First collection of late medieval English mystical writing, which has been newly edited with notes and glossary.

Walter Hilton's The Scale of Perfection maintains a secure place among the major religious treatises composed in fourteenth-century England. This guide to the contemplative life, written in two books of more than 40,000 words each, is notable for its careful explorations of its religious themes and also as a monument of Middle English prose. Its popularity is attested by the fact that some forty-two manuscripts containing one or both of the books survive, with a relatively large number of manuscipts with Book I alone, which suggests it may have been the more popular of the two. Hilton (born c. 1343) was a member of the religious order known as the Augustinian Canons. There is reason to believe that be was trained in canon law and studied at the University of Cambridge. He was the author of a number of works in English and Latin, all much shorter than The Scale. He died at the Augustinian Priory of Thurgarton in Nottinghamshire in 1396. On the basis of the content of certain of his works it can be safely inferred that he was actively involved in some of the religious controversies current in England in the 1380s and 1390s, and his principal concern, evident in The Scale , is to defend orthodox belief, especially in the conduct of the contemplative life.

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 “marvelous history”* of medieval Europe, from the bubonic plague and the Papal Schism to the Hundred Years’ War, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August *Lawrence Wright, author of The End of October, in The Wall Street Journal The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering age of crusades, cathedrals, and chivalry; on the other, a world plunged into chaos and spiritual agony. In this revelatory work, Barbara W. Tuchman examines not only the great rhythms of history but the grain and texture of domestic life: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike. Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries, and guilty passions, Tuchman re-creates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, dominating all, the knight—in all his valor and “furious follies,” a “terrible worm in an iron cocoon.” Praise for A Distant Mirror “Beautifully written, careful and thorough in its scholarship . . . What Ms. Tuchman does superbly is to tell how it was. . . . No one has ever done this better.”—The New York Review of Books “A beautiful, extraordinary book . . . Tuchman at the top of her powers . . . She has done nothing finer.”—The Wall Street Journal “Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . a great book, in a great historical tradition.”—Commentary