Table of Contents

1: The period and the literature
2: Writers, audiences, and readers
3: Major genres
4: Modes of meaning
5: The afterlife of Middle English literature
Notes
Bibliography

Reviews

This book is the most effective introduction to Middle English literature that I know. It is everywhere alert to the ways that modern literary sensibilities need to be adjusted in order to appreciate the medieval norm, and Burrow combines astonishing learning with a pedagogical shrewdness that always picks out just the telling passage or focusing cultural fact. This second edition adds a great deal of new and equally important material to a work that had already become a classic in its own right. Christopher Cannon, Girton College, Cambridge