Saturday, September 19, 2026 · 天火 · tianmu.org
14th Century
Middle English in renewal: romance, marvel travel, border song, and the literary return of English after the Norman Conquest.
✦ ─── ⟐ ─── ✦
Texts
Boethius and Troilus — Chaucer, Skeat Volume IIChaucer’s Boece — his Middle English prose translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy — together with the complete Troilus and Criseyde, from Walter W. Skeat’s second edition of the Oxford Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, volume II (Clarendon Press, 1900), with Skeat’s introductions, textual notes, and collations kept entire.Confessio AmantisGower's Middle English frame-tale of a lover's confession to Venus's priest, tale by tale through the seven deadly sins, in Macaulay's edition.English GildsThe original ordinances of over one hundred English gilds, as returned to the royal writ of 1389 by the gilds of Norwich, Lynn, London and beyond in their own words, edited by Toulmin Smith and completed by his daughter Lucy Toulmin Smith, with Lujo Brentano's pioneering essay on the history of gilds.The BruceThe complete Middle Scots text of Barbour's 14th-century verse chronicle of Robert the Bruce, in W. M. Mackenzie's 1909 critical edition, with his introduction, notes, appendices, and glossary.The Canterbury TalesThe complete Middle English text of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales — all nine groups of tales with their prologues and links, the Tale of Gamelyn appendix, and Walter W. Skeat’s textual introduction and collation notes, from the second edition of the Oxford Complete Works, volume IV (Clarendon Press, 1900).The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, and the Astrolabe — Chaucer, Skeat Volume IIIThe Middle English text of Chaucer's House of Fame and Legend of Good Women, his Middle English prose Treatise on the Astrolabe, and Walter W. Skeat's account of the sources of the Canterbury Tales — with Skeat's introductions and collation notes throughout, from volume III of the second edition of the Oxford Complete Works (Clarendon Press, 1900).The Parlement of the Thre Ages and Wynnere and WastoureTwo Middle English alliterative poems from a fourteenth-century manuscript miscellany, edited by Israel Gollancz for the Roxburghe Club (1897): a dream-vision debate of Youth, Middle Age, and Old Age, together with the earliest datable poem of the alliterative revival, a debate on getting and spending before the king.The Romaunt of the Rose and the Minor Poems — Chaucer, Skeat Volume IThe Romaunt of the Rose and Chaucer's twenty-three Minor Poems in Middle English, with Walter W. Skeat's Life of Chaucer, his textual introductions, and his line-by-line notes, from volume I of the second edition of the Oxford Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Clarendon Press, 1899.The Vision and Creed of Piers PloughmanThomas Wright's complete two-volume edition of the Middle English alliterative poems The Vision of Piers Ploughman and Piers Ploughman's Creed, edited from a fourteenth-century Cambridge manuscript with his historical introduction, notes, and glossary — second revised edition, here collected in one.
Ballads and Border Memory3 pages
Fourteenth-century ballad and border memory, where conflict, saint legend, and oral tradition preserve older northern stories.
Middle English Romance and Travel6 pages
Middle English romance and wonder travel, including the alliterative revival and the imagined geography of medieval pilgrimage.
Mystics and Reformers8 pages
The religious prose of the English fourteenth century — Rolle and Hilton among the mystics, and the Wycliffite protest.