Second Norton Critical Edition

This Norton Critical Edition includes:

• Lynn Staley’s superb translation, preserving the voices and cadences of the original text and retaining much of the Middle English language.
• A “Kempe lexicon,” defining the author’s idiosyncratic words and spelling, and additional explanatory annotations.
• Two new images of St. Nicholas’ chapel in King’s Lynn and a map of medieval England accompanying Staley’s revised introduction.
• Primary sources that contextualize the religious authorities and divine figures who inform Margery’s character and spiritual journey.
• Eleven critical essays—four new to the Second Edition—offering diverse perspectives on authorship, cross-culturalism, and moralism, among other topics.
• A selected bibliography.

A Modern English Verse Translation by Robert J. Meindl, Mark T. Riley, and R. F. Yeager

John Gower’s Vox Clamantis is one of the major poetic achievements of the Middle Ages. This line-by-line translation from the original Latin into Modern English is intended for a wide audience, and to be easily readable by scholars and non-scholars alike. It replicates Gower’s Latin meter as closely as possible in English, uses straightforward language, and clarifies many difficult points of medieval legal theory, Classical allusion, and theological interpretation heretofore left unexplained in any previous attempts, full or partial, to translate the poem. This book also includes the “Letter to Arundel”, translated in verse for the first time.

Save 50% and get free shipping to with code MED26 only at boydellandbrewer.com. Offer ends 31 August 2026.

Learning to Talk Shop: Mercantile Mischief and Popular Pedagogy in Premodern Englandexplores the phrasebooks, and guides to conversations that flooded the marketplace in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, making a virtual classroom available to an audience who could not afford or did not have access to formal education. Privileging market share and mercantile savvy over moral instruction and linguistic mastery, these mischievous little books offered readers lessons in the pragmatic, and murky, ethics of the premodern marketplace, teaching them bargaining tactics, insults, pick up lines, and strategies for welching on debts. Revealing what happens when language learning itself undergoes a translation out of the classroom, into the marketplace and further down the social ladder, Learning to Talk Shop offers a new account of premodern education, not through erudite tomes and schoolmaster sovereigns, but through practical books that enabled non-elite readers to thrive in an environment not particularly conducive to their success. Phillips asks what we learn and whom we can see when we look at premodern education from this humbler, more mischievous perspective, telling the tales of resourceful chambermaids, savvy black stableboys, and arithmetically adept barmaids as well as the story of a schoolgirl who compiled a textbook of her own and the narrative of a black schoolmaster teaching in Shakespeare’s London.

https://www.pennpress.org/9781512826975/learning-to-talk-shop/

A vibrant revival of a neglected witty and daring medieval gem, and a foundational work for English romance and translation studies. Essential reading for students of medieval literature and manuscript culture.

In the late thirteenth century, as English began to assert itself against Anglo-Norman and French literary traditions, Sir Tristrem emerged as one of the earliest and most inventive Middle English romances. Uniquely preserved in the Auchinleck Manuscript, this poem reimagines the Tristan legend with a bold comic tone, distinctive stanza form, and a sharp awareness of its audience’s expectations. Both a translation and a transformation of Thomas of Britain’s Tristran (c.1170), it stands alongside the more courtly German and Norwegian retellings by Gottfried von Strassburg and Brother Robert of Norway-yet diverges from both in its brevity, tonal shifts, and performative agility.

This edition pairs a lively modern English verse translation with the complete Middle English text-offering, for the first time, a dual-language format that remains sensitive to the poem’s performance-driven origins. The accompanying study reconsiders Sir Tristrem not only as literature, but as a document of transmission: oral, scribal, and manuscript. It explores its triangulated relationship with other Tristan traditions, its place within a manuscript collection of romances shaped by translation, and the formal innovations through which it reshapes a familiar narrative.

Resisting the reductive labels of its critical past, Sir Tristrem, as presented here, reclaims its role as a serious, playful, and quintessentially English contribution to medieval narrative tradition.

This Element argues that it was not just the application of medieval texts by Richard Hakluyt that made them relevant for England's budding colonial ideology; rather, it shows that these premodern texts already conveyed the essence of the expansionist mercantilism and colonialist imperialism that would characterise early English exceptionalism and the Elizabethan reach for the Americas. The upshot of the author's argument is threefold. First, Hakluyt and his contemporaries were much better and closer readers of medieval travel texts than we give them credit for; second, the ideology behind English colonialism was shaped in the late medieval period, not in Elizabethan England; and third, another facet of periodisation, with its epistemological emphasis on rupture rather than continuity, comes under pressure.

The CFP for Volume 7 (2026): “Celebrating Collaboration” can be found here. Submissions for Volume 7 are due by 15 February 2026.

In the aftermath of the Black Death, the depopulation of the countryside, and the beginnings of the Enclosure Movement, English poets imagined enforced labor as a panacea for social unrest precipitated by environmental catastrophe. Arguing that Piers Plowman established how poetry could envision religious and economic transformation based on agrarian production, The Work of Reform reveals that the Piers Plowman tradition's valorization of agrarian toil was open to appropriation by later writers developing totalizing, top-down colonialist projects.

This special issue introduces new postcolonial voices, paradigms, and analytical methods into medieval studies. It aims to enlarge the conceptual and theoretical arsenal used by medievalists to understand cultural contact in the distant past; to invite new ways of thinking about the relations between the medieval and modern; and to advance urgent conversations on premodern race, Mediterranean history, and the global Middle Ages

Table of contents:

Marcel Elias, “Second-Wave Medieval Postcolonialism.”

Sierra Lomuto, “Tensions of Geography: Orientalism in the Man of Law’s Tale and Floris and Blancheflour.”

Anthony Bale, “Thinking with the Renegade: Politics of Conversion and Ambiguity of Identity in the Later Middle Ages.”

Rachel Schine, “Performing Blackness in the Medieval Muslim Metropolis: Arabic Literature and Tropicalization.”

Christine Chism, “Tūdūr Trouble in 1001 Nights: Translating Networks in the Postcolonial Premodern.”

Karla Mallette, “Fortuna fallenti: Black Swans and Decolonizing the Italian Middle Ages.”

Sharon Kinoshita, “Marco Polo Meets Postcolonial Theory: Challenges and Opportunities of the Global Middle Ages.”

The earliest version of William Langland’s Piers Plowman shows this elusive and centrally important fourteenth-century poet inventing the forms that his life’s work will take. Piers Plowman is a sinuous cycle of dream visions in alliterative verse comprehending many aspects of medieval English culture from tavern life, plague, homelessness, and labour politics to religious devotion and theological controversy. At once socially capacious and spiritually electrifying, Langland’s poem was an instant bestseller in its own time and has provoked strong reactions from the fourteenth century to the present.

At under 2,500 lines, the A-text is significantly more compact than the later B- and C-texts, yet it contains much of the poetic thinking that Langland would elaborate in the longer versions. The poem proceeds as a spiritual quest, undertaken by the dreamer Will, to discover how to save his soul, reform church and society, and attain an ethical mode of life in this world. The action oscillates between the cultivated fields of England’s West Midlands and the commotion of London and Westminster.

Piers Plowman poses both textual and interpretative difficulties. This is the first critically considered edition of the A-text supported by an introduction, side glosses, and on-page explanatory notes with undergraduate, postgraduate, and scholarly readers in mind.

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I have tried to produce the edition I have wanted to use in my own classroom. My model was Derek Pearsall’s Exeter edition of Langland's C-text. My edition has a substantial introduction; side-glosses for all hard words; on-page explanatory notes; and an appendix containing two important additions to the poem made by Langland during the B revision, so that this edition can best substitute for a reading of the B-text visio.

Quinn argues that Middle English lyrics are best understood when read as emotional performances and guides readers through the poems’ expressions of joy, sorrow, anger, fear, compassion, spiritual devotion, romantic attraction, erotic frustration, and gender-targeted contempt. For the poems he considers in detail, Quinn provides line-for-line modern renditions of the Middle English texts. The book also includes commentaries keyed to the original texts, intended to prompt interpretations and enrich understandings of the lyrics. Quinn concludes by tracing the later development of versification from medieval to Renaissance lyrics, looking at work by Chaucer, Hoccleve, Petrarch, Wyatt, Surrey, and Shakespeare.

An Introduction to Middle English Lyrics encourages readers to appreciate this literary genre on its own terms and to reconsider modern ideas of what makes a “good” poem. With a deeper knowledge of how lyrics functioned in their historical settings, this book fosters a reassessment of their significance to the broader history of English poetry.  

Exam Copy Available here: https://floridapress.org/exam-copies/

Information on the book here: https://floridapress.org/9780813079431/an-introduction-to-middle-english-lyrics/

In this timely and impactful contribution to debates over the relationship between politics and storytelling, Lee Manion uncovers the centrality of narrative to the European concept of sovereignty. In Scottish and English texts traversing the political, the legal, the historiographical, and the literary, and from the medieval through to the early modern period, he examines the tumultuous development of sovereignty discourse and the previously underappreciated role of narratives of recognition. Situating England and Scotland in a broader interimperial milieu, Manion shows how sovereignty's hierarchies of recognition and stories of origins prevented more equitable political unions. The genesis of this discourse is traced through tracts by Buchanan, Dee, Persons, and Hume; histories by Hardyng, Wyntoun, Mair, and Holinshed; and romances by Malory, Barbour, Spenser, and Melville. Combining formal analysis with empire studies, international relations theory, and political history, Manion reveals the significant consequences of literary writing for political thought.

https://www.arc-humanities.org/9781802702859/how-medieval-songs-come-down/

Nancy P. Pope, ed., NLW MS Brogyntyn ii.1: Understanding a Multi-Scribe Manuscript Miscellany, York Manuscript and Early Print Studies 9 (York Medieval Press, 2025). This volume is the first full examination of a fascinating manuscript, Brogyntyn ii.1, a Middle English miscellany with a little Latin, compiled in the 1460s for an audience of low-ranking gentry. Its 57 texts include the romance Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle, practical information, almost every genre of verse, and many items in prose, two of which were adapted from poetic versions by their scribes. More than half of these items are either unique to this manuscript or have been uniquely altered from their sources and analogues.

The essays here offer both a comprehensive and foundational understanding of the manuscript. They consider the intended readers’ social class, analyse the scribal handwriting, and identify the dialectal provenance of all the scribes who wrote in English. Further chapters consider specific texts (The Siege of Jerusalem in Prose and a life of St. Katherine of Alexandria), while four others look closely at the variety of lyrics, different kinds of practical texts and their parodies, and sequences of poems with thematic connections. It also includes editions of four previously unpublished items.

The table of contents may be seen at https://boydellandbrewer.com/book/nlw-ms-brogyntyn-ii-1/

Higher Education is a rich and diverse environment which allows so many different types of people and disciplines to flourish. Medieval Studies is a particular confluence of this, with the meeting of history, literature, history of art, archaeology, and more. The contributors describe their lived experience of disability and how this intersects with the discipline of Medieval Studies, embracing both the challenges and the joy this can bring. They discuss teaching, research, and just existing within the university, bringing in theoretical approaches as well as linking to medieval texts. Towards an Accessible Academy provides a unique perspective on the state of accessibility within this field and in the university environment more broadly.　

This volume sits between work which centers the experience of disabled academics and which provides guidance for supporting disabled students. While providing real-life testimonies of disability in the academy, many chapters also include practical advice on best practice in supporting disabled scholars and students, as well as how the authors feel connected to the medieval sources we study.　

The book is also a call to action for all of its readers to actively practise allyship, providing clear examples of how we might all implement the advice given by contributors to improve the accessibility of our academy.

Link to the book: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/isbn/9781501521096/html 

The Cambridge Guide to Global Medieval Travel Writing, ed. Sebastian Sobecki (CUP, 2025), has now been published. Many of the 40 essays in this volume were written by Chaucerians and fellow NCS members. The following page links to the electronic version of the book, which will be easily accessible for members with an institutional affiliation who would like to use in their teaching: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-guide-to-global-medieval-travel-writing/7F1358A52209165E55807116F2E7AD77#fndtn-information. Members wishing to purchase a hardcopy, can use the code CGGT2025 for a 20% discount when ordering directly from Cambridge University Press.

Description: The Middle Ages laid the foundations for the long European and Middle Eastern history of voyaging, colonialism, and expansion: the Papal embassies that took over a year of overland travel to reach Mongolia, Ibn Battuta's thirty years of voyaging to Africa and East Asia, or the arrival of European colonialism in the Americas. With a focus on medieval Europe, this is the first book to cover global medieval travel writing from Iceland to Indonesia, providing unrivalled insight into the experiences of early travellers. Paying special attention to race, gender and manuscript culture, the volume's vast geographical and linguistic range provides expert coverage of Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Chinese literature. An essential resource for teaching and research, the collection challenges established views of the Middle Ages and Western ideas of history.

20% discount code: 25ESA2

Reading Geoffrey Chaucer: An Introduction offers students, general readers, and teachers an accessible series of essays on select works by Chaucer that emphasizes how those works’ deepest concerns and most fraught complexities remain urgently relevant in our present day. Each chapter connects Chaucer’s world with particular problems of our own, such as autocratic patriarchal social orders and geopolitical religious/racial conflict. Introducing modern critical approaches to those problems – gender studies and postcolonial theory, for example – each chapter provides in-depth discussion of how Chaucer explores their nature, implications, and consequences by way of his distinctive literary idiom. Texts covered include the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales and the tales told by the Knight, Miller, Man of Law, Wife of Bath, Pardoner, and Prioress and the House of Fame, Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde. Each chapter is self-contained, supplying essential backgrounds along with full summaries of the works under discussion. But the book is also criss-crossed with recurrent inquiries, which collectively trace some of the most characteristic qualities of Chaucer’s writing. With its unusual combination of breadth and depth, this introduction to Chaucer helps readers at all levels of familiarity appreciate why his work continues to matter.

Ingrid Nelson, Medieval Media: Bodies, Networks, Chaucer (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Misty Schieberle and Elon Lang, eds. “Teaching Thomas Hoccleve. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 31.2 (Fall 2024). https://www.wichita.edu/academics/fairmount_las/smart/backissueSMART2.php#Fall2024

Love and anti-Judaism is a new examination of medieval romance for the questions it poses of the most significant events in Christian history. Did the life of Christ change the nature of love? How could the sacrifice of Abraham and Isaac, which did not happen, prefigure that of Christ, which did? Can reactions to sexual violence approach the responsibility demanded by sacrifice?

Providing new readings of the richly-studied romances Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Orfeo, the book also investigates Sir Gowther and Sir Amadace for their sophisticated responses to these theological questions. The book argues that romance explores difficulties in the Christian practice of reading the Hebrew Bible as a prefiguration of the life of Christ and the history initiated by him. Such a mode of biblical reading is foundational to medieval anti-Judaism, with Jewish interpretations accused of being incomplete or incorrect because they did not depend upon Christ. Focusing on the Song of Songs, Love and anti-Judaism demonstrates that medieval exegesis often depended upon the figure of Synagoga, the personification of Jewish faith and community in the Christian imagination, for the construction of Christ as a lover who sacrificed himself for his bride.

Such dependence enabled medieval romance to build world-shaking ambivalence into its portrayals of love and sexual violence. An examination of anti-Judaism as a discourse of violence and desire that could be turned inwardly to expose the irresolution in Christianity, this book demonstrates that medieval romance reanimates biblical sacrifice in the vulnerabilities of love.

Link to the book: https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526183170/