This collection of essays explores the relation between literature and madness from the Medieval through to the Modern period. The essays examine how literature represents the experience of madness and cultural responses to it, and how madness may inspire creativity. The volume also illuminates the history of medicine, demonstrating the shifts and continuities in clinical understandings of and social attitudes to mental illness from the Middle Ages through to the 'enlightened' notions of the Eighteenth Century to the development of psychoanalysis. The volume includes original contributions...

This concise companion provides a succinct introduction to Chaucer's major works, the contexts in which he wrote, and to medieval thought more generally.

• Opens with a general introductory section discussing London life and politics, books and authority, manuscripts and readers.
  
• Subsequent sections focus on Chaucer's major works - the dream visions, Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales.
  
• Essays highlight the key religious, political and intellectual contexts for each major work.
  
• Also covers...

Romance is a varied and fluid literary genre, notoriously difficult to define. This groundbreaking Companion surveys the many permutations of romance throughout the ages.

• Considers the literary and historical development of the romance genre from its classical origins to the present day
  
• Incorporates discussion of the changing readership of romance and of romance's special relation to women readers
  
• Comprises 30 essays written by leading authorities on different periods and sub-genres
  
• Challenges the idea that...

The Body and the Arts focuses on the dynamic relation between the body and the arts: the body as inspiration, subject, symbol and medium. Contributors from a variety of disciplines explore this relation across a range of periods and art forms, spanning medicine, literature from the classical period to the present, and visual and performing arts.

A Companion to Medieval Poetry presents a series of original essays from leading literary scholars that explore English poetry from the Anglo-Saxon period up to the 15^th century.

• Organised into three parts to echo the chronological and stylistic divisions between the Anglo-Saxon, Middle English and Post-Chaucerian periods, each section is introduced with contextual essays, providing a valuable introduction to the society and culture of the time
• Combines a general discussion of genres of medieval poetry, with specific consideration of texts and...

An interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring the complex and conflicted topic of beauty in cultural, arts and medicine, looking back through the long cultural history of beauty, and asking whether it is possible to 'recover beauty'.

This collection of essays explores the relation between literature and madness from the Medieval through to the Modern period. The essays examine how literature represents the experience of madness and cultural responses to it, and how madness may inspire creativity.