Böcker i TEAMS Middle English Texts Series-serien

"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.

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 is means to be a poet writing in the wake of Chaucer.

The complete text of John Gower's poem is a three-volume edition, including all Latin components-with translations-of this bilingual text and extensive glosses, bibliography and explanatory notes. Volume 1 contains the Prologue and Books 1 and 8, in effect the overall structure of Gower's poem.

Audelay's idiosyncratic devotional tastes, interesting personal life history, and declared political affiliations-loyalty to king, upholder of estates, anxiety over heresy-make him worthy of careful study beside his better-known contemporaries. Of particular note: MS Douce 302 preserves Audelay's own alliterative Marcolf and Solomon, a poem thought to be descended from Langland's Piers Plowman. The Audelay Manuscript also contains unique copies of other alliterative poems of the ornate style seen in Gawain and the Green Knight and The Pistel of Swete Susan. These pieces are Paternoster and Three Dead Kings, both set at the end of the book. Whether or not they are Audelay's own compositions, they seem certain to be his own selections. Audelay also displays a persistent habit of sequencing materials in generic and devotionally affective ways. His is a pious sensibility delicately honed by reverence for the liturgy and by an awe of God. That Audelay's poetry can awaken us to new poetic sensitivities in medieval devotional verse is reason enough to bring him into the ambit of canonical fifteenth-century English poets.

Composed in rhyming English verse, 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.

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.

Four Middle English Charlemagne romances from the Otuel cycle: Roland and Vernagu, Otuel a Knight, Otuel and Roland, and Duke Roland and Sir Otuel of Spain. A translation of the romances' source, the Anglo-French Otinel, is also included.

Composed for King Henry VI in the middle of the Wars of the Roses, Of Knyghthode and Bataile adapts the most widely used military manual in the Middle Ages into English verse. This edition of the poem also provides a contextualizing introduction and copious notes and glosses to assist the modern student with understanding the text.

A new edition of Of Knyghthode and Bataile, a fifteenth-century Middle English verse adaptation of the late Roman Epitoma rei militaris by Vegetius.

In this volume, John Metham's classic romance Amoryus and Cleopes is made available to a wider audience of students and teachers of Middle English with its contextualizing introduction, extensive notes, and helpful gloss. This fifteenth century romance, written by John Metham, creatively reworks Ovid's tale of Pyramus and Thisbe's tragic love from his Metamorphoses. Metham draws on a wide variety of popular romances and particularly Chaucer's Ovidian works to create an inventive romance of his own with a decidedly moral aim. This volume will be of interest to students of Middle English romance and all those interested in the literary legacy of Chaucer.

The poem that Richard Maidstone wrote on the metropolitan crisis of 1392 reports information about the royal entry that concluded the crisis in greater detail than any other source. The poem is not primarily a report, however; like Maidstone's other writings, it is above all an ideologically driven literary intervention, produced at a particular moment, addressing a particular political circumstance. . . . Maidstone's Concordia shows Anglo-Latin poetry, on a specific occasion, in the process of making itself a public poetry a broadly appealing, flexible, legible medium for addressing public issues.

At the end of the 15th century, Gavin Douglas devised his ambitious dream vision The Palyce of Honour in part to signal a new scope to Scottish literary culture. For all its comedy, it stands as a reminder to James IV of Scotland that poetry casts a powerful light upon the arts of rule. Second edition. Suitable for classrooms at all levels.

A "bourde" is an English comedic poem similar to a French fabliau but with a moralizing element and less of an emphasis on violence. Collection of ten Middle English bourdes, specifically designed for students, and has contextualizing introductions, copious notes, glosses, and a glossary..

The two texts of the dialogue presented here, a Latin version printed c. 1488 and a Middle English translation printed in 1492, preserve lively, entertaining and revealing exchanges between the Old Testament wisdom figure Solomon and Marcolf, a medieval peasant who is ragged and foul-mouthed but quick-witted and verbally astute.

First modern edition of the poem since 1863, presents it to a new audience of students. Attributed to the mystic Richard Rolle, it became one of the most popular poems in medieval England and appears in more than any other Middle English poem. Extensive annotations and gloss, accessible to students at all levels in Middle English.

This particular collection of French lyrics made in France in the late fourteenth century, University of Pennsylvania MS 15, is the most likely repository of Chaucer's French poems. It is the largest manuscript anthology extant of fourteenth-century French lyrics in the formes fixes with by far the largest number of works of unknown authorship.

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.

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.

John Lydgate is known as the most distinguished poet of fifteenth-century England. This volume presents his brilliant and underappreciated dramatic texts written for both private and public entertainment, encompassing both religious and secular topics. This is the first time since 1934 that many of these poems have been reprinted or reedited. They are published here with an extensive gloss and notes, as well as a glossary and an introduction, making them accessible to a new generation of students of the Middle Ages. These works are indispensible to any study of medieval English drama.

Gower's imaginative French poetry is now available in a new edition with facing page translation, annotations, and introduction. Gower's Traitie employs the French poetic form of balade, typically used for courtly verses, to avow instead the virtues of loving marriage, characteristic of Gower's signature moralizing. His Cinkante Balades confront the tradition of the French Livre de Cent Balades, by describing the feelings of a young man towards his lady, but eventually offering a praise of love insofar as it is subject to reason and morality. Together the two works offer an excellent introduction to the Anglo-Norman works of Gower and are perfect for classroom use.

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. The text 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.

Shoaf here presents a hitherto neglected Middle English text for both undergraduate and graduate classrooms: Thomas Usk's The Testament of Love. Left unpublished since the nineteenth century, Usk's modern edition includes glosses, notes, and a contextualizing introduction to assist students of all levels in approaching Usk's Middle English poem. The fourteenth century work describes Love descending to Usk's prison cell, and the two engaging in a long, theological conversation reminiscent of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. Notable for its idiosyncratic imagery, wide variety of themes, and Christian sentimentality, The Testament of Love is a fascinating text to be studied in any Middle English classroom.

Scottish poet William Dunbar is usually considered one of the most important figures of fifteenth-century British literature, and may lay claim to being the finest lyric poet writing in English in the century and 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. 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.

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 manuscipts 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 be 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.

Illustrates how, in the devout medieval English sensibility, doctrine was vitally connected to affective receptivity. Narrative moods range from love-longing and passion to bitter grief and sorrowful lament, feelings from the intimately personal state of being God's created creature, individually answerable to divine law and love.

This fresh classroom edition of the Middle English poems of Laurence Minot, with its introduction, gloss, notes, and glossary, enables students of all levels to encounter Minot's poetry.

Poems and historical documents relevant to understanding the political climate of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Britain, many of which have been out of print for a century. This new edition, geared towards classroom use with its notes, introductions, gloss, and glossary, opens up the fascinating study of late medieval English history.

The only known English version of Chretien de Troyes's romance of Perceval. Accompanying this tale is Ywain and Gawain. An excellent introduction to Middle English Arthurian romance, as they include editing, glosses, introductions, and a very helpful glossary for beginning students.

This new edition makes available to students of English romance and of the Matter of Britain two significant Middle English Arthurian romances. With introductions, glosses, notes, and glossary, a very accessible edition for students.