Jean Froissart

"A frequently brilliant study of pseudo- autobiographical writing in the fourteenth century". -- Rupert T. Pickens, University of Kentucky

"New and challenging readings of texts that are central to the understanding of the fourteenth-century literature of Spain, France, and England.... (de Looze's) wide acquaintance with the Western literary tradition from Homer and Virgil to Dickens and Joyce is apparent on every page. His analyses of four medieval authors... will become essential reading for all but the most dyed-in-the-wool, dry-as-dust medievalists and will do much to counteract the insularity of many modem theorists". -- Ross G. Arthur, York University

In Pseudo-Autobiography in the Fourteenth Century, Laurence de Looze examines representative "books of the self" by four prominent medieval authors in order to discover how such texts have been read both as works of autobiographical "truth" and as works of pure literary artifice. In formulating an answer, he considers whether there is anything that inheres in a text that makes it necessarily autobiographical, and how the term autobiography may describe, in these instances, a way of reading more than a way of writing.

In the course of his study, de Looze develops a method of analyzing "pseudoautobiography" that transcends national boundaries and scholarly subdisciplines, and he applies the methods and concerns of modem literary theory to the interpretation of medieval texts. At the same time, he grounds his study thoroughly in the medieval context of these works, discussing the tradition and its pertinent texts -- from Augustine and Boethius through Jean de Meun and beyond -- thus providing a substantial chronological andlinguistic range for his discussion.

Because it offers insights into the works of four prominent medieval writers and proposes a new, reader-oriented typology of autobiographical writing, de Looze's study will be of wide interes

This volume, the first of a two-volume set, is the work of fourteen European and American scholars and focuses on the wider aspects of the Hundred Years. These essays range far afield from the traditional heartlands of Hundred Years War studies to investigate the influence of the conflict on Italy, the Low Countries, and Spain and on such topics as urban history, and the actualities of weapon use on the battlefield. A number of the essays in this collection seek to reexamine old but thorny questions long associated with the conflict, including the real immediate impact of gunpowder technology on siege warfare during the fourteenth century and the "purposeful" strategy of Henry V in staging and bringing about the battle of Agincourt in 1415.