Böcker i TEAMS Middle English Texts Series-serien

Verses about heroic women from the Old Testament. These poems exhibit the attitudes of Late Medieval England towards heroic women, and offer an unusually positive depiction of Judiasm. With extensive notes, glosses, and introductions, invaluable to teachers and students of Middle English.

On anticlerical poetry in late medieval England. These Middle English poems attack ecclesiastical corruption; most of the poems were written by disgruntled Lollards about clerics and friars in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. Well glossed and include introductions and copious notes, for students of any level of experience.

The feast of Corpus Christi, was devoted to the Eucharist, and the normal practice was to have solemn processions through the city. In this way the people might be stimulated to devotion and brought symbolically, even mystically into a relationship with the central moments of salvation history.

The paraphrase is a remarkable artifact of the Chaucerian period, one that can reveal a great deal about vernacular biblical literature in Middle English, about understandings of the Bible, about the environment in which the Lollards and other reformers worked, perceived roles of women in history and in society and composition of medieval drama.

Morality play deals allegorically with the life of man, his struggle against temptation and sin and hope of final redemption. The play begins before Mankind's birth and concludes with his salvation after death, and features the traditional enemies of Mankind (the World, the Flesh and the Devil) and his two advisors (the Good and the Bad Angel).

A morality play warning Mankind how it may be led astray by temptation, while entertaining the audience with banter between the characters representing vice. With a gloss, notes, an introduction, and a glossary, this edition of the lively Middle English play is perfect for any level of instruction and invaluable to those who teach early drama.

Completes the presentation of the five surviving Middle English morality plays. In addition to the texts of "The Pride of Life" and "Wisdom," Klausner's edition includes two appendices which provide the texts of primary sources for the two plays as well as appropriate music which may have accompanied performances, especially "Wisdom."

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.

Despite its title, Caxton's "Game and Playe of the Chesse" does not, in fact, have much to say about a game or about playing it. Instead, the work uses the chessboard and its pieces to allegorize a political community whose citizens contribute to the common good.

Since its rediscovery by nineteenth-century scholarship, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61 has never been ignored, though it has also not gained a great deal of notoriety beyond the scholars of Middle English romance.

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.

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.

These four narratives were among the most popular Middle English romances; 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.

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.

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.

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. The various genres represented in this sampler attest to the diversity of late medieval literary tastes and to the flexibility of the courtly idiom.

Companion to another Middle English Texts series text, Sherry Reames' Middle English Legends of Women Saints. 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 poem, 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.

Through these fourteenth-century Middle English poems, readers can experience something of the controversies that surfaced and resurfaced even after Aquinas had articulated his doctrine of the Communion of Saints

The texts, both anonymous, are "Richard the Redeless," concerning the governmental style of Richard II, and "Mum and the Sothsegger," addressing social issues in the reign of Henry IV. Both works reveal that alliterative poetry continued to be the chief vehicle for political and social criticism at the turn of the 15th century.

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.

Anonymous English dream vision allegory produced, probably, in the third quarter of the 15th century. Blends didacticism with the mythological and the courtly, and seeks to bring Reson and Sensualyte 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.

Gives students of medieval Arthurian literature access to the Merlin section of the Old French Vulgate Cycle, an interconnected set of Arthurian works composed during the first half of the 13th century. Written in the latter half of the 15th century, it is a treasure trove of characters, incidents and motifs.

The poems selected for this volume provide a sampling of the rich tradition of Marian devotion as expressed in Middle English. 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.

An excellent introduction to the tradition of romances dealing with the matter of France-that is, Charlemagne and his Twelve Peers. This is a valuable introduction to Charlemagne romances and is accessible to beginners in Middle English because of contextualizing introductions and glosses for each text, as well as a helpful glossary.

An asset to any study of gender in medieval England; three poems that complement each other in their treatments of relations between the sexes. Incl. contextualizing introductions and helpful glosses; also an extensive glossary for the entire volume. Useful to not only beginning students of Middle English and thos more advanced.

"The Wallace" catalogs 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.

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.

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.

Brings together for the first time the two late medieval English translations, Stephen Scrope's precise translation The Epistle of Othea and the anonymous Litel Bibell of Knyghthod, once criticized as a flawed translation. Substantial introductions, comprehensive explanatory notes.