Search results for ""medieval institute publications""

One of the most engaging Middle English crusading poems, Richard Coer de Lyon recounts in verse the exploits, both historical and fanciful, of Richard I, king of England. While Richard's participation in the Third Crusade serves as its main subject, the poem disrupts its historical narrative with a number of fabulous interpolations, two of which are particularly notorious: the depiction of Richard's mother as a demon, and the portrayal of the king himself as a voracious cannibal. Once the source of critical disparagement, the poem's blending of history and fantasy—its historical distortions—have recently become the focus of renewed interest in the poem. With a substantial introduction and comprehensive explanatory and textual notes, this new edition of Richard Coer de Lyon signally contributes to the reappraisal and understanding of what became—during the centuries-long process of its composition—one of the most popular of medieval romances.

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As Hanks and Jesmok note in their introduction, "pursuing opponents and pursuing love move the Morte's narrative, but the work's richness comes from its romance and tragic elements: the human quest for maturity and fulfillment and those uncontrollable forces that undermine the quest and destroy the dream. Malory's use of myth and magic to explore these themes has received extensive scholarly attention, but his views on and thematic use of Christianity have long needed a closer look."

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Comparative Perspectives on History and Historians: Essays in Memory of Bryce Lyon (1920-2007) features a section of appreciations of Bryce Lyon from the three editors, R. C. Van Caenegem, and Walter Prevenier, followed by three sections on the major areas on which Lyon's research concentrated: the legacy of Henri Pirenne, constitutional and legal history of England and the Continent, and the economic history of the Low Countries. Original essays by Bernard S. Bachrach, David S. Bachrach, Jan Dumolyn, Caroline Dunn, Jelle Haemers, John H. A. Munro, James M. Murray, Anthony Musson, David Nicholas, W. Mark Ormrod, Walter Prevenier, Jeff Rider, Don C. Skemer, and Marci Sortor deepen our understanding of Lyon's career and significance and further our knowledge of the areas in which he worked.

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The Middle Ages provided an important, if complex, set of literary and historiographic models for early modern authors, although the early modern authors responded to the alien political, religious, and cultural landscape of medieval England through their more present ideological concerns. From Shakespeare's manipulation of his medieval source material to Protestant responses to medieval Catholicism, this collection of essays explores the ways that early modern English writers responded to the medieval English literary and historical record, dealing with topics such as historiographic bias, print history, intertextuality, and cultural history.

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Clifford Davidson's newly revised and expanded edition of A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge makes available the most significant text of dramatic criticism in Middle English. A polemic against the playing of "miraclis," the Tretise is frequently linked to the Wycliffite or Lollard movements of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. In an essay on the text's dialect, Paul A. Johnston, Jr. definitively identifies the Tretise as the work of two authors who lived in adjacent counties in the Midlands.

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John Lydgate is known as the most distinguished poet of fifteenth-century England. This volume presents his brilliant and underappreciated dramatic texts written for both private and public entertainment, encompassing both religious and secular topics. This is the first time since 1934 that many of these poems have been reprinted or reedited. They are published here with an extensive gloss and notes, as well as a glossary and an introduction, making them accessible to a new generation of students of the Middle Ages. These works are indispensible to any study of medieval English drama.

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Since its rediscovery by nineteenth-century scholarship, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61 has never been ignored, though it has also not gained a great deal of notoriety beyond the scholars of Middle English romance. It is hoped that the present volume will encourage study of the entire manuscript as a valuable witness to the devotional habits, cultural values, and popular tastes of late medieval England.

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While the essays offered in this collection vary in subject, discipline, and methodological approach, they center on the interpretation of the material world, whether that materiality appears in literature, stone, or the artifacts removed from an archaeological dig. The essay deal mainly with the Germanic and Celtic worlds, but incorporate motifs from Eastern Christian and Roman cultures. Contributors address the themes of time in history; societal and ideological change and continuity; iconic style and polysemous textuality; symbolic and representational interpretation; gender-specific economic production; definitions of social and political structures; and social processes of eclecticism and adaptation. Hence the approaches are interdisciplinary, contextual, comparative, and fluid in their integration of texts and images where the text represented is as crucial to the meaning as is the image or object; they therefore represent the study of the material culture of the Anglo-Saxon period at its best. The variety of disciplines represented in the essays and the range of topics covered by the individual scholars give some indication of the enormous scope of the scholarship of Rosemary Cramp, in whose honor this volume was produced. Readers will find that the subjects dealt with resonate with each other in interesting and complex ways. It is an invaluable contribution to scholars of Anglo-Saxon culture and archaeology.

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The complete text of John Gower's poem is a three-volume edition, including all Latin components-with translations-of this bilingual text and extensive glosses, bibliography and explanatory notes. Volume 1 contains the Prologue and Books 1 and 8, in effect the overall structure of Gower's poem.

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The complete text of John Gower's Confessio Amantis is a 3-volume edition, including all Latin components - with translations - of this bilingual poem and extensive glosses, bibliography, and explanatory notes. Volume 3 contains Books 5, 6, and 7, which follow another kind of development as Gower shifts from romance banter and formulaic confession to philosophical inquiry.

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Scottish poet William Dunbar is usually considered one of the most important figures of fifteenth-century British literature, and may lay claim to being the finest lyric poet writing in English in the century and half between the death of Chaucer in 1400 and the appearance of Tottel's Miscellany in 1557. Dunbar's poems offer vivid depictions of late medieval Scottish society and serve up a striking pageant of colorful figures at the court of James IV (r. 1488-1513), with which he was associated for much of his adult life. The poems are remarkable both for their diversity and variability and for their multiplicity of voices, styles, and tones. The great variety of poems within Dunbar's canon includes religious hymns of exaltation, moral poems on a wide range of serious themes, comic and parodic poems of extreme salaciousness and scatological coarseness, general satires against the times, and satires with much more specific targets, often a single individual. This edition of eighty-four poems attributed to Dunbar includes extensive background material and explanatory notes that are sure to be of interest to students and Dunbar enthusiasts alike. The edition is rounded out with textual notes, an index of first lines, and a glossary.

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The poem that Richard Maidstone wrote on the metropolitan crisis of 1392 reports information about the royal entry that concluded the crisis in greater detail than any other source. The poem is not primarily a report, however; like Maidstone's other writings, it is above all an ideologically driven literary intervention, produced at a particular moment, addressing a particular political circumstance. Maidstone's Concordia shows Anglo-Latin poetry, on a specific occasion, in the process of making itself a public poetry a broadly appealing, flexible, legible medium for addressing public issues.

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John Capgrave's The Life of Saint Katherine, written c. 1463 in Lynn in Norfolk, is, according to the editor, . . . the longest and most intricate Katherine legend written during the Middle Ages, either in Latin or in any vernacular. In telling the story of the life of the virgin martyr, Katherine, Capgrave uses many of the tropes that mark the enormously popular genre of hagiography as it was written throughout the Middle Ages. Given his learning, however, and his evident acquaintance with the works of Chaucer, Lydgate, and Osburn Bokenham, and his knowledge of medieval drama, and the possibility that he knew of The Book of Margery Kempe, this saint's life should be particularly interesting to students of late Middle English culture, especially literature. In the course of his encyclopedic narrative, in which he evidently sought to appeal to a broad audience in sophisticated, if provincial, Norfolk, Capgrave inserts digressions on Greek and Roman history; on just and unjust rule and justifiable vs. unjustifiable rebellion; on child care; on medieval English feasts, jousts, and pageants; and on the role(s) of women.

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This collection of essays was the first published in North America that sought to describe the methodology and some results of a scholarly enterprise hailed in the preface to the volume as one of the most vibrant, innovative, and productive movements in medieval scholarship at the present time.Under the direction of Monique Bourin an international team of scholars has been considering onomastics from the perspective of history rather than that of linguistics or philology. By examining data on both the micro and macro levels, researchers are beginning to describe how medieval patterns of naming have implications for our understanding of family relationships, kinship, and larger social structures that were not fully realized by earlier scholars.

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For all its spiritual cheerfulness and obvious importance as a tale to conclude tales, a last word from a notable maker of words, The Parson's Tale seems to have inspired sentence and solaas in remarkably few critics. This volume rejects the tradition that assumes the tale to be of questionable literary value. The studies included span the range of Parson's Tale criticism from the textual, to the philological, to the hermeneutical. What they share is the assumption that if one is to understand the role of The Parson's Tale, one must begin by accepting the language and method by which Chaucer fashioned it. This rethinking of traditional scholarship on this crucial aspect of The Canterbury Tales will be of great interest to Chaucer scholars and students of medieval literature.

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This anthology aims to add flesh to the bones and the supplements, reservations, and alternatives for a deeper understanding of the tradition of natural law throughout the medieval period. It runs contrary to the opinion so commonly held since the Renaissance, that any tradition deemed medieval has little or even nothing to offer to contemporary needs and interests. The essays contained herein put to bed such a notion with fresh and interesting takes on Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, natural law in the traditions of Golden Age Spain, and more.

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In a series of essays readers will find information about modern scholarship on the subject of chivalry and various suggestions for ways to teach some familiar and unfamiliar chivalric materials. Short bibliographies are provided for teachers' further use.

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The study of popular hymnody is remote not only from contemporary experience but also from very many contemporary scholars. A great deal of this remove stems from the complicated origins and history of this important genre. The Monophonic Lauda aims to present for the first time an English study of the form, as such a text has not been available before. This also necessitates an exploration of previous scholarship on the lauda, though the book is not devoted to this particular exercise. The volume is well illustrated, including musical notation and black-and-white plates.

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This illustrated volume intelligently provides a much-needed introduction to what may have been the most popular variety of drama in the Middle Ages: the saint play. A comprehensive and collaborative survey is provided with an emphasis on interdisciplinary study rather than only literary analysis. While the saint play in England is the connecting theme of the volume, the papers explore other topics necessary to fully understand the culture of the saint play, such as the genre as manifest on the continent, including plays in French, Italian, and German.

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Each of these diverse essays confronts important issues in the study of medieval art, literature, and drama. The topics covered include the symbolism of scatological illustration in Gothic manuscripts (Karl Wentersdorf), connections between word and picture in religious art (Roger Ellis), and the relationship perceived between divine and human creativity (R. W. Hanning), while Clifford Davidson provides an exploration in the phenomenology of space and time in medieval theater.

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Before he suddenly passed away, John W. Robinson was working on a manuscript that he saw as effecting a marriage between the dramatic and the theatrical, as he felt there was too large a divide between literary scholars and practitioners of the theater. In it, Robinson stated that his purpose it to expound as plays the New Testament plays of the Wakefield Master and some of the related York plays, including two by the York Realist. . . . hop[ing] to show that the meaning and effect of the Wakefield Master's and York Realist's plays will not appear unless they are approached with the understanding that they were performed, with some idea of how they were performed, and with some appreciation of what they meant to a medieval audience. That manuscript is presented here, a close study of eight plays and the elements Robinson considers essential to performance: playwright, sponsors, location, plot, script, players, and audience.

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This richly illustrated book surveys representations of the stage and acting from manuscript illuminations, stained glass, sculpture, woodcarving, wall paintings, and the woodcuts that appear in playbooks produced by the first English printers.

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Strife occurs everywhere among characters in The Canterbury Tales, in the stories as well as the links between them. Characters seem always ready to dispute, contradict, declaim, and contend about almost anything. A competitive spirit suffuses the work, from the tale-telling among pilgrims and the personal rivalries that develop on the pilgrimage to the conflicts, beguilings, and one-uppings that go on in the tales. By understanding the rivalries of the Canterbury world, we may then recognize why Chaucer so insists on the individuality of the characters he creates, why so many characters (rightly or wrongly) resist structures, and why they challenge or reject social dogmas, often overturning them. The essays that make up this collection offer several provocative interpretations of the rivalrous and rebellious spirits that inhabit the worlds of Chaucer's tales. The volume is intended for the dedicated teacher of Chaucer as well as for the specialist in medieval English studies. As Chaucer's poem displays the contestive spirit of human affairs, so the collective spirit of these essays reflects vigorous debate and multi-faceted challenge.

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Strife occurs everywhere among characters in The Canterbury Tales, in the stories as well as the links between them. Characters seem always ready to dispute, contradict, declaim, and contend about almost anything. A competitive spirit suffuses the work, from the tale-telling among pilgrims and the personal rivalries that develop on the pilgrimage to the conflicts, beguilings, and one-uppings that go on in the tales. By understanding the rivalries of the Canterbury world, we may then recognize why Chaucer so insists on the individuality of the characters he creates, why so many characters (rightly or wrongly) resist structures, and why they challenge or reject social dogmas, often overturning them. The essays that make up this collection offer several provocative interpretations of the rivalrous and rebellious spirits that inhabit the worlds of Chaucer’s tales. The volume is intended for the dedicated teacher of Chaucer as well as for the specialist in medieval English studies. As Chaucer’s poem displays the contestive spirit of human affairs, so the collective spirit of these essays reflects vigorous debate and multi-faceted challenge.

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In his foreword to the volume, Clifford Davidson praises Guilfoyle's application of the concept of scenic form in her study of Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear, and her exposition of Shakespeare's historical consciousness, noting her sensitive examination of the shape of the playwright's scenes when placed against traditional visual configurations and related textual resonances. Any student of Shakespeare will benefit from the nuanced study of his imagery and how it helps to color his characters and the action in his plays.

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Included here are the texts, translations, musical transcriptions, and facsimiles of the Swedish music-dramas for Holy Week and Easter: Depositio, Elevatio, and Visitatio Sepulchri.

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This work-a parallel-text edition that contains all four versions of Piers Plowman-constitutes a major enterprise of textual scholarship and will provide for students of Langland a modern equivalent to Skeat's standard edition of 1886. This revised and corrected three-volume set is specifically designed to facilitate study of the parallel text (Volume 1) alongside both the textual notes (Volume 2, part 1) and the commentary/glossary (Volume 2, part 2), and is intended to make the entire edition available to as many students of Langland as possible.

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The abbreviated Psalms commentary by Honorius Augustodunensis (ca. 1070 - ca. 1140)-a redaction of his own, much larger commentary on the entire Psalter-participates in a long tradition of Christian interpretation of the Book of Psalms. A prolific author closely associated with Anselm of Canterbury, Rupert of Deutz, and Gilbert of Poitiers, Honorius wrote a massive commentary on the Psalms when the so-called "school of Laon" was at work on the Glossa ordinaria. Honorius's work shares the academic interest of that school, while simultaneously serving the devotion of the Benedictine Reform. His Exposition of Selected Psalms highlights a tripartite division of the Psalter, even as it discovers in the psalms an apocalypticism fitting to the Church in its last age.

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One of the most compelling and provocative books of twelfth-century England, the Markyate Psalter was probably produced at St. Albans Abbey between 1120 and 1140. Heralded as a high point of English Romanesque illumination, the manuscript contains the Chanson de St. Alexis. Leading scholars of twelfth-century manuscript studies explore the Psalter, understanding it through new methodologies, pursuing innovative lines of inquiry. The collection shines fresh light on a well-known manuscript, and broadens the discourse about the book and its readers.

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This fascinating first-person account of the visions experienced by the anchoress Julian of Norwich in May of 1373 is remarkable for its vivid prose and as an example both of early autobiographical writing in the vernacular and of a spiritual document. This practical edition includes a gloss, an introduction, notes, and a glossary, making it valuable to students of Middle English and medieval mysticism alike.

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A selection of documents, translated primarily from medieval Latin but occasionally from Old French, that shows how religious women and their patrons managed resources to make monastic communities - particularly a variety of Cistercian communities - work. The records help us reconstruct how nuns and abbesses of Cistercian communities in the thirteenth century organized and kept records, managed their properties, responded to attempts at usurpation, and balanced their lives between devotional practices, which were part of their cloistered world, and family and social responsibilities beyond the convent walls.

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In this volume, Fein presents highly emotional Middle English lyrics to a new audience of students and teachers of the Middle Ages. These Middle English poems, drawn widely from two hundred years of literary tradition, lead readers in devotion to God by invoking an emotional response to God's love. In this meditative tradition, readers would be brought closer to intellectually understanding God through their affective responses. With its copious footnotes, introductions, and glosses, this volume is ideal for classes on medieval spirituality and English lyrical poetry alike.

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The eleven essays offered in Women, Marriage, and Family in Medieval Christendom reflect the spirit and originality of Father Michael M. Sheehan, for whom the volume was collected. The essays consider three thematic categories that were dominant in most of Sheehan's own scholarly work: the role, position, and contributions of medieval women; the development of Christian marriage, especially in the High Middle Ages; and the secular family with its legal and emotional relationships. A close reading of the papers, particularly those concerned with the themes of marriage and the family, reveal what we can designate as the Sheehan school of social history. The collection expands on several of Sheehan's research areas, and while it shows a considerable interest in medieval England, it does not disregard the Continent. The volume is a worthy tribute to Sheehan and will be of great interest to students of social and legal history, women's history, the development of marriage, and the idea of the family.

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This volume contains the only known English version of Chrétien de Troyes's romance of the naïve knight Perceval, Sir Perceval of Galles. The work uses Perceval's ridiculous behavior as a late medieval satire of courtliness. Accompanying this tale is Ywain and Gawain, a translation of a second Chrétien poem, Le Chevalier au lion. Unlike Sir Perceval, this poem extols the virtues of chivalry and honor. These complementary works form an excellent introduction to Middle English Arthurian romance, as they include editing, glosses, introductions, and a very helpful glossary for beginning students.

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Rand H. Johnson's edition of the Latin letters of the late fifteenth-century German schoolmaster Paulus Niavis brings to light the life and thought of a teachers whose career spanned an era of radical curriculum reform in the arts faculties at schools and universities, where the centuries-old program of scholasticism was being replaced by a program based on the Italian studia humanitatis. Niavis's letters, written after his academic conversion, reflect the blending of Italian and German humanism. While Niavis expresses praise and admiration for classical Latinity, his letters also offer examples from late antique, medieval, and scholastic sources. Johnson's careful treatment of Niavis's thoughts offers us a window into the methods of a humanist forerunner and pioneer in his native Saxony. Niavis's consideration of his own cultural moment represents a particular insight into the great educational changes on the ground at an important moment in the history of the German classroom.

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Professor Benson's edition of the Stanzaic Morte Arthur and the Alliterative Morte Arthure has been long out of print. Benson's edition of these important Middle English poems is here revised and updated by Professor Edward E. Foster, taking into account recent scholarship, to once again be available and accessible to students. The romances included here are two of the best, most significant Arthurian romances in Middle English, which complement each other in terms of style and content. While the Alliterative Morte Arthure belongs to the Alliterative Revival movement, replete with details of fourteenth century warfare, the Stanzaic Morte Arthur represents a briefer, quicker-paced, yet more sentimental English adaptation of the French Mort Artu. This edition—with contextualizing introductions, helpful glosses, plentiful notes, and useful glossary—comprises a great introduction to Middle English Arthuriana for students of the Middle Ages.

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The essays within this volume, produced in honor of J. Ambrose Raftis, are united by two themes significant in Raftis's career: a belief in the fundamental individuality of medieval English men and women, and a belief in their ability to make choices. However much environment, custom, social structure, and even biology might constrain or otherwise affect personal behavior, the men and women who appear in the often laconic entries of medieval court rolls were distinctive, one-of-a-kind persons, and their actions-their deeds and their misdeeds, their triumphs and their failures, their fortunes and their follies-were often the result of choices they had made. That is the medieval world of J. Ambrose Raftis, and it is that world, and that vision, that this book honors.

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This collection of essays was released in honor of John Leyerle, a scholar to whom all medievalists in North America, and many beyond, owe a great debt. As a teacher, scholar, and administrator, Leyerle has been a leader in the rise and renewal of medieval studies on this continent in the past thirty years. The essays in this volume encompass his broad academic interests and interdisciplinary approach to scholarship, with a range of contributors from Canada, the United States, and abroad.

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Dedicated to Judson Boyce Allen-whose work ranged from the specialized study of manuscripts through the interpretation of particular literary texts to the broadest issues of history-essays in this collection deal with such varied subjects as word and meaning in different versions of commentaries, manuals for preaching, manuscript materials for fourteenth-century vernacular texts and the claim of auctour, rubrics accompanying manuscript texts of Petrarch's story of Griselda, and women as writers and readers of manuscripts. The essays are written by friends in tribute to a scholar whose work and life inspired many. The volume will be of interest to medievalist scholars of literature, manuscripts, and manuscript culture.

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John Gower's Confessio Amantis (The Lover's Confession) is one of the most important English works of the Fourteenth Century. Within its frame of the lovesick lover's confession are well over a hundred stories, mainly derived from classical mythology, the Bible, and history which exemplify the Middle Ages. Echoing the octosyllabic line of the original, this is the first translation of the entire (33,000-line) poem, including its Latin verses and glosses.

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This volume explores the will-making process in late medieval England for all levels of society. Wills are some of the most studied records of the late Middle Ages and capture the evidence of what people owned and the patterns of family relationships. These documents, compiled by Robert A. Wood from several archives and city records, cast a light on many aspects of medieval life, including gender distinctions and the heavy influence of the church. Included are wills from widows, tradespeople and artisans, clergy, and high-ranking wealthy people. Through these sources Wood is able to show how wills, inventories and testaments prepared people and their souls for the afterlife.

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The legend of Theophilus is a widely disseminated medieval miracle story. A good man gives in to Vain Glory, sells his soul to the Devil, has a terrible crisis of conscience, and is saved by the Virgin. The story is translated into most European languages and appears in stained glass, sculpture, and manuscripts. Gautier de Coinci writes the longest version of the legend; its colourful details reveal the medieval period's deep fear of hell and the Devil and its high hopes in the Virgin and the Church. Gautier de Coinci (1177–1236) was a French abbot and musical arranger, chiefly known for his devotion to the Virgin Mary. This is the first English translation of Gautier de Coinci's pre-Faustian version of the legend of Theophilus. It is presented in a facing-page translation with the original Old French, along with a full introduction and notes.

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In recent years, medieval studies has seen a flourishing of new ecocritical and environmental inquiries to literature, art and culture. These new approaches, drawing upon the material, spatial and post-human turns in humanities research, have directed scholarly attention to representations and histories of the non-human, and to the inarguable necessity of studying both human/human and human/non-human interactions in texts and cultures. Medieval Ecocriticisms is the first regular venue dedicated to medieval ecocritical studies. It seeks out the most current and innovative interdisciplinary approaches to the study of literature and the environment in the global Middle Ages.

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This volume presents the first widely available edition in English of the medieval romance Blandin de Cornoalha, accompanied by a translation and introduction to the work. Composed in the second half of the fourteenth century by an anonymous author, the story offers an early recording of the Sleeping Beauty folktale, incorporated into the adventures of two knights. Many elements in this romance from the south of France are comic, suggesting that Blandin is not simply a tale of knights in battle, but also a parody of medieval romance in general.

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An edition and accompanying translation of this late C13th anthology of early Middle English verse. In addition to the original text and Modern English translations, the edition contains a substantial scholarly introduction, notes and a substantial bibliography. Oxford, Jesus College, MS 29 (II), a thirteenth-century manuscript, contains the longest surviving English verse sequence from the period between the Exeter Book and the Harley Lyrics. 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 and presented here with accompanying translations in Modern English and scholarly introduction and apparatus. This scholarly presentation of the text is designed for both research and classroom use, intended for teachers, scholars and students.

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This modernized extract from The Great Chronicle of London covers the reign of England's first Tudor king, Henry VII (1485-1509). It gives an eye-witness account of events in London, and of news from elsewhere, from the viewpoint of a well-to- do citizen who was closely involved in civic administration. It describes many notable public events: riots and uprisings, executions, coronations, royal marriages and funerals, and ceremonial activities involving the mayor and aldermen. Its year by year entries also cover matters like the weather, the cost of living, taxes, and the effects of building work undertaken in the city. Although its compiler worked to a scheme common to other London chronicles from the period, he was ready to express his own views on a number of matters, and wrote with keen observation and occasional wit.

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The Digby Play of Mary Magdalene is a rare, surviving example of the Middle English saint play. It provides a window on the deep embedding of biblical drama and performance in late medieval devotional practices, social aspiration and critique, and religious discourses. Fully annotated and extensively glossed, this edition adds to the METS Drama series an essential resource for the study of late medieval English religious drama.

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The Towneley plays are a collection of biblical plays in the Huntington Library's MS HM 1, a manuscript once owned by the Towneley family of Towneley Hall, Lancashire. Once thought to constitute a cycle of plays from the town of Wakefield in Yorkshire's West Riding, the collection includes some of the best-known examples of medieval English drama, including the much-anthologized Second Shepherds Play.

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