Dieter Mehl: English Literature in the Age of Chaucer (The Longman Literature in English Series).

• J. A. Burrow

Professor Mehl’s latest book covers a longer period than might be suggested by its title. The first half does indeed comprise chapters on the four main Ricardian poets, Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the Gawain-poet; but these are followed by a chapter on two Lancastrian poets, Lydgate and Hoccleve, together with further chapters on the Middle English lyric, Middle Scots poetry, and the prose of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The editors of the Longman series to which the book belongs declare their commitment to a study of literature ‘based upon awareness of the relations between literary forms and their historical contexts’ (p. vii), an approach most recently represented, in medieval English studies, by the Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (1999).

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