This volume collects poems and historical documents relevant to understanding the political climate of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Britain, many of which have been out of print for a century. This new edition, geared towards classroom use with its notes, introductions, gloss, and glossary, opens up the fascinating study of late medieval English history. This volume contains five sections: Poems of Political Prophecy; Anticlerical Poems and Documents; Literature of Richard II's Reign and the Peasants' Revolt; Poems against Simony and the Abuse of Money; and Plowman Writings-all tied together by a common attitude of satire and complaint, and a distrust of those who may abuse power. This volume would make an excellent source for a class on English satire or late medieval politics.

Archbishop Wulfstan of York (d. 1023) is among the most important legal and political thinkers of the early Middle Ages. A leading ecclesiastic, innovative legislator, and influential royal councilor, Wulfstan witnessed firsthand the violence and social unrest that culminated in the fall of the English monarchy before the invading armies of Cnut in 1016. In his homilies and legal tracts, Wulfstan offered a searing indictment of the moral failings that led to England’s collapse and formulated a vision of an ideal Christian community that would influence English political thought long after the Anglo-Saxon period had ended. These works, many of which have never before been available in modern English, are collected here for the first time in new, extensively annotated translations that will help readers reassess one of the most turbulent periods in English history and re-evaluate the career of Anglo-Saxon England’s most important political visionary.

This was the first full-scale history of medieval English literature for nearly a century. Thirty-three distinguished contributors offer a collaborative account of literature composed or transmitted in England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland between the Norman conquest and the death of Henry VIII in 1547. The volume has five sections: 'After the Norman Conquest'; 'Writing in the British Isles'; 'Institutional Productions'; 'After the Black Death' and 'Before the Reformation'. It provides information on a vast range of literary texts and the conditions of their production and reception, which will serve both specialists and general readers, and also contains a chronology, full bibliography and a detailed index. This book offers an extensive and vibrant account of the medieval literatures so drastically reconfigured in Tudor England. It will thus prove essential reading for scholars of the Renaissance as well as medievalists, and for historians as well as literary specialists.

A study of the prophetic tradition in medieval England brings out its influence on contemporary politics and the contemporary elite.

A useful collection of sources, now reprinted, which document and commentate on the formation of medieval political culture between the 12th and 14th centuries. Aimed at a non-specialist readership fifteen texts are presented in English translation and in chronological order supported by suggestions for further reading. These include letters and treatises by Bernard of Clairvaux, Marie de France, John of Salisbury, Thomas Aquinas, John of Paris, Dante Alighieri, William of Ockham, John Wyclif and Christine de Pizan.

A wide-ranging survey of the most important medieval authors and genres, designed for students of English.