Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis details the first years of the Confessio's material history and offers a major revision to a century's old narrative of political revision and conversion around the trauma of 1400. Joel Fredell argues for "late stage" revisions by Gower to his great poem in Middle English from the late 1390s up to Gower's death in 1408. This approach, new to scholarship for Ricardian and Lancastrian literature, demands profound re-evaluation of Gower's poetic persona and its entanglement in the opening and closing books of the Confessio. It offers a reassessment of the political and literary relationships between versions dedicated to Richard II and Henry IV. It repositions Gower's laureate status in a London world of deluxe book production that created a canon of Ricardian poets linked to their fifteenth-century inheritors. Finally, it identifies for the first time how late medieval authors designed their poetry as fictional artifacts that witness history from quasi-chronicles like Maidstone's Concordia or Richard the Redeless, quasi-petitions like the Lollard "Petition to the King and Parliament," quasi-epistles that begin so many texts, quasi-transcripts such as the Record and Process of the Deposition of Richard II, and so on. Joel Fredell is Professor of English at Southeastern Louisiana University, USA.

Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantis details the first years of the Confessio’s material history and offers a major revision to a century’s old narrative of political revision and conversion around the trauma of 1400. Joel Fredell argues for “late stage” revisions by Gower to his great poem in Middle English from the late 1390s up to Gower’s death in 1408. This approach, new to scholarship for Ricardian and Lancastrian literature, demands profound re-evaluation of Gower's poetic persona and its entanglement in the opening and closing books of the Confessio. It offers a reassessment of the political and literary relationships between versions dedicated to Richard II and Henry IV. It repositions Gower's laureate status in a London world of deluxe book production that created a canon of Ricardian poets linked to their fifteenth-century inheritors. Finally, it identifies for the first time how late medieval authors designed their poetry as fictional artifacts that witness history from quasi-chronicles like Maidstone’s Concordia or Richard the Redeless, quasi-petitions like the Lollard “Petition to the King and Parliament,” quasi-epistles that begin so many texts, quasi-transcripts such as the Record and Process of the Deposition of Richard II, and so on.

Examines manuscripts of Langland, Chaucer, Gower, Nicholas Love and Arthurian tales, alongside other devotional works and archival evidence. Professor Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's scholarship has transformed the study of medieval manuscripts and readers, particularly in the areas of devotional literature, professional scribal production and clerical writing. The essays collected here celebrate and reflect her influence and practice of giving careful attention to material contexts and archival sources when reading literature produced in late medieval England. They offer new interpretations of scribal practices, professional readers' activities, documentary evidence and challenging material and cultural contexts. They also reconsider scholarly practices and assumptions, while demonstrating how manuscript and archival studies can energize scholarship on such varied topics as authority, reader reception, modern editorial perspectives, gender and religious activities.

Absent Narratives is a book about the defining difference between medieval and modern stories. In chapters devoted to the major writers of the late medieval period - Chaucer, Gower, the Gawain -poet and Malory - it presents and then analyzes a set of unique and unnoticed phenomena in medieval narrative, namely the persistent appearance of missing stories: stories implied, alluded to, or fragmented by a larger narrative. Far from being trivial digressions or passing curiosities, these absent narratives prove central to the way these medieval works function and to why they have affected readers in particular ways. Traditionally unseen, ignored, or explained away by critics, absent narratives offer a valuable new strategy for reading medieval texts and the historically specific textual culture in which they were written.

Dorothy Leigh Sayers was an English crime writer, poet, playwright, essayist, translator and Christian humanist; she was also a student of classical and modern languages. She is perhaps best known for her mysteries, a series of novels and short stories, set between the First and Second World Wars, which feature Lord Peter Wimsey, an English aristocrat and amateur sleuth. Novels Whose Body? Clouds of Witness Unnatural Death Short Stories The Abominable History of the Man with Copper Fingers The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager’s Will The Fantastic Horror of the Cat in the Bag The Unprincipled Affair of the Practical Joker The Undignified Melodrama of the Bone of Contention The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps That Ran The Bibulous Business of a Matter of Taste The Learned Adventure of the Dragon’s Head The Piscatorial Farce of the Stolen Stomach The Unsolved Puzzle of the Man with No Face The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba

Fictions of Advice historicizes the late medieval mirrors (or handbooks) for princes to reveal how the ambiguities and contradictions characteristic of the genre are responses to—as well as attempts to manage—the risks implicit in advising a king. Often thought of as moralizing advice unable to engage political conflicts, the mirrors for princes have been taken for dull and conventionalized testimonies to the medieval taste for platitude. Judith Ferster maintains that advice was at the center of one of the important political debates in the late Middle Ages: how to constrain the king and allow for his subjects' participation. Fictions of Advice rereads the English mirrors for princes to show how their moralizing was often highly topical and even subversive. Although overtly deferential to the rulers they address, the mirrors' authors were surprisingly capable of criticism and opposition. In putting the texts back into their historical contexts, Ferster reveals the vital cultural and political function they fulfilled in their societies.