Reading, writing and the prosecution of warfare went hand in hand in the fifteenth century, demonstrated by the wide circulation and ownership of military manuals and ordinances, and the integration of military concerns into a huge corpus of texts; but their relationship has hitherto not received the attention it deserves, a gap which this book remedies, arguing that the connections are vital to the literary culture of the time, and should be recognised on a much wider scale. Beginning with a detailed consideration of the circulation of one of the most important military manuals in the Middle Ages, Vegetius' De re militari, it highlights the importance of considering the activities of a range of fifteenth-century readers and writers in relation to the wider contemporary military culture. It shows how England's wars in France and at home, and the wider rhetoric and military thinking those wars generated, not only shaped readers' responses to their texts but also gave rise to the production of one of the most elaborate, rich and under-recognised pieces of verse of the Wars of the Roses in the form of 'Knyghthode and bataile'. It also indicates how the structure, language and meaning of canonical texts, including those by Lydgate and Malory, were determined by the military culture of the period.

In Fifteenth-Century Lives, Karen A. Winstead identifies and explores a major shift in the writing of Middle English saints’ lives. As she demonstrates, starting in the 1410s and ’20s, hagiography became more character-oriented, more morally complex, more deeply embedded in history, and more politically and socially engaged. Further, it became more self-consciously literary and began to feature women more prominently—and not only traditional virgin martyrs but also matrons and contemporary holy women. Winstead shows that this literature placed a premium on scholarship and teaching. Hagiography celebrated educators and scholars to a greater extent than ever before and became a vehicle for educating readers about Christian dogma. Focusing both on authors well known, such as John Lydgate and Margery Kempe, and on others less known, such as Osbern Bokenham and John Capgrave, Winstead argues that the values promoted by fifteenth-century hagiography helped to shape the reformist impulses that eventually produced the Reformation. Moreover, these values continued to influence post-Reformation hagiography, both Protestant and Catholic, well into the seventeenth century. In exploring these trends in fifteenth-century hagiography, identifying the factors that contributed to their emergence, and tracing their influence in later periods, Fifteenth-Century Lives marks an important contribution to revisionary scholarship on fifteenth-century literature. It will appeal to students and scholars of late medieval English literature and late medieval religion.