Product Description: This book draws on a lengthy experience of teaching graduates how to approach medieval books. It leads the reader through the stages of the editorial process, using part of Richard Rolle's Commentary on the Song of Songs as the working exemplar...read more

Product Description: This book offers an introduction to medieval English book-history through a sequence of exemplary analyses of commonplace book-historical problems. Rather than focus on bibliographical particulars, the volume considers a variety of ways in which scholars use manuscripts to discuss book culture, and it provides a wide-ranging introductory bibliography to aid in the study...read more

Product Description: The Buke of the Howlat was composed in the late 1440s for Elizabeth Douglas, wife of Archibald Douglas, earl of Moray. It is one of the great monuments of fifteenth-century Scots verse, perhaps the finest example of Older Scots alliterative poetry, telling a comic fable of an owl's borrowed feathers, his pride and ultimate fall, and a bird parliament which decides his fate...read more

Product Description: In volume 1 of Jankyn’s Book of Wikked Wyves (Georgia, 1997), Ralph Hanna and Traugott Lawler presented authoritative versions of three medieval texts invoked by Jankyn (fifth husband of the Wife of Bath) in The Canterbury Tales. In Jankyn’s Book, volume 2, Lawler and Hanna revisit one of those texts by way of presenting all the known contemporary commentaries on it...read more

Product Description: Richard Rolle - the Yorkshire hermit, visionary and transmitter of religious counsel - was widely recognised in the later English Middle Ages as a major spiritual author. However, this influential figure poses difficulties for scholars and remains a largely untapped literary resource...read more

Product Description: English literary culture in the fourteenth century was vibrant and expanding. Its focus, however, was still strongly local, not national. This study examines in detail the literary production from the capital before, during, and after the time of the Black Death...read more

Product Description: The Knightly Tale of Golagros and Gawane, the finest of all Older Scots romances, was written during the last quarter of the fifteenth century. It uses the thirteen-line alliterative stanza to vivid effect. Its greatest sophistication, however, lies in its thematic engagement with matters of sovereignty and chivalry, in its persistent interest in negotiated exchanges rather than outright warfare, and in its moving depictions of the limitations of an aristocratic ethos fundamentally dedicated to destructive violence...read more