Senshu University has hosted many international conferences on medieval English literature - primarily on Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland - as well as in the related fields of Old Germanic, medieval French and Renaissance Italian literature. These international collaborations inform and contribute to the present volume, which addresses the heritage bequeathed to medieval English language and literature by the classical world. This volume explores the development of medieval English literature in light of contact with Germanic and Old Norse cultures, on the one hand, and Romance languages, on the other. The book includes a comparative study of Beowulf in the Germanic context, discusses aspects of Piers Plowman and its tradition, and offers philological approaches to Chaucer (especially his Troilus and Criseyde). The articles assembled here collectively suggest how the torches of classical learning were carried from continental Europe to illuminate the pages of medieval English literature.

Contents: Tomonori Matsushita: Introduction - Graham D. Caie: A Case of Double Vision: Denmark in Beowulf and Beowulf in England - Kazutomo Karasawa: Hrothgar in the Germanic Context of Beowulf - A.V.C. Schmidt: The Four Elements as a Structural Idea in Piers Plowman - Helen Barr: The Place of the Poor in 'the Piers Plowman Tradition' - Masatoshi Kawasaki: 'My Wyl Is This' (Canterbury Tales. I [A] 1845): Chaucer's Sense of Power in The Knight's Tale and The Clerk's Tale - Yoshiyuki Nakao: Textual Variations in Troilus and Criseyde and the Rise of Ambiguity - Yoshiyuki Nakao/Masatsugu Matsuo: A Comprehensive Textual Comparison of Troilus and Criseyde: Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 61 and B.A. Windeatt's Edition of Troilus and Criseyde (1990) - Mitsu Ide: The Old English Equivalents for Factum Esse and the Salisbury Psalter - Akiyuki Jimura: On the Decline of the Prefix y- of Past Participles - Hiroshi Yonekura: Compound Nouns in Late Middle English: Their Morphological, Syntactic and Semantic Description - Masa Ikegami: Robert Henryson's Rhymes between 'Etymological -e and -i' and the Special Development of Unstressed /i/ - Akinobu Tani: Word Pairs or Doublets in Caxton's History of Reynard the Fox: Rampant and Tedious? - Sylvia Huot: Senshu University Manuscripts 2 and 3 and the Roman de la Rose Manuscript Tradition - Patrick P. O'Neill: The Senshu Psalter.

Tomonori Matsushita is Professor of Medieval English literature and linguistics, Senshu University, Tokyo. A.V.C. Schmidt is Andrew Bradley-James Maxwell Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. David Wallace is Judith Rodin Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania.