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This volume reflects the multiplicity of English poetry between 1100 and 1400. The chapters focus on the historical, linguistic, and poetic transitions of the period, including major innovations and developments in language, topics, poetic forms, and means of expression.
List of contents
- 1: Helen Cooper and Robert R. Edwards: Introduction
- Part I. Contexts
- 2: Laura Ashe: Historical and Political Changes: The Norman Conquest to the Hundred Years' War
- 3: Ralph Hanna: Poetic Sites
- 4: Simon Horobin: Manuscripts: The Textual Record of Middle English Poetry
- Part II. Literary Culture
- 5: Richard Dance: The Poetic Field, I: Old and Middle English Language and Poetry
- 6: Siân Echard: The Poetic Field, II: Anglo-Latin
- 7: Keith Busby: The Poetic Field, III: Anglo-French
- 8: Victoria Flood: The Poetic Field, IV: Welsh
- 9: Ad Putter: Verse Forms
- 10: Andrew Galloway: Poetic and Literary Theory
- Part III. 'Matere'
- 11: Caroline D. Eckhardt: Poetry and National History
- 12: Craig E. Bertolet: Poetry in its Age: Satire and Complaint
- 13: Stephen M. Yeager: Doctrine and Learning
- 14: Jacqueline Tasioulas: Poetry and the Bible
- 15: Karen A. Winstead: Saints' Lives and Sacred Biography
- Part IV. Genre Poetics
- 16: Christopher Cannon: Narrative on the Margins: Tales and Fabliaux
- 17: Denis Renevey: Religious and Didactic Lyrics
- 18: Susanna Fein: Secular Lyrics
- 19: Rhiannon Purdie: Non-Cycle Romances of Love
- 20: Wolfram R. Keller: Romances of the Ancient World
- 21: Elizabeth Archibald: The Matter of Britain
- 22: Marcel Elias: Crusade Romances and the Matter of France
- 23: Andrew James Johnston: The 'Matter of England'
- Part V. The Ricardian Poets
- 24: Nicolette Zeeman: Piers Plowman
- 25: Helen Cooper: The Gawain-Poet
- 26: David Lawton: Chaucer's Courtly Poetry
- 27: Barry Windeatt: The Canterbury Tales
- 28: R. F. Yeager: John Gower
- 29: Julia Boffey: The Reception of the Middle English Poetic Tradition
About the author
Helen Cooper is Professor Emeritus of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. She holds Emeritus and Honorary Fellowships at University College, Oxford, and a Life Fellowship at Magdalene College, Cambridge. She has particular interests in the cultural continuations across the medieval and early modern periods. Her books include Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance; Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales; The English Romance in Time; Shakespeare and the Medieval World; and the editorial material to the Oxford World's Classics Malory: Morte Darthur and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Robert R. Edwards is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative Literature at The Pennsylvania State University. His chief areas of research and teaching are the English, Romance, and Latin literatures of the Middle Ages. His other interests include textual culture, medieval literary theory, and poetics. He has held grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation and fellowships from the National Humanities Center and Clare Hall, Cambridge. His current projects are an edition of Troilus and Criseyde for the Cambridge University Press edition of Chaucer's works and a study of medieval English literary reception.
Summary
This volume reflects the multiplicity of English poetry between 1100 and 1400. The chapters focus on the historical, linguistic, and poetic transitions of the period, including major innovations and developments in language, topics, poetic forms, and means of expression.
Additional text
The great achievement of the 1100-1400 volume is that it takes seriously its 300-year time span...The volume does not set out to tell a story of teleological progress,...Instead we follow multiple strands of poetic culture and are encouraged to think about medieval English poetry on its own terms.
