This chapter turns to anxieties about the motivations of crusaders, focusing on the romance of Guy of Warwick. In fourteenth-century Europe, an ideology of “chivalric crusading” that sought to harmoniously combine courtly love, worldly self-advancement, and service to God gained wide popularity, disseminated by works such as Guillaume de Machaut’s La Prise d’Alixandre and the Livre des fais of Marshal Boucicaut. But this ideology was not without its critics: writers including John Gower, Philippe de Mézières, and Henry of Grosmont seized upon the notion of crusading as love-service to articulate complex critiques of the worldly ambitions of crusaders. Guy of Warwick intervenes in this debate by exploring the practical and experiential implications of fighting for worldly love and pious motives.

This essay focuses on the two most influential English authors of the later medieval period, Geoffrey Chaucer and his contemporary, John Gower, to analyse the roles of women within their corpus, both as subjects and as extra-textual readers. Bridges asks what femininity enables in their works and how ߝ and what ߝwomen mean, emphasising the embeddedness of both writers in long-established and international textual cultures. Central to her analysis is the notion of a hermeneutic that constructs women and femininity in ethical terms, as bound up with notions of vice and virtue. The essay explores questions of voice, agency, and genre across Chaucerߣs works to demonstrate the intimate connection of femininity with questions of reading and interpretation. For Gower too, ethics are shown to be a central focus, and treatments of femininity open onto moral and political debates. Differing presentations of women treated in common by Chaucer and Gower illuminate their ideological priorities and contrasting practices of poetic translatio studii. For both, womenߣs presence proves a complex, powerful, but often ambiguous textual phenomenon.

Opening with a dramatic encounter between two angry lords and their opposing retinues of loyal men, Chapter 3 explores the role played by anger in medieval English legal and literary culture. Following a brief introduction to the field of the history of emotion, the chapter explores the etymology of several anger-related words in Latin, Anglo-Norman French, and Middle English. Using John Gower’s Mirour de l’Homme, the chapter demonstrates the complexities of medieval English understandings of the passion of anger. Moving from literature to legal texts, the chapter then explores the language used in the plea rolls to describe sudden anger, long-standing hatred, and other emotion-filled states. The chapter closes with another Gower tale in which the sin of incest is treated as secondary to the damnable sin of uncontrolled wrath.

French – dialects, peoples and places – shaped late medieval European literary culture. We cannot with certainty ascribe any surviving French poetry to Geoffrey Chaucer, but the poet’s existing corpus demonstrates how Chaucer read, emulated and adapted French works and how Chaucer’s French also aided his approach to Latin sources. Chaucer’s contemporaries associated his poetry with the Roman de la Rose, and this essay surveys Chaucer’s engagement with French poetry produced by Eustache Deschamps, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, Christine de Pizan, Oton de Grandson, John Gower and Guillaume de Deguileville in relation to the widely influential Rose.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.