British Literature I, Anglo-Saxon to Early Modern: Books

Including an introduction to the book and a note on the William Blake designs

In addition to exploring Chaucer's material world, this encyclopedia surveys the beliefs, customs, and rituals of the Middle Ages. It broadens the general reader's understanding of Chaucer and his world and helps students analyze and interpret his texts.

A comprehensive dictionary that covers the plays, poems, characters and background to Shakespeare's works. The dictionary also includes terms used in the theatre and stagecraft, as well as historical references and details on the Elizabethan historical and social period.

This timely introduction to Old English literature focuses on the production and reception of Old English texts, and on their relation to Anglo-Saxon history and culture.

• Introduces Old English texts and considers their relation to Anglo-Saxon culture.


• Responds to renewed emphasis on historical and cultural contexts in the field of medieval studies.


• Treats virtually the entire range of textual types preserved in Old English.


• Considers the production, reception and uses of Old English texts.


• Integrates the Anglo-Latin backgrounds crucial to understanding Old English literature.


• Offers very extensive bibliographical guidance.


• Demonstrates that Anglo-Saxon studies is uniquely placed to contribute to current literary debates.

Medieval literature can be daunting. This critical guide is designed to help readers to relax in the company of diverting and entertaining voices from that 'other country' that is the past.Medieval Literature 1300-1500 offers close readings of Middle English texts placed within the culture with which they interact. Famous works, like The Canterbury Tales, are discussed alongside lesser-known poems, prose, and plays, in five thematically-organised chapters, accompanied by helpful critical apparatus. Reflecting the proliferation of user-friendly editions, many available on-line, this book extends the range of Middle English writing for which there is accessible up-to-date critical support, enabling the student, the general reader, the course designer, and the aspirant specialist, to read widely and with enjoyment in the medieval period.

Full of information and stimulating ideas, and a pleasure to read, Burrow's book deals with circumstances of composition and reception, the main genres, "modes of meaning" (allegory etc.), and medieval literature's afterlife in modern times. It shows that the literature of authors such as Chaucer, Gower, and Langland is more readily accessible than usually imagined, and well worth reading too. By placing medieval writers in their historical context - the four centuries between the Norman Conquest and the Renaissance - Professor Burrow explains not only how they wrote, but why.

This concise introduction to the literature of an exciting and influential period opens with an overview of the historical and cultural context in which English Renaissance literature was produced, and a discussion of its contemporary and subsequent critical reception. The following chapters survey the major Renaissance genres of drama, poetry and prose. Each chapter provides illustrative case studies of canonical and non-canonical key texts by authors such as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, Sir Francis Bacon, Thomas Nashe, and Lady Mary Wroth. A guide to further reading accompanies each chapter, complemented by a section of student resources at the end of the book. The final chapter summarises significant developments in English Renaissance literary culture, and discusses the future direction of Renaissance literary scholarship.

Reviews current knowledge of the character and operation of theatres in Shakespeare's time, with an explanation of their origins. Coverage includes the practices of Elizabethan actors and script writers: methods of characterization; gesture, blocking and choreography, including music, dance and fighting; actors' rhetorical interaction with audiences; and use of costumes, stage props, and make-up.

Carolyne Larrington has gathered together a uniquely comprehensive collection of writing by, for and about medieval women, spanning one thousand years and Europe from Iceland to Byzantiu. The extracts are arranged thematically, dealing with the central areas of medieval women's lives and their relation to social and cultural institutions. Each section is contextualised with a brief historical introduction, and the materials span literary, historical, theological and other narrative and imaginative writing. The writings here uncover and confound the stereotype of the medieval woman as lady or virgin by demonstrating the different roles and meanings that the sign of woman occupied in the imaginative space of the medieval period.
Larrington's clear and accessible editorial material and the modern English translations of all the extracts mean this work is ideally suited for students. Women and Writing in Early Europe: A Sourcebook also contains an extensive and fully up-to-date bibliography, making it not only essential reading for undergraduates and post graduates but also a valuable tool for scholars.

This is a comprehensive history of English literature written in Britain between the Reformation and the Restoration. While it focuses on England, literary effort in Scotland and Ireland is also covered, with occasional references to Wales and Ireland. This literary history by an international team of scholars is essential reading for students and scholars of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, culture, and history.

The twelve articles in this volume promote the growing contacts between medieval linguistics and medieval cultural studies generally. Articles address medieval English linguistics, and the interrelation in Anglo-Saxon England between Latin and vernacular

Tattoos and graffiti immediately bring to mind contemporary urban life and its inhabitants. But in fact, both practices date back much further than is generally thought—even by scholars. Drawing on a previously unavailable archive, Juliet Fleming reveals the unknown and disregarded literary arts of sixteenth century England.

In Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England, Fleming argues that our modern assumptions of what constitutes written expression have limited our access to and understanding of early modern history and writing. Fleming combines detailed historical scholarship with intellectual daring in a work that describes how writing practices have not been limited to the boundaries of the page; instead they have included body surfaces, ceramics, ceilings, walls, and windows.

Sandy Bardsley examines the complex relationship between speech and gender in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and engages debates on the static nature of women's status after the Black Death. Focusing on England, Venomous Tongues uses a combination of legal, literary, and artistic sources to show how deviant speech was increasingly feminized in the later Middle Ages. Women of all social classes and marital statuses ran the risk of being charged as scolds, and local jurisdictions interpreted the label "scold" in a way that best fit their particular circumstances. Indeed, Bardsley demonstrates, this flexibility of definition helped to ensure the longevity of the term: women were punished as scolds as late as the early nineteenth century.
The tongue, according to late medieval moralists, was a dangerous weapon that tempted people to sin. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, clerics railed against blasphemers, liars, and slanderers, while village and town elites prosecuted those who abused officials or committed the newly devised offense of scolding. In courts, women in particular were prosecuted and punished for insulting others or talking too much in a public setting. In literature, both men and women were warned about women's propensity to gossip and quarrel, while characters such as Noah's Wife and the Wife of Bath demonstrate the development of a stereotypically garrulous woman. Visual representations, such as depictions of women gossiping in church, also reinforced the message that women's speech was likely to be disruptive and deviant.

In The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero, Peggy McCracken explores the role of blood symbolism in establishing and maintaining the sex-gender systems of medieval culture. Reading a variety of literary texts in relation to historical, medical, and religious discourses about blood, and in the context of anthropological and religious studies, McCracken offers a provocative examination of the ways gendered cultural values were mapped onto blood in the Middle Ages.

This book examines descriptions of the natural world in a wide range of Old English poetry. Jennifer Neville describes the physical conditions experienced by the Anglo-Saxons and argues that the poetic descriptions were not a reflection of these conditions but a literary device used by Anglo-Saxons to define more important issues, such as the state of humanity, the creation and maintenance of society, the power of individuals, the relationship between God and creation, and the power of writing to control information.