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This 1998 collection examines the ways in which writing was used in the Celtic countries between c. 400 and c. 1500. It is concerned with the amount and types of material committed to writing as well as with the social groups which promoted the use of literacy and had access to its products.

This first comprehensive study in English of the many and variegated ways the afterlife was envisioned in the Middle Ages presents exciting new interpretations that will interest literary scholars, (art) historians, and theologians.

In this book, eleven essays by leading scholars of music, liturgy, literature, manuscript production and architecture analyse how the medieval arts invited collaborative performances designed to persuade. Using concepts derived from rhetoric to analyse specific examples, the essays show the immense power of those forms of rhetoric which are 'beyond words'.

The Craft of Thought, first published in 1998, examines medieval monastic meditation as a discipline for making thoughts, and discusses its influence on literature, art, and architecture, deriving examples from a variety of late antique and medieval sources, with excursions into modern architectural memorials.

This revisionary account of the 900-year-long history of a major poetic tradition sheds new light on poems from Beowulf to Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and challenges the idea that the alliterative tradition falls into two halves divided by the Norman Conquest.

Little attention has been paid to the political and ideological significance of the medieval exemplum, a brief narrative form used to illustrate a moral. Through a study of four major works in the Chaucerian tradition, Professor Scanlon redefines the exemplum as a 'narrative enactment of cultural authority'.

Chretien de Troyes was one of the most important medieval writers of Arthurian narrative. A key figure in reshaping the 'once and future fictions' of Arthurian story, he was instrumental in the late twelfth-century shift from written and oral legendary traditions to a highly sophisticated literary cultivation of the Old French verse romance.

A study of the Divine Comedy, this book offers an interesting perspective on Dante's representation of the afterlife. Alison Morgan departs from the conventional critical emphasis on Dante's place in relation to learned traditions by undertaking a thorough examination of the poem in the context of popular beliefs.

This book is an extended investigation of the anticlericalism of the medieval English poem Piers Plowman.

This 1998 book investigates the politics of vernacular translation in late medieval England the contemporary concerns of clerical corruption of authoritative texts, and the education of vernacular writers such as Langland, Trevisa and Wyclif.

Did literacy foster popular heresy, or did heresy provide a crucial stimulus to the spread of literacy? This volume considers the importance of the written word in pre-Lutheran heresies, and explores the extent to which heretics' familiarity with books exceeded that of their orthodox contemporaries.

This book examines how the medieval clergy tried to govern the day-to-day speech of Western Christians. It explores, for the first time, how Chaucer, Langland, Gower and the 'Patience' poet presented and judged these attempts to label Sins of the Tongue.

This comparative 1997 study examines Floire and Blancheflor and shows how medieval writers from Spain, France, Italy, England and Scandinavia reworked this story from the twelfth to the sixteenth century to develop and emphasize social, political, religious and artistic goals.

This wide-ranging study examines the role of the dream in medieval culture with reference to philosophical, legal and theological writings as well as literary and autobiographical works.

This 1998 collection examines the ways in which writing was used in the Celtic countries between c. 400 and c. 1500. It is concerned with the amount and types of material committed to writing as well as with the social groups which promoted the use of literacy and had access to its products.

Inspired by the example of Chaucer and Gower, John Lydgate articulated the great political questions of his time in his poetry, prose and translations. Maura Nolan offers a major re-interpretation of Lydgate's work, his relationship to Chaucer, and his central role in the developing literary culture of the fifteenth century.

English literary culture in the fourteenth century was vibrant and expanding, with a strongly local focus. Ralph Hanna charts the development and the generic and linguistic features particular to London writing and shows how romance, administrative and theological writing underwrote the great pre-Chaucerian London poem, William Langland's Piers Plowman.

Mark Miller's innovative study argues that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales represent an extended mediation on agency, autonomy and practical reason. This philosophical aspect of Chaucer's interests can help us understand what is both sophisticated and disturbing about his explorations of love, sex and gender. Partly through fresh readings of the Consolation of Philosophy and the Romance of the Rose, Miller charts Chaucer's position in relation to the association in the Christian West between problems of autonomy and problems of sexuality and reconstructs how medieval philosophers and literary writers approached psychological phenomena often thought of as distinctively modern. The literary experiments of the Canterbury Tales represent a distinctive philosophical achievement that remains vital to our own attempts to understand agency, desire and their histories.

Until the Reformation, almost all sermons were written down in Latin. Based on the extant manuscripts, this is the first systematic description and analysis of such collections of Latin sermons from the golden age of medieval preaching in England, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Until the twelfth century writing in the western vernaculars dealt almost exclusively with religious, historical and factual themes, but the second half of the twelfth century saw the emergence of a new genre consciously conceived as fictional, the romance. Dennis Green explores how and why this shift occurred.

This book presents an interesting approach to Dante's Divine Comedy, drawing on medieval theories of reading and understanding a text.

This book examines the presumption that Chaucer invented literary English, and argues instead that his English is largely traditional. It provides a thorough history of every one of Chaucer's words and maps the origins and patterns of use that have made these words so compelling for 600 years.

This is the first book to consider the rise of translation as part of a broader history of critical discourses from classical Rome to the late Middle Ages, and sheds light on its crucial role in the development of vernacular European culture.

In this 1995 study of two great poems of the later medieval period, James Simpson examines the two kinds of literary humanism which dominated their cultural context and shows the very different modes of thought which lie behind their conceptions of selfhood and education.

This 1994 book offers insights into the rich and varied Dutch literature of the Middle Ages. Sixteen essays written by top scholars consider this literature in the context of the social, historical and cultural developments of the period in which it took shape.

In this study, Joseph Duggan interprets the Cantar de mio Cid as a work that transmutes moral values first into the economic values of a gift economy, then into genealogical values. He maintains that the Cantar de mio Cid was composed around the year 1200 in substantially the form in which we have it now, in the course of a singer's performance.

This 1991 book is a literary study of Richard Rolle, one of the most widely read English writers of the late Middle Ages. Nicholas Watson proposes a chronology of Rolle's Latin and English writings and offers a literary analyses of a number of his works, showing how they focus principally on the establishment of his own spiritual authority.

The fifty-plus manuscripts of Piers Plowman have always posed a puzzle to scholars. This 1996 book is an account of the editions of the poem which have appeared since 1550, examining the circumstances in which the editions were produced, the lives and intellectual motivations of the editors, and the relationship between one edition and the next.

Simon Gilson examines Dante's reception in Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, particularly his influence on Boccaccio and Petrarch, and on humanism. Ranging across literature, philosophy and art, Gilson's study fully illuminates for the first time Dante's central place in Italian Renaissance culture and thought.

Troubadours and Irony re-examines the work of five early troubadours, namely Marcabru, Bernart Marti, Peire d'Alvernha, Raimbaut d'Aurenga and Giraut de Borneil, to argue that the courtly poetry of southern France in the twelfth century was permeated with irony and that many troubadour songs were playful, laced with humorous sexual innuendo and far from serious.