A new and completely revised edition of this authoritative work, intended to encourage personal appreciation and independent appraisal by students of English. This is a stimulating introduction to the poetry composed in an age that witnessed fundamental cultural developments: the emergence of the English from among the warring tribes of Europe, their conversion to Christianity, the development of feudalism and the chivalric myth, the military adventure of the Crusades, and the growth of a vigorous citizen class in the burgeoning towns of England.

Layamon's Brut is a landmark in English literature, the first major work in English after the Norman Conquest, and the precursor of a rich Arthurian literature, from Malory to Tennyson and on to our own time. This edition combines a fully-edited version of the original text with a close parallel prose translation, together with a lengthy Introduction, textual notes and a full and up-to-date bibliography.Written c.1200-1220, the Brut develops the themes of its principal source, Robert Wace's Roman de Brut, itself a version of Geoffrey of Monmouth's bestseller, the Historia Regum Britanniae, in...

The Owl and the Nightingale is one of the first and greatest long comic poems in the English language and one of the best-known and most accomplished of all medieval literary texts. By turns both gleefully trivial and allusively serious, it has been described by literary critics as a "most miraculous piece of writing," "a marvel of literary art" and "a truly amazing phenomenon." There is no other edition currently in print and this is the first new English edition of the poem since 1960.The book contains a lively parallel-text translation in modern English, as well as a glossary, notes and...

This edition, the first since 1878, offers Middle English texts accompanied by detailed notes contextualizing the poems within an apocryphal tradition and full glossary. The Introduction reviews the development of the Adam and Eve legend in medieval European vernacular. Last edited in 1878, the two poems edited in this volume are medieval English versions of the legendary lives of Adam and Eve, telling of their attempts to regain the Paradise they had just lost and their life after the Fall, and merging with the related legends of the history of the Cross before Christ. The poems are...

Thomas Hoccleve (1368-426) was one of Chaucer's first disciples and is represented in this book by a selection of his works, newly edited from his own copies and fully annotated. It provides students and other readers new to his work with a very fair indication of his range and achievement as original writer and translator and includes a full Introduction and marginal glosses. It also offers those more familiar with his work a fuller account than has hitherto been available of the manuscripts both of Hoccleve's own texts and, when he was translating from Latin or French, of his sources. Some...

Wace's "Brut" is an 1155 French verse rendering of Geoffrey of Monmouth's earlier Latin "history" of Britain, from the time of Brutus, the eponymous founder, to the 7th century. Wace uses Geoffrey's stories, such as those of King Lear and King Arthur, with a lively inventiveness and originality, drawing on oral sources and his own knowledge of parts of Britain, imaginatively re-interpreting the material. This is the first complete English translation and is presented in parallel with the French text, enabling those who wish to have access to the original to do so easily. This new reprint has...

Edition with notes, glossary and an introductory essay by C. S. Lewis.

This edition of the Old English poem 'The Wanderer' from the Exeter Book includes contextual introduction, notes and glossary.

Scholarly edition of Aelfric's 'Lives of Three English Saints' (Oswald, Edmund and Swithin) with contextual introduction and glossary.

Williams explores the concept of the monster in the Middle Ages, examining its philosophical and theological roots, and analysing its symbolic function in medieval literature and art.