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The borderline between the periods commonly termed "medieval" and "Renaissance", or "medieval" and "early modern", is one of the most hotly, energetically and productively contested faultlines in literary history studies. The essays presented in this volume both build upon and respond to the work of Professor Helen Cooper, a scholar who has long been committed to exploring the complex connectionsand interactions between medieval and Renaissance literature. The contributors re-examine a range of ideas, authors and genres addressed in her work, including pastoral, chivalric romance, early English drama, and the writings of Chaucer, Langland, Spenser and Shakespeare. As a whole, the volume aims to stimulate active debates on the ways in which Renaissance writers used, adapted, and remembered aspects of the medieval.

Andrew King is Lecturer in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at University College, Cork; Matthew Woodcock is Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at the University of East Anglia.

Contributors: Joyce Boro, Aisling Byrne, Nandini Das, Mary C. Flannery, Alexandra Gillespie, Andrew King, Megan G. Leitch, R.W. Maslen, Jason Powell,Helen Vincent, James Wade, Matthew Woodcock

English literature --- History and criticism. --- Chaucer. --- English drama. --- Middle English. --- Old ENglish. --- Renaissance. --- chivalry. --- early modernism. --- literary analysis. --- manuscripts. --- medieval history. --- medieval. --- middle ages.

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The Hundred Years War was central and paradoxical for the writing of English history, simultaneously galvanising pugnacious articulations of nationalism and exposing their bankruptcy. However, the conflict remains a sticking point in scholarship of medieval multilingualism and its complex relationship to nationalism, often overlooked in calls for a "post-national" vocabulary.
This book chartsthe narration of the war in English literature, from contemporary chroniclers and poets, such as Chaucer, documenting the conflict that dominated the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to later polemicists and playwrights looking back on their medieval past, including Shakespeare. It explores how its propagandists navigated its cultural minefields, and then how their mythologisations became ciphers for Tudor expressions of nationalism. Challenging the periodisation that habitually divides the medieval from the early modern, it shows how an event of the magnitude and longevity of the HundredYears War shaped ways of thinking about English history and language from Chaucer and Lydgate to Spenser and Shakespeare. It also brings to light a rich and neglected corpus of Hundred Years War literature, from anonymous chroniclers and balladeers to agonising eyewitness accounts.

Joanna Bellis is the Fitzjames Research Fellow in Old and Middle English at Merton College, Oxford.

English literature --- Hundred Years' War, 1339-1453 --- French literature --- History and criticism. --- Literature and the war. --- In literature. --- Hundred Years' War (1339-1453) --- 1100-1700 --- English history. --- Hundred Years War. --- analysis. --- chaucer. --- documents. --- early modernism. --- interpretation. --- manuscripts. --- middle ages. --- middle english. --- old english. --- primary sources. --- research. --- scholarship. --- study.