This comprehensive collection of the major critical views of Chaucer's works over time engages students with the entire critical history.

• Introduces students to the critical discourse on Chaucer's works from a historical perspective.
  
• Encourages students to make links between past and present criticism.
  
• Foregrounds those modern approaches that are genuinely productive.
  
• Avoids a formulaic approach through lively editorial commentary and judicious selection of texts.

This comprehensive collection of the major critical views of Chaucer's works over time engages students with the entire critical history.

• Introduces students to the critical discourse on Chaucer's works from a historical perspective.
  
• Encourages students to make links between past and present criticism.
  
• Foregrounds those modern approaches that are genuinely productive.
  
• Avoids a formulaic approach through lively editorial commentary and judicious selection of texts.

Corinne J. Saunders's exploration of the topos of the forest, a familiar and ubiquitous motif in the literature of the middle ages, is a broad study embracing a range of medieval and Elizabethan exts from the twelft to the sixteenth centuries: the roman d'antiquite, Breton lay and courtly romance, the hagiographical tradition of the Vita Merlini and the Queste del Saint Graal, Spenser and Shakespeare. Saunders identifies the forest as a primary romance landscape, as a place of adventure, love, and spiritual vision... offers a pleasurable overview of the narrative function of the forest as a...

This work explores and untangles the theme of rape, and its counterpart ravishment, in Anglo-French cultural tradition between the disintegration of the classical world and the Renaissance. Tracing debate and dialogue across intellectual and literary discourses, Corinne Saunders places Middle English literary portrayals of rape and ravishment in the context of shifting legal, theological and medical attitudes. The treatment of rape and ravishment is considered across a wide range of literary genres: hagiography, where female saints are repeatedly threatened with rape; legendary history, as in...