This invigorating study places medieval romance narrative in dialogue with theories and practices of gift and exchange, opening new approaches to questions of storytelling, agency, gender and materiality in some of the most engaging literature from the Middle Ages. It argues that the dynamics of the gift are powerfully at work in romances: through exchanges of objects and people; repeated patterns of love, loyalty and revenge; promises made or broken; and the complex effects that time works on such objects, exchanges and promises. Ranging from the twelfth century to the fifteenth, and including close discussions of poetry by Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet and romances in the Auchinleck Manuscript, this book will prompt new ideas and debate amongst students and scholars of medieval literature, as well as anyone curious about the pleasures that romance narratives bring.

In this detailed study of English narrative verse the author describes and analyses the undisputed masterpieces of narrative (such as the works of the Gawain poet, Langland, Gower and Chaucer), as well as anonymous romances and specimens of religious and comic narrative which form the background to more well-known poems.

In the century before Chaucer a new language of political critique emerged. In political verse of the period, composed in Anglo-Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English, poets write as if addressing the king himself, drawing on their sense of the rights granted by Magna Carta. These apparent appeals to the sovereign increase with the development of parliament in the late thirteenth century and the emergence of the common petition, and become prominent, in an increasingly sophisticated literature, during the political crises of the early fourteenth century. However, very little of this writing was truly directed to the king. As David Matthews shows in this book, the form of address was a rhetorical stance revealing much about the position from which writers were composing, the audiences they wished to reach, and their construction of political and national subjects.

In Telling Tales, Joel Rosenthal takes us on a journey through some familiar sources from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England to show how memories and recollections can be used to build a compelling portrait of daily life in the late Middle Ages.

Popular views of medieval chivalry—knights in shining armor, fair ladies, banners fluttering from battlements—were inherited from the nineteenth-century Romantics. This is the first book to explore chivalry’s place within a wider history of medieval England, from the Norman Conquest to the aftermath of Henry VII’s triumph at Bosworth in the Wars of the Roses. Saul invites us to view the world of castles and cathedrals, tournaments and round tables, with fresh eyes. Chivalry in Medieval England charts the introduction of chivalry by the Normans, the rise of the knightly class as a social elite, the fusion of chivalry with kingship in the fourteenth century, and the influence of chivalry on literature, religion, and architecture. Richard the Lionheart and the Crusades, the Black Death and the Battle of Crecy, the Magna Carta and the cult of King Arthur—all emerge from the mists of time and legend in this vivid, authoritative account.

In this study, Nancy Bradbury presents a spectrum of medieval English romances that extends from the fragmentary remains of a predominantly oral tradition to a writerly work that proclaims its own place in the European tradition of canonical poetry. By focusing on works composed at the interface of oral and literary tradition, Bradbury tracks the movement of folkloric patterns from the shared culture of oral storytelling to the realm of elite literature.

Medieval Englishmen were treacherous, rebellious and killed their kings, as their French contemporaries repeatedly noted. In the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, ten kings faced serious rebellion, in which eight were captured, deposed, and/or murdered. One other king escaped open revolt but encountered vigorous resistance. In this book, Professor Valente argues that the crises of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were crucibles for change; and their examination helps us to understand medieval political culture in general and key developments in later medieval England in particular. The Theory and Practice of Revolt takes a comparative look at these crises, seeking to understand medieval ideas of proper kingship and government, the role of political violence and the changing nature of reform initiatives and the rebellions to which they led. It argues that rebellion was an accepted and to a certain extent legitimate means to restore good kingship throughout the period, but that over time it became increasingly divorced from reform aims, which were satisfied by other means, and transformed by growing lordly dominance, arrogance, and selfishness. Eventually the tradition of legitimate revolt disappeared, to be replaced by both parliament and dynastic civil war. Thus, on the one hand, development of parliament, itself an outgrowth of political crises, reduced the need for and legitimacy of crisis reform. On the other hand, when crises did arise, the idea and practice of the community of the realm, so vibrant in the thirteenth century, broke down under the pressures of new political and socio-economic realities. By exploring violence and ideas of government over a longer period than is normally the case, this work attempts to understand medieval conceptions on their own terms rather than with regard to modern assumptions and to use comparison as a means of explaining events, ideas, and developments.