The Oxford English Literary History is the new century's definitive account of a rich and diverse literary heritage that stretches back for a millennium and more. This volume explores the vast cultural, literary, social, and political transformations which characterized the period 1000-1350.

Laura Ashe is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College. She works on medieval English literary, cultural, and political history, with particular specialisms in England's multilingual literatures, chivalry and crusading, kingship, romance and historiography, sanctity and hagiography, devotional writings and thought, love, subjectivity, and the early literature of interiority. Educated at Cambridge and Harvard, her books include Fiction and History in England, 1066-1200 (2007), Early Fiction in England: From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Chaucer (2015), and Richard II (2016). She is one of the editors of New Medieval Literatures, has edited several other collaborative volumes, and published numerous articles, on topics ranging from the eighth to the seventeenth century.

• Introduction


• 1: England, c. 1000: this world is in haste


• 2: Conquests, kings, and transformations


• 3: Know yourself: interiority, love, and God


• 4: The Bellator and Chevalerie: the struggle for the warrior's soul


• 5: It is different with us: love, individuality, and fiction


• 6: Conversations with the living and the dead


• 7: Engletere and the Inglis: Conflict and construction


• Epilogue


• Bibliography


• Index