The fifty-plus manuscripts of Piers Plowman have always posed a puzzle to scholars. This book is an account of the editions of the poem that have appeared since 1550, when it was first published by the protestant reformer Robert Crowley. It examines 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. It uses a wide range of published and unpublished material to shed light on attempts to crack one of the major editorial conundrums in medieval studies.

This book analyzes key twelfth-century Latin and vernacular texts that articulate a subjective autobiographical stance. The reader is led into a complex maze of paths, through intellectually daunting issues such as the relation of subject to object, self to body, body to text and text to language. The contention is that the self forged in medieval literature could not have come into existence without the gap between Latinity and the vernacular and the shift in perspective in the twelfth century toward a visual and spatial orientation.

Mary Erler traces networks of female book ownership and exchange which have so far been obscure, and shows how women were responsible for owning as well as circulating devotional books. Seven narratives of individual women who lived between 1350 and 1550 are enclosed by an overview of nuns' reading and their surviving books, and a survey of women who owned the first printed books in England. An appendix lists a number of books not previously attributed to female ownership.

This collection examines the significance of 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 that promoted the use of literacy and had access to its products. Presenting the fruits of much new research, the book is intended as a contribution to the study both of medieval literacy generally and of the history and cultures of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Brittany in the Middle Ages.

Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann's study of Arthurian verse romance was first published in German in 1985, but her radical argument that we need urgently to redraw the lines on the literary and linguistic map of medieval Britain and France is only now being made available in English. Updated with a new foreword and a supplementary bibliography, this study serves as a contribution to both reception history, examining the medieval response to Chretien's poetry, and genre history, suveying the evolution of Arthurian verse romance in French over two centuries.

In this study of vernacular French narrative from the twelfth century through the later Middle Ages, Donald Maddox considers the construction of identity in a wide range of fictions. He focuses on crucial encounters, widespread in medieval literature, in which characters are informed about fundamental aspects of their own circumstances and selfhood. The study offers many new perspectives on the poetic and cultural implications of identity as an imaginary construct during the long formative period of French literature.

In this full-length study of the early history of greed Richard Newhauser challenges the traditional view that avarice only became a dominant sin with the rise of a money economy. He shows that avaritia, the sin of greed for possessions, was dominant in a wide range of theological and literary texts from the first century CE, and that by the early Middle Ages avarice headed the list of vices for authors aiming to convert others from pagan materialism to Christian spirituality.

What happens when a prestigious text of one period is read and reused in a different, much later world? What can we learn from the annotations accumulated by a single manuscript as it moved among new institutions and readerships? In this study Christopher Baswell takes as his model Virgil's Aeneid, and the many kinds of appeal it held for the culture of the Middle Ages. He examines a series of Latin manuscripts of the text which were copied in twelfth-century England but reused and reannotated for three centuries, and shows how medieval vernacular poets used Virgil's prestige to lay their own...

This comparative study examines Floire and Blancheflor and shows how medieval writers from Spain, France, Italy, England, and Scandinavia reworked this story from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries to develop and emphasize social, political, religious and artistic goals. It shows the influence of a little-known medieval Spanish version, especially as a precursor to Boccaccio's Il Filocolo, and examines important issues of the development of prose fiction in medieval and Renaissance Europe.

This book first appeared in German in 1985, and set a new agenda for the study of medieval literary theory. While Haug focuses primarily on medieval German writers, the principles underlying his argument are equally relevant to medieval literature in English or any other European language. This ground-breaking study is now available in English for the first time.