John Gower was an English poet, a contemporary of William Langland and the Pearl Poet, and a personal friend of Geoffrey Chaucer. He is remembered primarily for three major works—the Mirour de l'Omme, Vox Clamantis, and Confessio Amantis—three long poems written in French, Latin, and English respectively, which are united by common moral and political themes.
The Parson's Tale is the final "tale" of Geoffrey Chaucer's poetic cycle The Canterbury Tales. Unlike the other tales, it is not a narrative at all, but a treatise on penitence and the Seven Deadly Sins, a kind of spiritual "self-help" manual for personal use. This was a popular genre in the Middle Ages; Chaucer's is a translation and reworking that ultimately derives from the Latin manuals of two Dominican friars, Raymund of Pennaforte and William Perault. Modern readers and critics, however, have found it pedantic and boring, especially in comparison to the rest of the Canterbury Tales. While some scholars have questioned whether Chaucer ever intended the Parson's Tale to be part of the Tales at all, more recent scholarship understands it as integral to them, forming an appropriate ending to a series of stories concerned with the value of fiction itself.
Troilus and Criseyde is an epic poem by Geoffrey Chaucer which re-tells in Middle English the tragic story of the lovers Troilus and Criseyde set against a backdrop of war during the siege of Troy. It was written in rime royale and probably completed during the mid-1380s. Many Chaucer scholars regard it as the poet's finest work. As a finished long poem, it is more self-contained than the better known but ultimately unfinished The Canterbury Tales. This poem is often considered the source of the phrase: "all good things must come to an end" (3.615).
The term Middle English literature refers to the literature written in the form of the English language known as Middle English, from the late 12th century until the 1470s. During this time the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, became widespread and the printing press regularized the language. Between the 1470s and the middle of the following century there was a transition to early Modern English. In literary terms, the characteristics of the literary works written did not change radically until the effects of the Renaissance and Reformed Christianity became more apparent in the reign of King Henry VIII. There are three main categories of Middle English literature, religious, courtly love, and Arthurian, though much of Geoffrey Chaucer's work stands outside these. Among the many religious works are those in the Katherine Group and the writings of Julian of Norwich and Richard Rolle.
Derek Stanley Brewer was a Welsh medieval scholar, author and publisher.
Margaret Beryl Clunies Ross is a medievalist who was until her retirement in 2009 the McCaughey Professor of English Language and Early English Literature and Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Sydney. Her main research areas are Old Norse-Icelandic Studies and the history of their study. Since 1997 she has led the project of editing a new edition of the corpus of skaldic poetry. She has also written articles on Australian Aboriginal rituals and contributed to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Amoryus and Cleopes is a poem written in 1449 by John Metham; it was an early English adaptation of the Pyramus and Thisbe narrative from Book 4 of Ovid‘s Metamorphoses.
Malcolm Beckwith Parkes, credited as an author as M. B. Parkes, was an English paleographer, notable for his contributions to the scholarship of medieval manuscripts. His studies of the manuscripts of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland were especially important, and his 1978 article "The Production of Copies of the 'Canterbury Tales'" was described as "seminal".
Richard Johann Utz is a German-born medievalist who has spent much of his career in North America. He specializes in medieval studies, and served as president of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism (2009–2020).
Carolyn Dinshaw is an American academic and author, who has specialised in issues of gender and sexuality in the medieval context.
Wendy Scase is the Geoffrey Shepherd Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Birmingham. She is currently researching the material histories of English medieval literature, studying a range of material from one-sheet texts to the largest surviving Middle English manuscript.
Nicholas Watson is an English-Canadian medievalist, literary critic, religious historian, and author. He is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English at Harvard University and chair of the Harvard English Department.
Veronica O'Mara is a historian at the University of Hull who is a specialist in medieval English religious literature, particularly sermons, and female literacy. She is joint editor with Carolyn Muessig of Medieval Sermon Studies. O'Mara is engaged in a long-term project on Nuns' Literacies in Medieval Europe which has resulted in conferences in Hull (2011), Missouri-Kansas City (2012), and Antwerp (2013).
Helen Barr is an academic specialising in English literature on the late medieval period. She has spent her entire career at the University of Oxford, and, in 2016, the university awarded her the title of Professor of English Literature.
Sebastian Sobecki is a medievalist specialising in English literature, history, and manuscript studies.
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.
Cyril William Edwards was a British medievalist and translator. Teaching in London and Oxford, he published extensively on the medieval German lyric and Old High German literature, and translated four of the major Middle High German verse narratives.
Christopher Cannon is a medievalist at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and Classics, previously Chair of Classics, and from 2020-2024 Vice Dean for the Humanities and Social Sciences in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. His research and writings have focused on the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, early Middle English, and elementary learning in the Middle Ages.
Thorlac Francis Samuel Turville-Petre is an English philologist who is Professor Emeritus and former head of the School of English at the University of Nottingham. He specializes in the study of Middle English literature.
Marion Turner is the J. R. R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford and an academic authority on Geoffrey Chaucer. She has authored several books, including Chaucer: A European Life, which was shortlisted in 2020 for the Wolfson History Prize, and was a finalist in the PROSE Awards, and for which she was awarded the 2020 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize.
