Derek Pearsall is the Gurney Professor of English at Harvard University and was Professor and Co-Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York, 1965-85. His numerous publications include Chaucer to Spenser: An Anthology (1999) and The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (1992) both available from Blackwell. He is also the author of John Lydgate (1970), Old English and Middle English Poetry (1977), The Canterbury Tales: A Critical Study (1985), An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Langland (1990).

• Preface. Notes on Contributors.1. The Humanity of Christ: Reflections on Orthodox Late Medieval Representations and The Humanity of Christ: Representations in Wycliffite Texts and Piers Plowman: David Aers.2. The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions: Mary Carruthers.3. Eunuch Hermeneutics: Carolyn Dinshaw.4. Misogyny and Economic Person in Skelton, Langland, and Chaucer: Elizabeth Fowler.5. At the Table of the Great: More's Self-Fashioning and Self-Cancellation: Stephen Greenblatt.6. The Colonial Wyatt: Contexts and Openings: Roland Greene.7. Price and Value in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Jill Mann.8. William Langland's Kynde Name: Authorial Signature and Social Identity in Late Fourteenth-Century England: Anne Middleton.9. Historical Criticism and the Claims of Humanism: Lee Patterson.10.'Abject odious': Feminine and Masculine in Henryson's Testament of Cresseid: Felicity Riddy.11. Prison, Writing, Absence: Representing the Subject in the English Poems of Charles d'Orléans: A. C. Spearing.12. False Fables and Historical Truth: Paul Strohm.Index.