The 'new' new historicist shift from a Foucauldian modelling of the infinitely malleable instrumentation of power, in which writers like Hoccleve are inevitably complicit, to a more flexible model in which authority is typically anxious and unstable, open to compromise and negotiation, and where writers can mak significant interventions, is welcome. Perkins's book is a triumph of this new approach. MEDIUM AEVUM (Derek Pearsall) This is the first book-length study of Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes. It is an excellent one; critically alert and sensitive to the potential of a variety of fruitful...

"An excellent collection... breaks new ground in many areas. Should make a substantial impact on the discussion of the contemporary influence of Anglo-Saxon Culture." Conor McCarthy, author of Seamus Heaney and the Medieval Imagination Britain's pre-Conquest past and its culture continues to fascinate modern writers and artists. From Henry Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader to Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, and from high modernism to the musclebound heroes of comic book and Hollywood, Anglo-Saxon England has been a powerful and often unexpected source of inspiration, antagonism, and reflection. The essays...

Medieval romance narratives glitter with the material objects that were valued and exchanged in late-medieval society: lovers' rings and warriors' swords, holy relics and desirable or corrupted bodies. Romance, however, is also a genre in which such objects make meaning on numerous levels, and not always in predictable ways. These new essays examine from diverse perspectives how romances respond to material culture, but also show how romance as a genre helps to constitute and transmit that culture. Focusing on romances circulating in Britain and Ireland between the twelfth and sixteenth...