The essays in this volume honour the distinguished career of Professor Elizabeth Archibald. They explore two areas that her scholarship has done so much to illuminate: medieval romance, and Arthurian literature. Several chapters examine individual romances, including Emar**é, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Roman de Silence. Others focus on wider concerns in romances and related works in Middle English, Latin, French, German and Icelandic, from a variety ...

Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth/early fifteenth-century anchoress and mystic, is one of the most important and best-known figures of the Middle Ages. Her Revelations, intense visions of the divine, have been widely studied and read; the first known writings of an English woman, their influence extends over theology and literature. However, many aspects of both her life and thought remain enigmatic.This exciting collection offers a comprehensive, accessible coverage of the...

'All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well' Julian of Norwich is one of the most celebrated figures of the English Middle Ages. She is esteemed as one of the subtlest writers and profoundest thinkers of the period for her account of the revelations that she experienced in 1373. Julian lived as an anchoress in Norwich, and after recovering from a serious illness she described the visions that had come to her during her suffering. She co...

This is a comprehensive critical guide to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. This new edition has been comprehensively revised in light of the latest scholarly and critical research and with a fully updated bibliography. It includes a full account of Chaucer's imaginative deployment of his sources, and an extended survey of this narrative poem's innovative combination of a range of generic identities. The chapters explain how Chaucer builds thematic significance into his poem's symme...

'And then he, completely astonished at her words, left off his lewdness, saying to her as many a man had done before, "Either you are a truly good woman or else a truly wicked woman." 'Brave, outspoken and guaranteed to annoy people wherever she went - including exasperated fellow pilgrims in Jerusalem and her long-suffering husband - Margery Kempe was one of the most vivid and unforgettable voices of the Middle Ages. Whether travelling alone, getting herself arrested or having vis...

A remarkable medieval woman's life and the earliest surviving autobiography in English, now updated with new materialThe story of the eventful life of Margery Kempe - medieval wife, mother, businesswoman, pilgrim and visionary - is the earliest surviving autobiography in English. Here Kempe recounts in vivid, unembarrassed detail the madness that followed the birth of the first of her fourteen children, the failure of her brewery business, her dramatic call to the ...

`Now listen with good will, as I go straight to my subject matter, in which you may hear the double sorrows of Troilus in his love for Criseyde, and how she forsook him before she died' Like Romeo and Juliet, or Tristan and Iseult, the names of Troilus and Criseyde will always be united: a pair of lovers whose names are inseparable from passion and tragedy. Troilus and Criseyde is Chaucer's masterpiece and was prized for centuries as his supreme achievement. The story of how Troil...

`Now listen with good will, as I go straight to my subject matter, in which you may hear the double sorrows of Troilus in his love for Criseyde, and how she forsook him before she died' Like Romeo and Juliet, or Tristan and Iseult, the names of Troilus and Criseyde will always be united: a pair of lovers whose names are inseparable from passion and tragedy. Troilus and Criseyde is Chaucer's masterpiece and was prized for centuries as his supreme achievement. The story of how Troil...