The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 2. Medieval Poetry: 1100-1400

The Oxford History of Poetry in English is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of ’poetry’: from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. The series both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the fourteen volumes.

This volume occupies both a foundational and a revolutionary place. Its opening date--1100--marks the re-emergence of a vernacular poetic record in English after the political and cultural disruption of the Norman Conquest. By its end date--1400--English poetry had become an established, if still evolving, literary tradition. The period between these dates sees major innovations and developments in language, topics, poetic forms, and means of expression. Middle English poetry reflects the influence of multiple contexts--history, social institutions, manuscript production, old and new models of versification, medieval poetic theory, and the other literary languages of England. It thus emphasizes the aesthetic, imaginative treatment of new and received materials by medieval writers and the formal craft required for their verse. Individual chapters treat the representation of national history and mythology, contemporary issues, and the shared doctrine and learning provided by sacred and secular sources, including the Bible. Throughout the period, lyric and romance figure prominently as genres and poetic modes, while some works hover enticingly on the boundary of genre and discursive forms. The volume ends with chapters on the major writers of the late fourteenth-century (Langland, the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, and Gower) and with a look forward to the reception of something like a national literary tradition in fifteenth-century literary culture.

Helen Cooper, Professor Emeritus of Medieval and Renaissance English, University of Cambridge; Life Fellow, Magdalene College, Cambridge, Robert R. Edwards, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Pennsylvania State University

Helen Cooper is Professor Emeritus of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. She holds Emeritus and Honorary Fellowships at University College, Oxford, and a Life Fellowship at Magdalene College, Cambridge. She has particular interests in the cultural continuations across the medieval and early modern periods. Her books include Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance; Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales; The English Romance in Time; Shakespeare and the Medieval World; and the editorial material to the Oxford World’s Classics Malory: Morte Darthur and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Robert R. Edwards is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative Literature at The Pennsylvania State University. His chief areas of research and teaching are the English, Romance, and Latin literatures of the Middle Ages. His other interests include textual culture, medieval literary theory, and poetics. He has held grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation and fellowships from the National Humanities Center and Clare Hall, Cambridge. His current projects are an edition of Troilus and Criseyde for the Cambridge University Press edition of Chaucer’s works and a study of medieval English literary reception.