Middle English Literature: A Guide to Criticism Book

1	Authorship	1
	John Lydgate : the critical approach	5
	Literary theory and literary practice	14
	Authority	20
2	Textual form	29
	The hoole book	34
	Division and failure in Gower's Confessio Amantis	43
3	Genre	55
	Middle English narrative genres	59
	The religious tradition	66
4	Language, style, rhetoric	74
	Early medieval narrative style	81
	The language of service and household rhetoric	90
	Three languages	99
5	Allegory	106
	Patristic criticism : the opposition	109
	The poets	116
	Intellectual and religious interpretations	126
	Allegorical buildings in medieval literature	131
6	Literature and history	139
	Economics	147
	Constructing social realities	152
7	Gender	164
	Sexual economics, Chaucer's wife of Bath and The book of Margery Kempe	166
	Medieval medical views of women and female spirituality	178
	Violence as symbolic capital in Malory's Morte Darthur	192
8	Identity	203
	Characterisation in the English mystery cycles	204
	Community, virtue, and individual identity in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight	212
	Troilus and Criseyde and subject of history	221