John Lydgate

This book is a collection of essays written in honor of Professor Douglas Gray, editor of the groundbreaking Oxford Book of Late Medieval Verse and Prose. The essays provide a comprehensive survey of fifteenth-century literature, stressing its importance, interest, and richness.

Sieges were a popular subject in medieval romances. Tales of the Crusades featured champions of Christianity capturing towns in the Holy Land or mounting heroic defences. The fall of a great city such as Troy, Thebes, or Jerusalem provided opportunities for the recreation of ancient chivalry and for reflections on historical change. Images of the siege in romances also point to other forms, such as drama and love allegory, where it represents the trial of the soul or the pursuit of the beloved. This book is the first full-length study of an important theme in medieval literature. Close reading of selected Middle English shows how writers used descriptions of sieges to explore such subjects as military strategy, heroism, chivalry, and attitudes to the past. This study also draws on a wide range of writings in several languages, to set the romances in a broad context. When they are seen against a background of military manuals, patristic commentary, pageantry, and love poetry, the sieges of romance take on deeper resonances of meaning and reflect the vitality of the theme in medieval culture as a whole.

This book examines three diseases - leprosy, bubonic plague and syphillis - to show how doctors, priests and literary authors from the Middle Ages and through the Renaissance interpreted certain illnesses through a moral filter. Lacking knowledge about the transmission of contagious diseases, doctors and priests saw epidemic diseases as a punishment sent by God for human transgression. Accordingly, their job was to properly read sickness in relation to the sin. By examining different readings of specific illnesses, this book shows how the social construction of epidemic diseases formed a kind of narrative wherein man attempts to take the control of the disease out of God's hands by connecting epidermic diseases to the sins of carnality.

This book establishes the range of meanings bestowed on the love deities through the later Middle Ages, and draws on feminist and cultural theories to offer new models for interpreting both academic Latin discourses and vernacular poetry.

This work explores and untangles the theme of rape, and its counterpart ravishment, in Anglo-French cultural tradition between the disintegration of the classical world and the Renaissance. Tracing debate and dialogue across intellectual and literary discourses, Corinne Saunders places Middle English literary portrayals of rape and ravishment in the context of shifting legal, theological and medical attitudes. The treatment of rape and ravishment is considered across a wide range of literary genres: hagiography, where female saints are repeatedly threatened with rape; legendary history, as in the stories of Lucretia and Helen; and romance, where acts of rape and ravishment challenge and shape chivalric order, and romance heroes are conceived through rape. Finally, the ways in which Malory and Chaucer write and rewrite rape and ravishment are examined.Dr CORINNE SAUNDERS is Lecturer in Medieval Studies, Department of English, University of Durham.

Humor began in British literature during the Middle Ages, when Chaucer developed the storytelling tradition along with the ironies that resulted from the juxtaposition of people from different classes and points of view. This book overviews scholarship on humor in British literature from its medieval origins through the seventeenth century. Chapters are devoted to particular centuries, with authors listed individually within each chapter. Each entry discusses the role of humor in the author's work and includes a bibliography.