TEAMS Middle English Texts Series – serie

An asset to any study of gender in medieval England, this volume contains three late-fifteenth-century allegorical dream visions that thematize the relations between the sexes. The Floure and the Leafe explores the courtly imagery of the flower and leaf, wherein the flower symbolizes the fickle, shallow attraction characteristic of men, compared to the evergreen persistence of the leaf, likened to the long-suffering of women. Meanwhile, The Assembly of Ladies recounts the activities of a group of women while describing the differences between the sexes. Finally, The Isle of Ladies details a male dreamer’s interactions with the ladies of an all-female island. The texts draw on tropes of French love visions, like those of Guillaume de Machaut or the authors of Le Roman de la Rose. Once attributed to Chaucer, all three Middle English texts are now thought to be anonymously authored in a Chaucerian style—as Derek Pearsall recounts.

This volume serves as an excellent introduction to the tradition of romances dealing with the matter of France-that is, Charlemagne and his Twelve Peers. Of the three groups of English Charlemagne romances, the Ferumbras group, the Otuel group, and detached romances, the editor has selected one of each: The Sultan of Babylon, The Siege of Milan, and The Tale of Ralph the Collier. This is a valuable introduction to Charlemagne romances and is accessible to beginners in Middle English because of contextualizing introductions and glosses for each text, as well as a helpful glossary.

Thomas Usk, a fourteenth-century bureaucrat and scrivener, is known primarily for his Testament of Love. Likely composed between 1385–1386 after the author was imprisoned for his political alliances, the Testament follows a personified Love descending into Usk’s prison cell and engaging him in an extensive theological discussion. Chief among the protagonist’s complaints is his longing for Margarite, his lady love, though other topics include a quasi-feminist defense of women, the functions of the law, his political discontent, and the nature of free will. In his dream-vision, Usk draws inspiration from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, as well as Chaucer and Gower, in his prolific exploration of Christian sentimentality. R. Allen Shoaf presents the first edition since the nineteenth century, provides glosses and notes to render the Middle English text accessible, and rethinks the relationship between Usk and his more famous literary contemporaries—namely, William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer.

Marian devotion flourished as part of the affective piety movement in late medieval Europe. As Karen Saupe notes, “what was most important about Mary was her unique identity as the point of connection between the divine and the human.” Fulfilling the paradoxical roles of virtuous virgin, loving human mother, and queen of heaven, Mary became for her worshipers a powerful intercessor to Christ—to whom penitents could turn to beg forgiveness for their sins. This edition compiles 93 lyrics from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries to provide a representative sampling of Middle English Marian devotion. Saupe’s volume presents nine sections, beginning with iconic moments in Mary’s life (the Annunciation, Nativity, Crucifixion, and Assumption) and progressing into later categories of prayer and praise. While most of the lyrics remain anonymous, a handful are attributed to known authors, including Chaucer, Lydgate, Hoccleve, and Dunbar. Altogether, they express the efforts of the English populace to voice their anxieties and joys through Mary.

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.

In this volume, John Metham's classic romance Amoryus and Cleopes is made available to a wider audience of students and teachers of Middle English with its contextualizing introduction, extensive notes, and helpful gloss. This fifteenth century romance, written by John Metham, creatively reworks Ovid's tale of Pyramus and Thisbe's tragic love from his Metamorphoses. Metham draws on a wide variety of popular romances and particularly Chaucer's Ovidian works to create an inventive romance of his own with a decidedly moral aim. This volume will be of interest to students of Middle English romance and all those interested in the literary legacy of Chaucer.

The thirteenth-century and fourteenth-century romances in this volume contain some of the finest imaginative work of what has become known as the Matter of England: late medieval, non-Arthurian romances largely dealing with English subjects and locales. Partly based on the English oral folk culture that survived the Norman Conquest, yet anchored in Continental poetic genres and bearing signs of poetic influence from both traditions, they also reflect the blend of English and French literature and culture that defines Anglo-Norman literature’s unique character. Together these tales, each accompanied by an introduction and detailed notes, provide readers with a cohesive study of medieval English romances’s key themes: knightly adventure paired with romantic love, engaging social realism mixed with supernatural events, the disenfranchised hero’s valorous deeds abroad and triumphant return from exile, and an ending that rewards him with glory, marriage, and his rightful place on the throne.

The Assembly of Gods, which was published near the end of the fifteenth century, is an allegorical dream vision poem. It is notable for its strange mixture of both classical and Christian sources, in which the classical pantheon debates over the moral state of an individual, in an attempt to bring Reson and Sensualyte into balance in the individual. This text is suitable for all levels of students with its introduction explaining the cultural and linguistic context of the text, as well as a gloss and notes. This volume is invaluable to those teaching courses on late medieval allegory and dream poems.

Pearl resists identification by author, date, occasion, or place of composition; still it is almost unanimously hailed as one of the masterpieces of our literature, so skilled is its author, so eloquent its language. It is a story, according to Sarah Stanbury, "of crossing-over, the stepping out from the ordinary life into a parallel universe where things operate by different natural laws: down the rabbit hole, through the wardrobe or looking glass, across the ocean to be shipwrecked on Prospero's island, or more recently, across a bridge to the island of Willow Springs in Gloria Naylor's haunting novel, Mama Day, where the crossing-over moves into a place of memory and hope, the nostalgic space of home as well as Beulah or Eden, the earthly paradise."

The disparate texts in this anthology, produced in England between the late thirteenth and the early sixteenth centuries, challenge, and in some cases parody and satirize, the institution of marriage. In so doing, according to the Introduction, they allow us to interrogate the traditional assumptions that shape the idea of the medieval household. The trials of marriage seem to outweigh its joys at times and, as some of these texts suggest, maintaining a sense of humor in the face of what must have been great difficulty could have been no easy task. The texts bridge generic categories. Some are obscure, written by anonymous authors; others are familiar, written by the likes of John Lydgate, John Wyclif, and William Dunbar. Taken together they suggest that, despite the fact that marriage had become a sacrament in the twelfth century and was increasingly recognized by ecclesiastical and secular authorities as a valuable social institution, it was not always a stabilizing and orderly social force.

This collection of Middle English hagiographies presents readers with women saints’ lives in multiple retellings from the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Frideswide of Oxford was the Anglo-Saxon abbess of a well-endowed monastery who is presented as a victim of male persecution. Mary Magdalen’s story touches upon feminine authority while also offering three paradigms of sanctity—the repentant sinner, apostle, and contemplative—which could be emulated by both men and women. The virgin martyr legends of Margaret of Antioch, Christina of Tyre, and Katherine of Alexandria present these women as challengers to political tyrants. Finally, Anne’s vita popularized a new type of sanctity of holy motherhood that was not miraculously virginal but biologically and maritally typical. Sherry Reames introduces readers to relatively obscure female-centered hagiographies, the majority of which have never before been published or have not been edited since the nineteenth century.

John Capgrave's The Life of Saint Katherine, written c. 1463 in Lynn in Norfolk, is, according to the editor, . . . the longest and most intricate Katherine legend written during the Middle Ages, either in Latin or in any vernacular. In telling the story of the life of the virgin martyr, Katherine, Capgrave uses many of the tropes that mark the enormously popular genre of hagiography as it was written throughout the Middle Ages. Given his learning, however, and his evident acquaintance with the works of Chaucer, Lydgate, and Osburn Bokenham, and his knowledge of medieval drama, and the possibility that he knew of The Book of Margery Kempe, this saint's life should be particularly interesting to students of late Middle English culture, especially literature. In the course of his encyclopedic narrative, in which he evidently sought to appeal to a broad audience in sophisticated, if provincial, Norfolk, Capgrave inserts digressions on Greek and Roman history; on just and unjust rule and justifiable vs. unjustifiable rebellion; on child care; on medieval English feasts, jousts, and pageants; and on the role(s) of women.

Although nearly everyone has heard the name of Robin Hood, few have actually read any medieval tales about the legendary outlaw. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren set out to correct this discrepancy in their comprehensive collection of all pre-seventeenth-century Robin Hood tales. The editors include such other "outlaw" figures as Hereward the Wake, Eustache the Monk, and Fouke le Fitz Waryn to further contextualize the tradition of English outlaw tales. In this text the figure of Robin Hood can be viewed in historical perspective, from the early accounts in the chronicles through the ballads, plays, and romances that grew around his fame and impressed him on our fictional and historical imaginations. This edition is particularly useful for classrooms, with its extensive introductions, notes, and glosses, enabling students of any level to approach the texts in their original Middle English.

This volume makes available two somewhat neglected yet significant and instructive Middle English alliterative texts that are usually read in conjunction with William Langland's Piers Plowman. The texts, both anonymous, are Richard the Redeless, which concerns the government style of Richard II (1367-1400; reigned 1377-99), and Mum and the Sothsegger, which addresses social issues in the reign of Henry IV (1367-1413; reigned 1399-1413). They should be assigned reading not only for those interested in the later reception of Piers Plowman but also for those seeking to understand literary and historical forces in late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England. Richard the Redeless (focusing on events in and around 1399) offers an often regretful, sometimes sharp critique of Richard's kingship under the guise of advice; Mum and the Sothsegger provides a satirical look at bureaucratic institutions during Henry's regime. Both works reveal that alliterative poetry in the Piers Plowman tradition continued to be the chief vehicle for political and social criticism at the turn of the fourteenth century.

Augustinian canon Walter Hilton’s The Scale of Perfection maintains a secure place among the major mystical writings that flourished in fourteenth-century England. Composed between 1380 and 1396, The Scale of Perfection is addressed to a woman who has recently taken her religious vows, and defends Hilton’s orthodox beliefs with strikingly visual imagery. Written over two books of more than 40,000 words each, the titular Scale describes a stairway to heaven which the religious can ascend by following Hilton’s moral advice; his topics range from defining the contemplative life and overcoming the seven deadly sins to reforming the human soul in the divine image of God and opening one’s inner eye. A popular treatise, it circulated in 42 manuscripts, was translated into Latin, and was printed by Wynkyn de Worde. While there have been multiple translations of the Scale, this is the first complete edition of the Middle English text.

The early thirteenth-century devotional guide Ancrene Wisse, or “Anchoresses’ Guide,” is a revision of an earlier work written to instruct three noblewomen enclosed as anchoresses in the West Midlands in their religious devotion; its readership had expanded to more than twenty anchoresses by the time of its revision. Its use of Middle English, uncommon as a medium for serious religious instruction in the thirteenth century, both attests to the state of language training among the laywomen who comprised the text’s intended audience, and reflects its composition within the West Midlands, a region with a strong tradition of English literary culture stretching back to the late Anglo-Saxon period. Ancrene Wisse gives modern readers a window into not only thirteenth-century English literary production, but also an unusual and striking form of medieval Christian devotion that held appeal for noblewomen seeking a pious life in the tradition of desert spirituality and asceticism.

John Lydgate, Benedictine monk and prolific author of Middle English poetry, finished writing The Siege of Thebes in the early 1420s. An apocryphal Canterbury Tale, The Siege is Lydgate’s counterpart to Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale and remains the only extant Middle English retelling of the struggle between Oedipus’s sons. Across its four parts, The Siege unfolds the aftermath of a paternal curse and the conflict between two brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, over their father’s throne. As the follow-up to Lydgate’s Troy Book, The Siege adopts some of the moralizing practices of that earlier text, as well as interrogating issues of poetic authority. It is Lydgate’s most political poem and boasts a lasting influence on Caxton’s printed edition of The Historie of Jason. This edition, based on MS Arundel 119, presents readers with an accessible approach to The Siege of Thebes.

The Wallace catalogs the sheer brutality of war. We are regaled with such detailed accounts of the sacking of towns and the burning down of buildings full of screaming inhabitants that the smells and sounds, as well as the terrible sights, of war are graphically conveyed in language which seems designed not only to express Wallace's rage and Hary's antipathy but also to incite hatred of the English in his readers.

Richard Maidstone, Carmelite friar and anti-Lollard activist, devoted his life to upholding orthodoxy. His Anglo-Latin Concordia, written in the last decade of the fourteenth century, details King Richard II’s royal entry into London, a spectacular event that officially ended his conflict with the city’s merchant-oligarchs. Richard had long abused his royal prerogative to extort vast sums of money from his subjects. Though violence erupted in protest, it concluded in the king’s 1392 "reconciliation" with London. Maidstone documents Richard’s procession, the lavish gifts presented, the speeches given in praise, culminating in his re-enthronement at Westminster palace. David Carlson focuses on the poem’s propagandistic features, highlighting Maidstone’s royalist agenda, his belief in using fear tactics to exercise control, and his "peculiarly Ricardian notion of ‘peace’ in the form of submission to royal authority," no matter how cruel or arbitrary it might be. This is the first edition since the nineteenth century and offers a facing-page English translation from A.G. Rigg.

Though our modern understanding of the medieval doctrine of Purgatory is generally shaped by its presentation by Dante in the Divine Comedy, there is a lengthy history of speculation about the nature of such a place of purgation. Through these fourteenth-century Middle English poems, readers can experience something of the controversies that surfaced and resurfaced even after Aquinas had articulated his doctrine of the Communion of Saints. The Gast of Gy, as Foster notes, puts a human face on the doctrine of Purgatory, not only in the amiable, logical, and patient person of the Gast of Gy himself, . . . but also in the careful and cautious dialogue between the Gast and the Pryor who questions him. Sir Owain and The Vision of Tundale present two accounts of the purgatorial journeys of living individuals who are offered a chance to see the torments they have brought upon themselves by their less-than-perfect lives along with the opportunity to return and amend those lives. All three poems were quite popular, as was the doctrine of Purgatory itself. And why not? As Foster notes in his general introduction, it the doctrine of Purgatory had everything: adventure and adversity, suffering and excitement, and, most importantly, a profound theological warning wrapped in the joyful solace of communion with the departed and hope for our own sinful selves.

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.

This edition anthologizes four fifteenth-century Middle English poems—three of which were previously attributed to Chaucer—that use dream-vision conventions to explore the theme of romantic love. Each features an unhappy narrator who secretly spies on the speech of lovers to inform his assessment on love. John Clanvowe’s Boke of Cupide relates a love debate between two birds, a nightingale and a cuckoo. John Lydgate’s Complaynte of a Lovers Lyfe features a knight complaining about the failures of his romantic life. The anonymous, Scotticized Quare of Jelusy follows a female newlywed, who rants about the influence of Jealousy on her husband. La Belle Dame Sans Mercy, Richard Roos’ English translation of Alain Chartier’s French poem of the same name, observes a debate between two lovers. Dana Symons discusses the development of the English love vision both within and independent of Chaucerian reception, and argues for decentering the dominant Chaucerian aesthetic in evaluating the courtly poems’ literary merit.

This volume is conceived as a complement to another Middle English Texts series text, Sherry Reames' Middle English Legends of Women Saints. This selection is intended to be broadly representative of saints' lives in Middle English and of the classic types of hagiographic legend as these were presented to the lay public and less-literate clergy of late medieval England.

The Siege of Jerusalem has long confounded readers with its graphic depictions of violence and the relish with which it describes the suffering of Jewish people. Despite the moral and emotional challenges this text presents, its participation in the longstanding “Vengeance of Our Lord” tradition, discussed throughout medieval Christendom and incorporating a combination of legend, miracle, historiography, and chivalric romance, provides modern readers with a wider window into this material’s reception and reuse in medieval England. This Middle English alliterative poem, written anonymously sometime in the fourteenth century, chronicles the Siege of Jerusalem in the year 70 CE, beginning with the crucifixion of Jesus and culminating in the Romans’ destruction of the Second Temple, intended to symbolize the vengeance of Jesus. Michael Livingston’s edition and notes bring out a new dimension of this poem, exploring the ways in which it realizes, rather than glorifies, the brutalities of war.

Though never quite matching the popularity and scholarly acclaim of his friend and contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer, the English poet John Gower produced an impressive body of poetry in Anglo-Norman French, Latin, and Middle English and has earned his reputation as one of the great English poets of the fourteenth century. His Confessio Amantis, or “The Lover’s Confession,” ranks among the Middle English texts most frequently copied before the advent of the printing press. The poem both follows and builds upon the model of fourteenth-century Christian confessions by shaping the lover’s account into a frame narrative for a collection of shorter poetic tales, pairing courtly-love reinterpretations of the seven deadly sins with moralizing narratives drawn from biblical, classical, and medieval sources. Volume 3 of this three-volume edition presents Books 5, 6 and 7, including translations of Latin components, alongside a comprehensive bibliography, glosses, and explanatory notes.

Prison poems, texts written in conditions of physical captivity or on the subject of imprisonment, flourished in the fifteenth century. This edition compiles five such poems, all of which draw on Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, the sixth-century philosophical treatise that preached against fickle Fortune and for the constancy of God. James I of Scotland and Charles D’Orleans—both royalty captured by political rivals—follow a Boethian trajectory in their poems (the Older Scots Kingis Quair and Middle English Fortunes Stabilnes, respectively), though they situate themselves as prisoners to love. George Ashby, a government clerk imprisoned for an unknown reason, pleads in his Complaint of a Prisoner in the Fleet 1463 for patience and purification of the soul against the vicissitudes of Fortune. Taken together, these poems consider prison not only as a physical condition but also as a literary trope that allows for both complaint and empowerment, providing avenues for escape through the pursuit of love, religious faith, or intellectual contemplation.

This edition samples from Chaucerian apocrypha, works wrongly attributed to, inspired by, or associated with Geoffery Chaucer, the father of English poetry. These fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English texts reflect the extent of Chaucer’s “brand name” appeal. The sixteen poems, united by courtly themes, are organized by Kathleen Forni into four sections. The Court of Love, an allegorical dream-vision, follows Philogenet who sues for the favor of Rosiall. Literature of Courtly Love includes John Lydgate’s Valentine poem Floure of Curtesye and The Lovers’ Mass, a satire that eroticizes Latin liturgy. The Antifeminist Tradition explores a misogynistic strain in Chaucerian poetry, including parodic catalogs of a woman’s faults rather than her charms. Good Counsel, Wisdom, and Advice depicts a preoccupation with traditional ethics and political guidance; a highlight is Scogan’s Moral Balade, which expands on Boethian ideas from Chaucer’s Gentillesse that nobility stems from one’s character, not birth. Forni brings to light a literary corpus which has long suffered critical neglect.

The complete text of John Gower's poem is a three-volume edition, including all Latin components-with translations-of this bilingual text and extensive glosses, bibliography and explanatory notes. Volume 1 contains the Prologue and Books 1 and 8, in effect the overall structure of Gower's poem.

These five texts by anonymous authors comprise a rich genre introduction to Middle English romance. Covering several texts surviving from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, Sentimental and Humorous Romances presents readers with tales both widely read and rare in their circulation, ranging from stories of Charlemagne’s ancestors to fringe Arthuriana, each with its own spin on the core theme of an unlikely love interest. Selections include a quintessential example of medieval European orientalism in Floris and Blancheflour, regional conflict in Sir Degrevant, the secrecy-driven lovers’ tale of The Squire of Low Degree, and two comic burlesques set at a tournament feast. This edition is well-suited to use by newcomers to Middle English romance, while providing more familiar readers with striking examples of the genre’s diverse thematic interests.