MOTHER'S DAY SPECIALS! SHOW ME MORE
AD PUTTER is professor of medieval English literature at the University of Bristol, England, and he is also coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend. MYRA STOKES was formerly a senior lecturer in the Department of English at Bristol University.
The Works of the Gawain Poet is a model of popular scholarship, one that harkens back to the glories of the old historical criticism of Tolkien and Henry Sweet. That it has appeared not under the imprimatur of a university press but as a reasonably priced paperback from Penguin Classics is a pleasant surprise. It belongs on the shelves of every library in the English-speaking world Washington Free Beacon All of the poems are presented, rather daringly, in their original Middle English (very slightly cleaned up), and the array of critical materials dart very nimbly around the Gawain poet's wide reading - though anonymous, this poet was surely one of the best-read writers of his age - and the end-product effect is to provide readers with something very close to a fourteenth century First Folio. It's a marvelous performance all around Open Letters Monthly This is an authoritative and accessible edition, that is likely to become the standard text on undergraduate reading lists, as well as helping to bring the poems to a much wider non-specialist readership -- Professor Simon Horobin, Oxford
