Las tres etapas del desarrollo humano

The works presented in this anthology bridge generic categories - satire, fabliaux, secular lyrics, didactic treatises, homiletic matter - and range from the late thirteenth century to the emergenceof the English Renaissance in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Some of these texts are obscure, written by anonymous authors, while others are by well-known authors, such as JohnLydgate, England's first poet laureate, and the fifteenth-century Scots writer William Dunbar. Yet the theme of marriage links these seemingly disparate texts together to provide an illuminating view of asocial institution with a long and complex history. We might expect notions of medieval marriage to be unified and cohesive given the fact that marriage became a sacrament in the twelfth century andwas increasingly recognized as a viable social arrangement by ecclesiastical and secular authorities. However, as some of the texts in this volume suggest, heterosexual marriage as an institution wasnot always a stabilizing and orderly social force. These texts challenge and, in some cases, parody, satirize, and critique the institution of marriage. In so doing they allow us to interrogate thetraditional assumptions that shape the idea of the medieval household. The trials of marriage seem to outweigh its joys at times and, as some of these texts suggest, maintaining a sense of humor in theface of what must have been great difficulty could have been no easy task.

The Peasants' Revolt of June and July 1381 was a milestone of medieval English politics and of Richard II's young reign.Polemical chroniclers -- Thomas Walsingham, monk of St. Albans (Historia Anglicana, Chronicon Angliae); Henry Knighton, Augustinian canon of St. Mary-of-the-Meadows, Leicester (Chronicon); theBenedictine author of Anonimalle Chronicle (from St. Mary's, York); a chronicler of Westminster (Chronicon Westmonasteriense); and Sir Jean Froissart in his Chronicles -- recount the stages of the rebellion...