Scholars and students working on the early courtly and chivalric literature of medieval Europe will have often felt the need for contemporary theoretical material with which to illustrate their arguments about courtesy and chivalry in romances, etc. The present volume, which presents critical editions of the two earliest didactic poems of this kind in the vernacular (both date from the first quarter of the thirteenth century), was conceived partly to fill this need. This book will be of interest not only to specialists in Old French literature, but also to those studying other literatures; both texts are known to have circulated in England in the fourteenth century and are therefore of importance for anglicists; L’Ordene de Chevalerie was adapted into Middle Dutch and Italian several times and provides excellent material for comparatists, netherlandists and italianists; moreover, given the germinal place of Old French literature in the culture of the Middle Ages, both poems are worthy of study in the context of the evolution of the ideals of courtesy and chivalry as European literary phenomenon. Each critical text is accompanied by an extensive literary introduction and philological apparatus, and translations into modern English prose have been appended to render the poems more accessible to non-romanists.

First published in 1999, this volume emerged as part of the Collected Studies series and features studies authored by Bernard Hamilton over a period of twenty years, all of which deal with relations between Western Europe and the neighbouring civilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean during the 12th and 13th centuries. The first set examines the kind of society which developed in the Crusader States (including three essays on women and Queens), and the attitude of western settlers to the Byzantine Empire, eastern Christian churches and the Islamic world. Further essays deal with the impact on Western Europe of Christian dualist heresy which had its roots in the Balkans and Armenia, and perhaps ultimately in Persia. The final group centres around the Holy Places, whose liberation was the raison d’etre of the crusade movement. They examine how the Western Church administered these shrines, the way in which they shaped western piety during the time of crusader rule, and how the cult of the Holy Places developed in the Western Church after they had been recaptured by Islam. Each article’s original citation information is included, along with the original page numbers and pagination.