Anthony Stockwell Garfield Edwards (born 1942) is Professor of Medieval Manuscripts at the University of Kent. Having studied at the University of Reading and McMaster University, he earned his Ph.D. at the University of London. [1]
Edwards is the co-editor of the Index of Middle English Prose (IMEP), currently in its twenty-third volume. Edwards is the author of such works as Middle English Prose: a critical guide to major authors and genres [2] and editor of A Companion to Middle English Prose [3] and The Life of St Edmund, King & Martyr: John Lydgate's illustrated verse life presented to Henry VI. [4]
Edwards is also co-editor (with Julia Boffey) of the New Index of Middle English Verse (2005) [5] and A Companion to Fifteenth-Century English Poetry, [6] and co-editor with Vincent Gillespie and Ralph Hanna of The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths (2000).
His research has been funded by the Guggenheim Foundation and he was a Fellow in 1988-89. [7]
He long served on the editorial board of the Book Collector and was a frequent contributor.
Campion Hall is one of the four permanent private halls of the University of Oxford in England. A Catholic hall, it is run by the Society of Jesus and named after Edmund Campion, a martyr and fellow of St John's College, Oxford. The hall is located on Brewer Street, between Christ Church and Pembroke College. The buildings, along with many of the fixtures and fittings, were designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, his only buildings in Oxford. The hall also houses an extensive collection of religious art spanning 600 years; the pieces were collected primarily by Fr Martin D'Arcy in the 1930s.
Edmund the Martyr was king of East Anglia from about 855 until his death.
Lancelot du Lac, also written as Launcelot and other variants, is a character in some versions of Arthurian legend where he is typically depicted as King Arthur's close companion and one of the greatest Knights of the Round Table. In the French-inspired Arthurian chivalric romance tradition, Lancelot is an orphaned son of King Ban of the lost kingdom of Benoic, raised in a fairy realm by the Lady of the Lake. A hero of many battles, quests and tournaments, and famed as a nearly unrivalled swordsman and jouster, Lancelot becomes the lord of the castle Joyous Gard and personal champion of Arthur's wife, Queen Guinevere, despite suffering from frequent and sometimes prolonged fits of madness. But when his adulterous affair with Guinevere is discovered, it causes a civil war that, once exploited by Mordred, brings an end to Arthur's kingdom.
John Lydgate of Bury was an English monk and poet, born in Lidgate, near Haverhill, Suffolk, England.
Richard Rolle was an English hermit, mystic, and religious writer. He is also known as Richard Rolle of Hampole or de Hampole, since at the end of his life he lived near a Cistercian nunnery in Hampole, now in South Yorkshire. In the words of Nicholas Watson, scholarly research has shown that "[d]uring the fifteenth century he was one of the most widely read of English writers, whose works survive in nearly four hundred English ... and at least seventy Continental manuscripts, almost all written between 1390 and 1500." In many ways, he can be considered the first English author, insofar as his vernacular works were widely considered to have considerable religious authority and influence soon after his death, and for centuries afterwards.
Louise Bogan was an American poet. She was appointed the fourth Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress in 1945, and was the first woman to hold this title. Throughout her life she wrote poetry, fiction, and criticism, and became the regular poetry reviewer for The New Yorker.
The Dialogue on Translation between a Lord and a Clerk, or Dialogus inter dominum et clericum, was written by John Trevisa. Along with the dedicatory Epistle, it forms the introduction to his 1387 translation of the Polychronicon of Ranulf Higden, commissioned by Trevisa's patron, Lord Berkeley. Written in Middle English, it consists of a series of arguments made by the clerk on why books should not be translated from learned languages such as Latin, each one followed by a rebuttal from the lord. The clerk eventually agrees, and the exchange concludes with a prayer for guidance in the translation.
Tail rhyme is a family of stanzaic verse forms used in poetry in French and especially English during and since the Middle Ages, and probably derived from models in medieval Latin versification.
Gloucester College, Oxford, was a Benedictine institution of the University of Oxford in Oxford, England, from the late 13th century until the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century. It was never a typical college of the University; in that there was an internal division in the college, by staircase units, into parts where the monasteries sending monks had effective authority. The overall head was a Prior, later changed to a Prior Studentium, and finally a Principal.
Saint Fremund, also known as Freomund, was a ninth-century saint, hermit and martyr in Anglo-Saxon England. He is venerated at both the village of Prescote in Oxfordshire, where he is patron saint, and at Dunstable Priory in Bedfordshire.
Robert of Bury was an English boy, allegedly murdered and found in the town of Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk in 1181. His death, which occurred at a time of rising antisemitism, was falsely blamed on local Jews. Though a hagiography of Robert was written, no copies are known, so the story of his life is now unknown beyond the few fragmentary references to it that survive. His cult continued until the English Reformation.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Siege of Thebes is a 4716-line poem written by John Lydgate between 1420 and 1422. Lydgate composed the Siege of Thebes directly following his composition of Troy Book - which was patronized by King Henry V - and directly preceding his production of The Fall of Princes - which Humphrey Duke of Gloucester patronized during King Henry VI's regency. The poem is particularly significant because it was written without an identifiable patron, and most probably without patron or commission whatsoever. Whatever the status of its patronage, the Siege of Thebes still managed to gain significant popularity, attested to by its 31 surviving manuscripts. The poem is, in large part, a response to Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Lydgate's poem borrows The Canterbury Tales' pilgrimage-based framing device and is written as an additional tale in the cycle. However, unlike Chaucer, Lydgate establishes himself as the narrator of the work, and recounts the siege of Thebes. Lydgate's Siege of Thebes follows and expands upon the Theban Cycle, but makes significant additions to the source materials.
The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye is a fifteenth-century poem written in English. The work exists in two redactions: the first was composed after the siege of Calais in 1436 but before the end of 1438, and a second edition of the work before June 1441. This second edition was probably revised again. Nineteen manuscripts contain the Libelle, which consists of about 1,100 lines in rhyming couplets, with a proem in rhyme-royal and a stanzaic envoi that differs between the poem's two editions.
Troy Book is a Middle English poem by John Lydgate relating the history of Troy from its foundation through to the end of the Trojan War. It is in five books, comprising 30,117 lines in ten-syllable couplets. The poem's major source is Guido delle Colonne's Historia destructionis Troiae.
The Lambeth Homilies are a collection of homilies found in a manuscript in Lambeth Palace Library, London. The collection contains seventeen sermons and is notable for being one of the latest examples of Old English, written as it was c. 1200, well into the period of Middle English.
The Wooing Group is a term coined by W. Meredith Thompson to identify the common provenance of four early Middle English prayers and meditations, written in rhythmical, alliterative prose. The particular variety of Middle English in which the group is written is AB language, a written standard of the West Midlands which also characterises the Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group.
Kaveh Akbar is an Iranian American poet, novelist, and editor. He is the author of the poetry collections Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Pilgrim Bell and of the novel Martyr!, a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the 2024 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize.
Julia Boffey is Professor of Medieval Studies at Queen Mary University of London. She studied as an undergraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge, and completed a D.Phil. thesis on medieval verse manuscripts at the Centre for Medieval Studies at York. She is the author of Manuscript and Print in London c.1475 - 1530 (2012) and Manuscripts of English Courtly Love Lyrics in the Later Middle Ages (1985), and editor of Fifteenth-century English Dream Visions: an Anthology (2003). She is also the co-editor of the New Index of Middle English Verse and A Companion to Fifteenth-Century English Poetry, as well as co-editor with Christiania Whitehead of Middle English Lyrics: New Readings of Short Poems (2018), with V. Davis of Recording Medieval Lives: Proceedings of the 2005 Harlaxton Symposium, and with Pamela King of London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages.
Norman Francis Blake was a British academic and scholar specialising in Middle English and Early Modern English language and literature on which he published abundantly during his career.