As students and scholars of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Dante know, late medieval writers were influenced greatly by the work of peers that crossed historical, national, cultural, linguistic boundaries. Through a Classical Eye contains first-rate essays that demonstrate a range of strategies for undertaking transcultural and transhistorical studies of the late medieval period, and examines medieval literature and culture where English, Italian, and Latin materials overlap.
 Written in honour of the groundbreaking contributions that Winthrop Wetherbee made to this growing area of study, the volume's contributors advance his legacy and add to the burgeoning interest in setting medieval literary studies into wide intellectual and historical horizons. Divided into three illuminating sections on Medieval Latin authorship, Italy and the world, and England and beyond, and including a personal reminiscence of Wetherbee by the noted novelist Robert Morgan, Through a Classical Eye is an outstanding collection that provides key insights into medieval literature and culture.

Through A Classical Eye: Transcultural & Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian, and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee

Literature & Fiction

Galloway, Andrew

Yeager, R.F.

Essays & Correspondence

University of Toronto Press

"A work of enormous importance. Of all the poems of the English Middle Ages, Piers Plowman is the one that most deserves and needs annotation of the fullest and best possible kind, both because it is a text of unrivaled literary quality and interest, and because it is characteristically knotty and deploys a language of unusual richness, density, and allusiveness. Much of this allusiveness is to areas of learning that are not at every modern reader's fingertips. A particular difficulty is the existence of the poem in three authorial versions of almost desperate complexity. It will be an immense triumph to have a commentary which elucidates their relationships as a matter of policy and not simply as the result of conflating annotation on the different versions."—Derek Pearsall
The first full commentary on Piers Plowman since the late nineteenth century is inaugurated with the publication of the first two of its five projected volumes.
The detailed and wide-ranging Penn Commentary places the allegorical dream-vision of Piers Plowman within the literary, historical, social, and intellectual contexts of late medieval England, and within the long history of critical interpretation of the poem, assessing past scholarship while offering original materials and insights throughout. The authors' line-by-line, section by section, and passus by passus commentary on all three versions of the poem and on the stages of its multiple revisions reveals new aspects of the poem's meaning while assessing and summarizing a complex and often divisive scholarly tradition. The volumes offer an up-to-date, original, and open-ended guide to a poem whose engagement in its social world is unrivaled in English literature, and whose literary, religious, and intellectual accomplishments are uniquely powerful.
The Penn Commentary is designed to be equally useful to readers of the A, B, or C texts of the poem. It is geared to readers eager to have detailed experience of Piers Plowman and other medieval literature, possessing some basic knowledge of Middle English language and literature, and interested in pondering further the particularly difficult relationships to both that this poem possesses. Others, with interest in poetry of all periods, will find the extended and detailed commentary useful precisely because it does not seek to avoid the poem's challenges but seeks instead to provoke thought about its intricacy and poetic achievements.
Andrew Galloway's Volume 1 treats the poem's first vision, from the Prologue through Passus 4, in all three versions, accepting the C text as the poet's final word but excavating downward through the earlier B and A texts. Stephen Barney's volume completes the framework for the commentary, dealing with the final three passûs of the poem, extant only in the B and C versions. Subsequent volumes will be the work of Ralph Hanna, Traugott Lawler, and Anne Middleton.
Overall, The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman marks a new stage of concentrated yet wide-ranging attention to a text whose repeated revisions and literary and intellectual complexity make it both an elusive object of inquiry and a literary work whose richness has long deserved the capacious and minutely detailed treatment that only a full commentary can allow. Perhaps no poem in English appeals more than Piers Plowman to those readers who understand Yeats's "fascination with things difficult," yet The Penn Commentary will enable generations of readers to share in the pleasures and challenges of experiencing, engaging with, and trying to elucidate the difficulties of one of the towering achievements of English literature.
Andrew Galloway is Professor of English and Medieval Studies at Cornell University.

The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman, Volume 1: C Prologue-Passūs 4; B Prologue-Passūs 4; A Prologue-Passūs 4

Reference

University of Pennsylvania Press

Medieval Literature and Culture: A student guide (Introductions to British Literature and Culture)

Continuum's Introductions to British Literature and Culture series provide practical guides to key literary periods. Guides in the series help to orientate students as they begin a new module or area of study, providing concise information on the historical, cultural, literary and critical context and acting as an initial map of the knowledge needed to study the literature and culture of a specific period. Each guide includes an overview of the historical period, intellectual contexts, major genres, critical approaches and a guide to original research and resource materials in the area, enabling students to progress confidently to further study. The Guide to Medieval Literature and Culture provides students with the ideal introduction to literature and its context from the 7th to 15th centuries, including: - the historical, cultural and intellectual background including religion and philosophy; society and politics; art and culture - major works and genres including religious literature; history writing; drama; Chaucer; Langland - concise explanations of key terms needed to understand the literature and criticism - key critical approaches to medieval literature from the Renaissance to the present - a chronology mapping historical events and literary works and further reading including websites and electronic resources.

History & Criticism

Continuum

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.

Confessio Amantis (Teams Middle English Texts Series) (Vol. 3)

Gower, John

Poetry

Medieval Institute Publications

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.

Confessio Amantis, Volume 1 (Middle English Texts)

The complete text of John Gower's Confessio Amantis is a three-volume edition, including all Latin components - with translations - of this bilingual poem and extensive glosses, bibliography, and explanatory notes. Volume 2 contains Books 2, 3, and 4, which follow in their structure the outline of Vice and its children found in the early French poem the Mirour de l'Omme.

Confessio Amantis, Volume 2 (Middle English Texts)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Galloway, Andrew. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Galloway, Andrew

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Galloway, Andrew. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Through A Classical Eye: Transcultural & Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian, and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee

The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman, Volume 1: C Prologue-Passūs 4; B Prologue-Passūs 4; A Prologue-Passūs 4

Medieval Literature and Culture: A student guide (Introductions to British Literature and Culture)

Medieval Literature and Culture: A student guide (Introductions to British Literature and Culture)

Confessio Amantis (Teams Middle English Texts Series) (Vol. 3)

Confessio Amantis, Volume 1 (Middle English Texts)

Confessio Amantis, Volume 2 (Middle English Texts)