Robin Hood is England's greatest folk hero. Everyone knows the story of the outlaw who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. Nick Rennison's highly entertaining book begins with the search for the historical Robin. Was there ever a real Robin Hood? Rennison looks at the candidates who have been proposed over the years, from petty thieves to Knights Templar, before moving on to examine the many ways in which Robin Hood has been portrayed in literature and on the screen.

Although nearly everyone has heard the name of Robin Hood, few have actually read any medieval tales about the legendary outlaw. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren set out to correct this discrepancy in their comprehensive collection of all pre-seventeenth-century Robin Hood tales. The editors include such other "outlaw" figures as Hereward the Wake, Eustache the Monk, and Fouke le Fitz Waryn to further contextualize the tradition of English outlaw tales. In this text the figure of Robin Hood can be viewed in historical perspective, from the early accounts in the chronicles through the ballads, plays, and romances that grew around his fame and impressed him on our fictional and historical imaginations. This edition is particularly useful for classrooms, with its extensive introductions, notes, and glosses, enabling students of any level to approach the texts in their original Middle English.

Thomas Hahn’s work laid the foundations for medieval romance studies to embrace the study of alterity and hybridity within Middle English literature. His contributions to scholarship brought Robin Hood studies into the critical mainstream, normalized the study of historically marginalized literature and peoples, and encouraged scholars to view medieval readers as actively encountering others and exploring themselves. This volume employs his methodologies – careful attention to texts and their contexts, cross-cultural readings, and theoretically-informed analysis – to highlight the literary culture of late medieval England afresh. Addressing long-established canonical works such as Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, and Malory alongside understudied traditions and manuscripts, this book will be of interest to literary scholars of the later Middle Ages who, like Hahn, work across boundaries of genre, tradition, and chronology.

Before stories of King Arthur and Robin Hood were adapted and readapted for film, television and theater, radio scriptwriters looking for material turned to Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur (1485) and Howard Pyle's The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883). Throughout the 1930s to the mid-1950s, their legends inspired storylines for Abbott and Costello, Popeye, Let's Pretend, Escape, Gunsmoke, The Adventures of Superman and others. Many of these adaptations reflect the moral and ethical questions of the day, as characters' faced issues of gender relations, divorce, citizenship, fascism, crime and communism in a medieval setting.

"Robin Hood-Geschichten und Geschichte" enthält nicht nur spannenden Erzählungen über den Helden von Sherwood Forrest, sondern klärt auch eine Frage, die uns seit Kindertragen bewegt, ob Robin Hood tatsächlich gelebt hat.