A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century offers a new narrative of what happened to English language writing in the long twelfth century, the period that saw the end of the Old English tradition and the beginning of Middle English writing. It discusses numerous neglected or unknown texts, focusing particularly on documents, chronicles and sermons. To tell the story of this pivotal period, it adopts approaches from both literary criticism and historical linguistics, finding a synthesis for them in a twenty-first century philology. It develops new methodologies for addressing major questions about twelfth-century texts, including when they were written, how they were read and their relationship to earlier works. Essential reading for anyone interested in what happened to English after the Norman Conquest, this study lays the groundwork for the coming decade's work on transitional English.

James L. Harner's Literary Research Guide, which Choice calls "the standard guide in the field," evaluates important reference materials in English studies. Since the publication of the first edition in 1989, tens of thousands of students and educators have used the Guide as an aid to scholarly research. In the new edition Harner has added entries describing resources published since May 2001 and has revised nearly half the entries from the fourth edition. The fifth edition contains more than 1,000 entries, which discuss an additional 1,555 books, articles, and electronic resources and cite 723 reviews. Readers of earlier editions will notice the inclusion of substantially more electronic resources, particularly reliable sites sponsored by academic institutions and learned societies, to account for the proliferation of bibliographic databases, text archives, and other online resources. This edition also features a new section on cultural studies.

These essays treat a variety of aspects of Marie's production; the poet's voice, the moods of her original audience, the beauty and significance of the works' intellectual or emotional appeal, and their sexual and textual politics.

The origins of the Cistercian monastic order are currently under intense scrutiny and revision, as scholars identify how the written word was used to 'invent' a unified corporate identity. Here Elizabeth Freeman examines the classic genre for inventing a past - the history, chronicle, and annal - and argues that historical narratives of the English Cistercians helped define the characteristics of both the new Cistercian monastic order and also the new orders of twelfth- and thirteenth-century England. She shows how Aelred of Rievaulx's Relatio de standardo and Genealogia regum Anglorum articulated new senses of Englishness, and demonstrates through attention to library holdings that this focus on national self-definition continued throughout the twelfth century. The Fundacio abbathie de Kyrkestall shifts focus to local history and exploits Cistercian tropes of land-use in order to resolve the communal insecurity that characterised the Cistercians in around 1200. The Narratione de fundatione Fontanis monasterii features another method of reconciling the nostalgic quest for continuity with the intellectual recognition of change - it separates historical 'fact' from 'meaning' and imbues events with rich allegorical significance. Finally, Ralph of Coggeshall's Chronicon Anglicanum indicates the multiple strategies Cistercian historians employed in order to turn the disparate and contradictory events of the past into a comprehensible and meaningful narrative.

The essays collected here have in common the concept of boundaries, which is defined according to discipline, and movement through boundaries. The essays cover a range of topics and periods. The first section consists of literary approaches to boundaries, ranging widely in subject matter from Norman drama to sixteenth-century goodnight ballads. The second section includes mainly historical studies of such topics as social mobility in Geoffrey of Monmouth's twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain, post-1453 Byzantine identity, and Milanese Renaissance musical genres. Individually and as a group, the essays contribute fresh insights into well-known and some less familiar works of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Contributions include: Linda Georgianna, 'Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae: lessons in self-fashioning for the bastards of Britain'; Robert L.A. Clark, 'Eve and her audience in the Anglo-Norman Adam'; John Damon, 'Seinte Cecile and Cristes owene knyghtes: violence, resignation, and resistance in the Second Nun's Tale'; Elaine R. Miller, 'Linguistic identity in the Middle Ages: the case of the Spanish Jews'; Emily Steiner, 'Medieval documentary poetics and Langland's authorial identity'; Patricia Marby Harrison, 'Religious rhetoric as resistance in Early Modern goodnight ballads'; Jami Ake, 'Mary Wroth's willow poetics: revising female desire in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus'; Annabel Patterson, 'The human face divine: identity and the portrait from Locke to Chaucer'; Jonathan Harris, 'Common language and the common good: aspects of identity among Byzantine emigres in Renaissance Italy'; Nolan Gasser, 'Beata et venerabilis Virgo: music and devotion in Renaissance Milan'; Elspeth Whitney, 'Sex, lies, and depositions: Pierre de Lancre's vision of the witches' sabbath'; Laura Hunt Yungblut, 'Straungers and aliaunts: the un-English among the English in Elizabethan England'.