Six essays explore the making of human identities and agency in English communities between the Great Plague and about 1600. They also focus attention on the processes of understanding past cultures and their texts. Among the topics are court politics, sacred and secular drama, and women. Paper edition (2416-9), $15.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book analyses the relation between politics and the production of culture in Lancastrian England, focussing on the intellectual activity of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, reconstructing his library and analysing his commissions of translations, biographies and political poems.

"Green's work is of the greatest importance for the understanding of a crucial period in the history of English writing and institutions, and a crucial shift in patterns of cognition."—Derek Pearsall, Harvard University

A literary and historical study of the first single-author book of lyric poetry in English

This volume brings together a selection of lectures and essays in which J.A. Burrow discusses the work of English poets of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries: Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and Hoccleve, as well as the anonymous authors of Pearl, Saint Erkenwald, and a pair of metrical romances. Six of the pieces address general issues, with some reference to French and Italian writings ('Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages', for example, or 'The Poet and the Book'); but most of them concentrate on particular English poems, such as Chaucer's Envoy to Scogan, Gower's Confessio Amantis, Langland's Piers Plowman, and Hoccleve's Series. Although some of the essays take account of the poet's life and times ('Chaucer as Petitioner', 'Hoccleve and the 'Court''), most are mainly concerned with the meaning and structure of the poems. What, for example, does the hero of Ipomadon hope to achieve by fighting, as he always does, incognito? Why do the stories in Piers Plowman all peter out so inconclusively? And how can it be that the narrator in Chaucer's Book of the Duchess so persistently fails to understand what he is told?

First recent full-length analysis of a major medieval poem.