This collection of essays and reviews represents the most significant and comprehensive writing on Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors. Miola's edited work also features a comprehensive critical history, coupled with a full bibliography and photographs of major productions of the play from around the world. In the collection, there are five previously unpublished essays. The topics covered in these new essays are women in the play, the play's debt to contemporary theater, its critical and performance histories in Germany and Japan, the metrical variety of the play, and the distinctly modern perspective on the play as containing dark and disturbing elements. To compliment these new essays, the collection features significant scholarship and commentary on The Comedy of Errors that is published in obscure and difficulty accessible journals, newspapers, and other sources. This collection brings together these essays for the first time.

Professor Skinner presents a lucid analysis of Machiavelli's text as a response to the world of Florentine politics.

Britain of the fifteenth century was rife with social change, religious dissent, and political upheaval. Amid this ferment lived John Capgrave—Austin friar, doctor of theology, leading figure in East Anglian society, and noted author. Nowhere are the tensions and anxieties of this critical period, spanning the close of the medieval and the dawn of early modern eras, more eloquently conveyed than in Capgrave's works. John Capgrave's Fifteenth Century is the first book to explore the major themes of Capgrave's writings and to relate those themes to fifteenth-century political and cultural debates. Focusing on Capgrave's later works, especially those in English and addressed to lay audiences, it teases out thematic threads that are closely interwoven in Capgrave's Middle English oeuvre: piety, intellectualism, gender, and social responsibility. It refutes the still-prevalent view of Capgrave as a religious and political reactionary and shows, rather, that he used traditional genres to promote his own independent viewpoint on some of the most pressing controversies of his day, including debates over vernacular theology, orthodoxy and dissent, lay (and particularly female) spirituality, and the state of the kingdom under Henry VI. The book situates Capgrave as a figure both in the vibrant literary culture of East Anglia and in European intellectual history. John Capgrave's Fifteenth Century offers a fresh view of orthodoxy and dissent in late medieval England and will interest students of hagiography, religious and cultural history, and Lancastrian politics and society.

The late fourteenth century was the age of the Black Death, the Peasants' Revolt, the Hundred Years War, the deposition of Richard II, the papal schism and the emergence of the heretical doctrines of John Wyclif and the Lollards. These social, political and religious crises and conflicts were addressed not only by preachers and by those involved in public affairs but also by poets, including Chaucer and Langland. Above all, though, it is in the verse of John Gower that we find the most direct engagement with contemporary events. Yet, surprisingly, few historians have examined Gower's responses to these events or have studied the broader moral and philosophical outlook which he used to make sense of them. Here, a number of eminent medievalists seek to demonstrate what historians can add to our understanding of Gower's poetry and his ideas about society (the nobility and chivalry, the peasants and the 1381 revolt, urban life and the law), the Church (the clergy, papacy, Lollardy, monasticism, and the friars) gender (masculinity and women and power), politics (political theory and the deposition of Richard II) and science and astronomy. The book also offers an important reassessment of Gower's biography based on newly-discovered primary sources. STEPHEN RIGBY is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Social and Economic History at the University of Manchester; SIAN ECHARD is Professor of English, University of British Columbia. Contributors: Mark Bailey, Michael Bennett, Martha Carlin, James Davis, Seb Falk, Christopher Fletcher, David Green, David Lepine, Martin Heale, Katherine Lewis, Anthony Musson, Stephen Rigby, Jens Röhrkasten.