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.

The Roman de la Rose was a major bestseller--largely due to its robust treatment of "natural" sexuality. This study concentrates on the ways in which Jean de Meun, in imitation of Ovid, assumed the mock-magisterium (or mastership) of love. Alastair J. Minnis considers allegorical versus literalistic expression in the poem, Jean's provocative use of plain and sometimes obscene language, the challenge of its homosocial and perhaps even homoerotic constructions, and the problematic translation of literary authority from Latin into the vulgar tongue.

Fallible Authors Chaucer's Pardoner and Wife of Bath Alastair Minnis "In pages rich with explication of scholastic, literary, and historical material, Minnis recovers a medieval notion of authorial fallibility."--Seth Lerer, TimesOnline Can an outrageously immoral man or a scandalous woman teach morality or lead people to virtue? Does personal fallibility devalue one's words and deeds? Is it possible to separate the private from the public, to segregate individual failing from official function? Chaucer addressed these perennial issues through two problematic authority figures, the...

A wide range of poets is covered - Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, the Gawain poet, Langland, and Lydgate, along with the translator of Claudian's De Consulatu Stilichonis. The Turnament of Totenham is read in terms of theory of the carnivalesque and popular culture, and major contributions are made to current linguistic, editorial and codicological controversies. Going beyond the Middle Ages, the book also considers the sixteenth-century reception of Chaucer's Legend of Good Women and Post-Reformation reading of Lydgate. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the production and...

"An innovative and important book."--Speculum "This valuable book . . . poses in a most interesting form the question of the relationship generally between literary theory and literary practice."--Times Higher Education Supplement "Stimulating and learned. . . . This book should serve as a milestone in medieval literary theory."--Yearbook of English Studies "No professional medievalist with a serious interest in literature can afford to leave this book unread."--British Book News "A work of great importance. . . . Minnis's effort takes its own direction and...