Jane Gilbert is Senior Lecturer in French at University College London.

'The committed reader will be rewarded by the sheer intellectual excitement of a book that gives new meaning to the idea of 'social death'.' Times Higher Education Supplement

• Introduction: living death; 1. Roland and the second death; 2. The knight as thing: courtly love in the non-cyclic prose Lancelot; 3. The Ubi Sunt? Topos in Middle French: sad stories of the death of kings; 4. Ceci n'est pas une marguerite: anamorphosis in Pearl; 5. Becoming woman in Chaucer: on ne naît pas femme, on le devient en mourant; Conclusion: living dead or dead-in-life?

Jane Gilbert is Senior Lecturer in French at University College London.

'The committed reader will be rewarded by the sheer intellectual excitement of a book that gives new meaning to the idea of 'social death'.' Times Higher Education Supplement

• Introduction: living death; 1. Roland and the second death; 2. The knight as thing: courtly love in the non-cyclic prose Lancelot; 3. The Ubi Sunt? Topos in Middle French: sad stories of the death of kings; 4. Ceci n'est pas une marguerite: anamorphosis in Pearl; 5. Becoming woman in Chaucer: on ne naît pas femme, on le devient en mourant; Conclusion: living dead or dead-in-life?

Jane Gilbert is Senior Lecturer in French at University College London.

'The committed reader will be rewarded by the sheer intellectual excitement of a book that gives new meaning to the idea of 'social death'.' Times Higher Education Supplement

• Introduction: living death; 1. Roland and the second death; 2. The knight as thing: courtly love in the non-cyclic prose Lancelot; 3. The Ubi Sunt? Topos in Middle French: sad stories of the death of kings; 4. Ceci n'est pas une marguerite: anamorphosis in Pearl; 5. Becoming woman in Chaucer: on ne naît pas femme, on le devient en mourant; Conclusion: living dead or dead-in-life?