John Conlee – författare

This anonymously authored Middle English adaptation of the Old French Vulgate Cycle survives in one manuscript, Cambridge University Library MS Ff.3.11, and was written near the middle of the fifteenth century, making it the single earliest piece of prose Arthuriana in Middle English. A complete account of its titular character’s life, the Prose Merlin follows the sorcerer from birth to final imprisonment by his former apprentice, Nimiane. Although composed not long before Malory’s Arthurian epic Le Morte D’Arthur, the Prose Merlin provides a more focused and optimistic account of the Arthurian court, while also reveling in the supernatural themes of its subjects. This edition, accessible to the reader unfamiliar with Middle English prose, is the first complete edition of the romance published since the nineteenth century, making it a valuable resource for modern scholarship.

Scottish poet William Dunbar is usually considered one of the most important figures of fifteenth-century British literature, and may lay claim to being the finest lyric poet writing in English in the century and half between the death of Chaucer in 1400 and the appearance of Tottel's Miscellany in 1557. Dunbar's poems offer vivid depictions of late medieval Scottish society and serve up a striking pageant of colorful figures at the court of James IV (r. 1488-1513), with which he was associated for much of his adult life. The poems are remarkable both for their diversity and variability and for their multiplicity of voices, styles, and tones. The great variety of poems within Dunbar's canon includes religious hymns of exaltation, moral poems on a wide range of serious themes, comic and parodic poems of extreme salaciousness and scatological coarseness, general satires against the times, and satires with much more specific targets, often a single individual. This edition of eighty-four poems attributed to Dunbar includes extensive background material and explanatory notes that are sure to be of interest to students and Dunbar enthusiasts alike. The edition is rounded out with textual notes, an index of first lines, and a glossary.