This long overdue new edition of Guillaume de Machaut's twenty-three motets, the largest surviving collection of such works by a single composer in this period, is based on the most authoritative of the surviving manuscripts and is designed to meet the needs both of advanced scholars and musicians as well as students and performers. This user-friendly format indicates variants on the scores and has a layout that makes each work's structure clearly visible; the lyrics, with full English translation, are presented at the end of each work.

This volume is the second of the thirteen in preparation that will offer the first complete scholarly edition of the poetry and music of Guillaume de Machaut, the foremost practitioner of these related arts at the end of the Middle Ages in France. It provides a freshly prepared edition based on the most reliable manuscript of two of Machaut's best known dits, the Remede de Fortune (Remedy for Fortune) and the Confort d'ami (Consolation from a Friend), both of which adapt the central ideas of Boethian philosophy to the love poetry tradition. The French texts are accompanied by facing English translations, and the musical passages are presented in situ in a performance-accessible form.

An edition of the early Middle English verse sequence contained in the thirteenth-century Oxford Jesus College MS 29 (II) with accompanying translations in Modern English and scholarly introduction and apparatus. The sequence is varied in subject, with poems of religious exhortation set beside others of secular pragmatism. Included are: The Owl and the Nightingale, Poema Morale, The Proverbs of Alfred, Thomas of Hales's Love Rune, The Eleven Pains of Hell, the prose Shires and Hundreds of England, the lengthy Passion of Jesus Christ in English, and twenty-one additional lyrics, most of them uniquely preserved in this manuscript. Made in the West Midlands, the Jesus 29 manuscript is the lengthiest all-English verse collection known to exist in the period between the Exeter Book and the Harley Lyrics.

Of Knyghthode and Bataile adapts the most widely used military manual in the Middle Ages into English verse. Responding to both the evolution of warfare and the historical background of his own time, its anonymous poet produced what one critic has called "one of the most brilliant military poems of the fifteenth century."

This book is the first critical edition of two fascinating but overlooked devotional texts. Each shines its own light on medieval faith. The Holkham Prayers and Meditations (ca.1410) is a rare example of female authorship, written by an unnamed woman to guide a "religious sustir." Simon Appulby's Fruyte of Redempcyon (1514) is more popular in aim, composed by one of England's last anchorites to serve his urban community. Both texts are accompanied by extensive notes and introductory essays to aid students and specialists alike.

This edition contains four Middle English Charlemagne romances from the Otuel cycle: Roland and Vernagu, Otuel a Knight, Otuel and Roland, and Duke Roland and Sir Otuel of Spain. A translation of the romances' source, the Anglo-French Otinel, is also included. The romances center on conflicts between Frankish Christians and various Saracen groups, and deal with issues of racial and religious difference, conversion, and faith-based violence.

These six poems explore some of the courtly and chivalric themes that preoccupied late medieval Scottish society. The volume includes Sir David Lyndsay's Historie and Testament of Squyer Meldrum, as well as his Answer to the Kingis Flyting; and three anonymous fifteenth-century poems: Balletis of the Nine Nobles, Complaint for the Death of Margaret, Princess of Scotland, and Talis of the Fyve Bestes.

The rise of an influential new family of poetry in the Middle Ages This book is the first collective examination of late medieval intimate first-person narratives that blur the lines between author, narrator, and protagonist and usually feature personification allegory and courtly love tropes, creating an experimental new family of poetry. In this volume, contributors analyze why the allegorical first-person romance embedded itself in the vernacular literature of Western Europe and remained popular for more than two centuries. The editors identify and discuss three predominant forms within this family: debate poetry, dream allegories, and autobiographies. Contributors offer textual analyses of key works from late medieval German, French, Italian, and Iberian literature, with discussion of developments in England, as well. Allegory and the Poetic Self offers a sophisticated, theoretically current discussion of relevant literature. This exploration of medieval “I” narratives offers insights not just into the premodern period but also into Western literature’s subsequent traditions of self-analysis and identity crafting through storytelling.

Much of our modern understanding of medieval society and cultures comes through the stories people told and the way they told them. Storytelling was, for this period, not only entertainment; it was central to the law, religious ritual and teaching, as well as the primary mode of delivering news. The essays in this volume raise and discuss a number of questions concerning the strategies, contexts and narratalogical features of medieval storytelling. They look particularly at who tells the story; the audience; how a story is told and performed; and the manuscript and social context for such tales. Laurie Postlewate is Senior Lecturer, Department of French, Barnard College; Kathryn Duys is Associate Professor, Department of English and Foreign Languages, University of St Francis; Elizabeth Emery is Professor of French, Montclair State University.

This book provides an overview of the current state of research on Machaut, the major figure of 14th-century French music and poetry, giving fair representation to the many areas of Machaut research that are pursued in fields outside music.Coverage of the current state of knowledge on each of the manuscripts includes the newly discovered Aberystwyth manuscript, described in detail here for the first time. A section on the large narrative poems pulls together recent research of several scholars and offers new views. An up-to-date concordance of the miniatures in all of the illustrated Machaut manuscripts gives information on where published studies and facsimiles may be found. The discography is the most complete list of Machaut recordings yet compiled and provides critical evaluations of recordings most valuable for instruction, according to our latest conception of performance practice in the 14th-century.A biography section organizes the documentary material in a way that will facilitate further research. The bibliography of secondary works cites books, editions, articles, and dissertations (including forthcoming works) from 1740 to 1991, in French, English, the other western European languages, Polish, Russian, and Japanese. The volume is fully indexed.