This Companion presents fifteen original and engaging essays by leading scholars on one of the most influential genres of Western literature. Essays on the origins of romance in French and English courts are complemented by articles that trace the transmission and evolution of these stories throughout Europe.

This is the first full-scale history of medieval English literature in nearly a century. Thirty-three contributors provide information on a vast range of literary texts and the conditions of their production and reception. The volume also contains a chronology, full bibliography and a detailed index. This book offers the most extensive account available of the medieval literatures so drastically reconfigured in Tudor England.

Learning How to Feel explores the ways in which children and adolescents learn not just how to express emotions that are thought to be pre-existing, but actually how to feel. The volume assumes that the embryonic ability to feel unfolds through a complex dialogue with the social and cultural environment and specifically through reading material. The fundamental formation takes place in childhood and youth.

Ben Jonson was the greatest of Shakespeare's contemporaries. His fame rests not only on the numerous plays he had written, but on his achievements over three decades as principal masque-writer to the early Stuart court, where he had worked in creative, if at times stormy, collaboration with Inigo Jones. One of the most accomplished poets of the age, he was--in fact if not in title--the first Poet Laureate in England.

Stories of transgression--Gilgamesh, Prometheus, Oedipus, Eve -- may be integral to every culture's narrative imaginings of its own origins, but such stories assumed different meanings with the burgeoning interest in modern histories of crime and punishment in the later decades of the seventeenth century.