the depths of the divine darkness. The Cloud of Unknowing says nothing of beauty, but rather invites the reader immediately into this darkness."—from the Introduction

An edition of a Middle English mystical work that has great literary quality and aesthetic appeal. Since it was written The Cloud has attracted the attention of a diverse range of readers, from Robert Bateman, an influential seventeenth-century Baptist, to the novelist Aldous Huxley and the psychologist Ira Progoff. Here a new edition makes the work available to contemporary readers. A lengthy Introduction provides context; notes help elucidate problem areas in the text.

"This edition contains selected poems and documents-some not printed since the nineteenth century, others often reprinted-which help illuminate political issues in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. It makes available to teachers and students representative political poems and documents ranging from a Latin poem on the venality of judges (reign of Edward I) to an antifraternal, macaronic lyric of about 1490. Here one hears, represented, voices of the overtaxed farmer, the outraged or fearful cleric, and the somber prophet, voices which reveal the persistent concerns of educated classes, especially the clergy. None of these is optimistic about England's future. The authors of the poems and documents, mostly anonymous or pseudonymous, speak in the traditional language of complaint and satire; but the outlines of their anxiety are fairly clear. They worry about misuses of power (especially in the Church), about their wealth and taxes, and about declines in moral standards. Sometimes they attack the king—particularly Richard II, who governed a troubled realm from 1388 (when he reached majority) to 1399 (when Henry of Lancaster deposed him)—but more often they censure the king's ministers or powerful barons of the realm."—from the Preface

This volume contains five sections: Poems of Political Prophecy; Anticlerical Poems and Documents; Literature of Richard II's Reign and the Peasants' Revolt; Poems against Simony and the Abuse of Money; and Plowman Writings.

"The eleven extant poems attributed to Laurence Minot celebrate a sequence of English victories on the Scottish border and on the continent between 1333, the Battle of Halidon Hill, and the surrender of the French town of Guînes in 1352. The poems appear to have been written shortly after the events they commemorate. . . . In the fifteenth-century manuscript in which the poems are copied, however, they are arranged as a continuous narrative 'romance,' connected by rubrics and linking stanzas. Other details, too . . . suggest Minot may have revised the entire series shortly after completing the last poem in the sequence.

"The eleven poems (1017 lines) survive in a single manuscript, Cotton Galba E.ix, a fifteenth-century miscellany that preserves other unique texts of Middle English poetry, the Arthurian romance Ywaine and Gawayne and The Prophecy of the Six Kings to Follow King John (The Prophecies of Merlin) as well as three penitential pieces found elsewhere in the Cursor Mundi and other poems more widely disseminated: The Sevyn Sages of Rome, the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, and the Pricke of Conscience."—from the Introduction

Breton Lays—those poems produced by or after the fashion of Marie de France in the twelfth century and which claim to be "literary versions of lays sung by ancient Bretons to the accompaniment of the harp"—served many functions. They were "read aloud for entertainment and instruction in familial matters, . . . used for the instruction of children, and . . . could address the need for private [devotional] reading and meditation." The poems edited in this volume, the editors assert, were distinctly "English" Breton lays "largely because they point to a renewed interest in the nuclear English family and the shaping of distinctly English family values."—from the Introduction

Includes "Sir Orfeo"; "Lay le Freine"; "Sir Degaré"; "Emaré"; Thomas Chestre's "Sir Launfal"; "Sir Gowther"; "Erle of Tolous"; and "Sir Cleges." Appendices include Marie de France's The Lay of the Ash Tree and The Lay of Sir Launfal and the anonymous Sir Landevale.

Includes "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle"; "Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle"; "The Avowyng of Arthur"; "The Awntyrs off Arthur"; "The Knightly Tale of Gologras and Gawain"; "The Greene Knight"; "The Turke and Sir Gawain"; "The Marriage of Sir Gawain"; "The Carle of Carlisle"; "The Jeaste of Sir Gawain"; and "King Arthur and King Cornwall."

This edition of two texts that have not been readily available to students adds much to our understanding of the texture of the Middle English romance.

Professor Benson's edition of the Stanzaic Morte Arthur and the Alliterative Morte Arthure, originally published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company in 1974, has been long out of print. Now his edition of these important Middle English poems, revised and updated by Professor Edward E. Foster to take account of recent scholarship, is again made available to students. Texts and apparatus, taken from the original edition, have been corrected and simplified; notes and bibliography have been expanded to incorporate the latest research and edited to conform to the format of the TEAMS Middle English Texts Series.

Neither Lancelot of the Laik nor Sir Tristrem has been readily available in an inexpensive edition until now; both, Professor Lupack argues, have been misperceived and thus under-appreciated. This new edition makes the poems available to students of English romance and of the Matter of Britain and enables us to enrich our sense of the texture of English treatments of the vast body of legends that grew around the court of Arthur.

This first-person account of the visions experienced by Julian of Norwich in May of 1373 is remarkable for its vivid prose and as an example both of early autobiographical writing in the vernacular and of a spiritual document.

"Reflective passages support the narrative of the visions with a circling, complex, always reasoned consideration of the doctrinal and devotional implications twenty years of thinking about them have yielded. For Julian, the showings reach deeply into what it means to be a human being, which for her is to be a creature created by God living in Christendom."—from the Introduction

When Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400, his massive project The Canterbury Tales lay unfinished and unpublished. Medieval scribe-editors in the fifteenth century attempted to close perceived gaps in the Tales and conceal the work's incompleteness. Thereby were produced a number of supplemental writings that ranged from apocryphal tales, spurious links, and large-scale continuations. This volume includes five such works that date from the fifteenth century and survive in at least one manuscript collection of Chaucer's Tales: "John Lydgate's Prologue to the Siege of Thebes," "The Ploughman's Tale," "The Cook's Tale," "Spurious Links," and "The Canterbury Interlude and Merchant's Tale of Beryn."

Gavin Douglas's The Palis of Honoure is a fascinating but still rather neglected dream poem from early sixteenth-century Scotland. The poem displays Douglas's descriptive precision and concreteness, his pungency of dialogue and versatility of diction, his vividness of persona, and his keen critical response to earlier books and writers. The Palis of Honoure impresses even modern readers by means of its sheer verve and inventiveness.

"In both Wynnere and Wastoure and The Parlement of the Thre Ages, a solitary narrator falls asleep and witnesses in his dream a verbal altercation about current [i.e., fourteenth-century] social abuses and defects of the spirit." The prologues of both poems resemble the traditional "chanson d'aventure," in which a narrator simply stumbles unexpectedly upon truth or transformation. The poems are complex and provide insight into fourteenth-century culture. As the editor observes, "the poem's perspectives are truly dizzying: on the one hand, economics, politics, ethics, and social relations are seen as an interrelated set of universal, timeless principles; on the other, they appear as actual, contingent conditions that have resulted from specific acts in history."—from the Introduction

Includes "Piers the Plowman's Crede," "The Plowman's Tale," "Jack Upland," "Friar Daw's Reply," "Upland's Rejoinder," and "Why I Can't Be a Nun."

Includes "The Storie of Asneth," "The Pistel of Swete Susan," "The Story of Jephthah and his Daughter," and "The Story of Judith."

"All three of these poems, read together, would make an interesting unit in a course in medieval women's studies."—from Studies in the Age of Chaucer 15 (1993)

Includes "The Sultan of Babylon," "The Siege of Milan," and "The Tale of Ralph the Collier."