This third volume in the popular Oxford Guides to Chaucer series offers a much needed introduction to Chaucer's shorter poems. The introductory chapters on the social and cultural contexts of the shorter poems are supplemented by a guide to the genre they mostly exemplify--the love-vision form. The volume then provides in-depth, individual chapters on the Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Parliament of Fowls, the Legend of Good Women, and the short poems, and includes an extensive appendix on Chaucer's language. Combining the best of old and new critical methods and research, this...

This anthology of newly-translated texts covers the single most important branch of medieval literary theory and criticism--the commentary tradition--in one of the most significant periods of its development. Fully annotated with notes and introductions, the selections encompass a wide range of topics--including authorship, ethics, symbolism, biography, poetics, allegory, and semiotics--and represent many important writers--including Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Grosseteste, Abelard, and Peter Lombard.

Professor Minnis argues that the paganism in Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight's Taleis not simply a backdrop but must be central to our understanding of the texts. Chaucer's two great pagan poems, l>Troilus and Criseyde/l> and l>The Knight's Tale/l>, belong to the literary genre known as the romance of antiquity' (which first appeard in the mid 12th century), in which the ancient pagan world is shown on its own terms, without the blatant Christian bias against paganism characteristic of works like the l>Chanson de Roland/l>, where the writer is concerned with present-day rather than...

This collection seeks to locate the Boece within the medievaltradition of the academic study and translation of the Consolatiophilosophiae/, thereby relating the work to the intellectual culturewhich made it possible. It begins with the fullest study yet undertakenof the Boethius commentary of Nicholas Trevet, this being a majorsource of the Boece. There follow editions and translationsof the major passages in Trevet's commentary where Neoplatonic issuesare confronted, then Chaucer's debt to Trevet is assessed in a detailedreview. The many choices which faced Chaucer as a translator are...

Penance, confession and their texts (penitential and confessors' manuals) are important topics for an understanding of the middle ages, in relation to a wide range of issues, from medieval social thought to Chaucer's background. These essays treat a variety of different aspects of the topic: subjects include the frequency and character of early medieval penance; the summae and manuals for confessors, and the ways in which these texts (written by males for males) constructed women as sexual in nature; William of Auvergne's remarkable writing on penance; and the relevance of confessors' manuals...

The attitudes towards the human body held by different branches of medieval theology are currently a major focus of scholarly attention. This first volume from York Medieval Press includes studies of the metaphor of man as head and woman as body, Abelard, women and Catharism, the female body as an impediment to ordination, women mystics, and the University of York's 1995 Quodlibet Lecture given by Eamon Duffy on the early iconography and -lives- of St Francis of Assisi. PETER BILLER is Professor of Medieval History at the University of York; A.J. MINNIS is Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of...