University of California, Berkeley Department of English Qualifying Exam Reading Lists
Historical Field List: Middle English Note: As per the graduate handbook, “historical field lists are advisory rather than contractual; they determine the parameters of the exam, but do not rule out the possibility that the conversation may range more broadly. Students may not refer to historical field lists during the exam.”
Primary Texts Four Romances of England: King Horn, Havelock the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, Athelston. Geoffrey Chaucer The Riverside Chaucer. Three Middle English Charlemagne Romances: The Sultan of Babylon, The Siege of Milan, The Tale of Chaucer sources: Ralph the Collier. Virgil. The Aeneid. Ovid. The Metamorphoses. Medieval English Lyrics Ovid. Heroides. Boethius. The Consolation o The Digby Lyrics Philosophy. Alan of Lille. The Plaint of The Harley Lyrics: The Middle English Lyrics of Nature. MS Harley 2253. Alan of Lille. Anticlaudianus. Dante. Inferno. (Cantos 3 and 5) Audelay, John the Blind Dante. Paradiso. (Canto 22) Poems and Carols (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 302). William Langland The Vision of Piers Plowman: B-Text and Julian of Norwich C-Text. The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Gawain-Poet Revelation of Love. The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript. Kempe, Margery The Owl and the Nightingale: Text and The Book of Margery Kempe. Translation. Rolle, Richard Ancrene Wisse. Prose and Verse from MS Longleat 29 and Related Manuscripts John Gower Uncollected Verse and Prose of Richard Confessio Amantis Rolle, with related Northern Texts The Major Latin Works of John Gower Mirour de l’Omme Hilton, Walter. The Scale of Perfection.
King Arthur’s Death: The Middle English The The Cloud of Unknowing. Edited by Patrick J. Stanzaic Morte Arthur and The Alliterative Morte Gallacher. Arthur Deonise Hid Divinite. Edited by Phyllis Hodgson. 2
Love, Nicholas The Complete Works. Edited by David J. The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Parkinson. Christ: A Reading Text. William Dunbar The York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern The Complete Works. Edited by John Spelling. Edited Richard Beadle and Conlee Pamela M. King Gavin Douglas Everyman. In Medieval Drama: An Anthology. The Palais of Honoure Edited by Greg Walker King James I Wisdom. In Medieval Drama: An Anthology. The Kingis Quair. In The Kingis Quair Edited by Greg Walker and Other Prison Poems. Edited by Linne R. Mooney and Mary-Jo Arn. Mankind. In Medieval Drama: An Anthology. Edited by Greg Walker Secondary Critical Works
Croxton’s Play of the Sacrament. In Medieval David Aers Drama: An Anthology. Edited by Greg Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Walker Imagination.
Thomas Malory John Alford Le Morte D’Arthur “The Role of Quotations in Piers Plowman” Usk, Thomas The Testament of Love Sarah Beckwith Signifying God: Social Relation and Selections from English Wycliffite Writings. Edited Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi by Anne Hudson. Plays
John Lydgate J. A. W. Bennett The Minor Poems Chaucer at Oxford and at Cambridge The Siege of Thebes Morton W. Bloomfield Thomas Hoccleve Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth Century Regiment of Princes Apocalypse ‘My Compleinte’ and Other Poems “Present State of Piers Plowman Studies”
John Skelton Aage Brusendorff The Complete English Poems The Chaucer Tradition
Six Eccesiastical Satires. Edited by James M. J. A. Burrow Dean. “Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages: The Case of Thomas Hoccleve” Robert Henryson “The Portrayal of Amans in the Confessio Amantis” 3
Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend Langland, and the Gawain Poet of Chaucer
Mary Carruthers John V. Fleming The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory Classical Imitation and Interpretation in in Medieval Culture Chaucer’s Troilus
R. W. Chambers Robert Worth Frank “The Authorship of ‘Piers Plowman’” Piers Plowman and the Scheme of Salvation: An interpretation of Dowel Andrew Cole, Andrew Dobet and Dobest Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer Richard Firth Green A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Margaret Connolly Ricardian England John Shirley: Book Production and the Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century English Court in the Late Middle Ages England Andrew Galloway Helen Cooper “The Literature of 1388 and the The Structure of the Canterbury Tales Politics of Pity in Gower’s Confessio Amantis.” In The Letter of the Law: Legal Rita Copeland Practice and Literary Production in Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in Medieval England the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and “Piers Plowman and the Schools” Vernacular Texts “Piers Plowman and the Subject of the Law” Carolyn Dinshaw Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics Ralph Hanna III Pursuing History: Middle English E. Talbot Donaldson Manuscripts and Their Texts “Chaucer the Pilgrim” Piers Plowman : The C-Text and its Poet Donald R. Howard Speaking of Chaucer “Chaucer the Man”
A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes Anne Hudson “The Production of Copies of the Lollards and their Books Canterbury Tales and Confessio Amantis in The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite the Early Fifteenth Century” Texts and Lollard History
T. P. Dunning and T. P. Dolan J. J. Jusserand Piers Plowman: An Interpretation of the A- English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages, Text XIVth Century
John H. Fisher Steven Justice “Genres of Piers Plowman” 4
Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 Feminizing Chaucer (2002)
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton Anne Middleton Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and “Acts of Vagrancy: The C Version Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late “Autobiography” and the Statute of 1388” Medieval England (2006) (1997) “Langland and the Bibliographic Ego” “Chaucer’s ‘New Men’ and the Good of (1997) Literature in the Canterbury Tales” (1980) George Lyman Kittredge “Editing Terminable and Interminable” Chaucer and his Poetry (1917) (2001) “The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign Ethan Knapp of Richard II” (1978) The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve “Narration and the Invention of and the Literature of Late Medieval Experience: Episodic Form in Piers England (1997) Plowman” (1982) “Piers Plowman, the Monsters, and the Thomas A. Knott Critics: Some Embarrassments of “Observations on the Authorship of Literary History” (2010) ‘Piers the Plowman’: A Reply to R. W. Chambers” (1917) Alastair Minnis Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic V. A. Kolve Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages The Play Called Corpus Christi (1966) (2009)
David Lawton Linne R. Mooney “Dullness in the Fifteenth Century” “Chaucer’s Scribe” (2006) (1987) Maura Nolan Seth Lerer John Lydgate and the Making of Public Chaucer and his Readers: Imagining the Culture (2005) Author in Late Medieval England (1993) G. R. Owst C. S. Lewis Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval (1933) Tradition (1936) M. B. Parkes J. M. Manly “The Influence of the Concepts of “The Lost Leaf of ‘Piers the Plowman’” Ordinatio and Compilatio on the (1908) Development of the Book” (1976) Some New Light on Chaucer (1926) Lee Patterson Jill Mann Chaucer and the Subject of History (1991) Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The “Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century Literature of Social Classes and the General England: Henry V and John Lydgate” Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (1972) (1993) 5
Negotiating the Past: The Historical Paul Strohm Understanding of Medieval Literature “Chaucer’s Fifteenth-Century Audience (1987) and the Narrowing of the Chaucer Tradition” (1982) Derek Pearsall “Chaucer’s Troilus as Temporal Archive” “Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes: The (2000) Poetics of Royal Self-Presentation” Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of (1994) Fourteenth-Century Texts (1992) John Lydgate (1970) “Postmodernism and History” (2000) “The Troilus Frontispiece and Chaucer’s “What Can We Know about Chaucer Audience” (1977) that He Didn’t Know about Himself?” (2000) Ad Putter Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the J. S. P. Tatlock French Arthurian Romance (1995) “The Canterbury Tales in 1400” (1935)
D. W. Robertson David Wallace “Chaucerian Tragedy” (1952) Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Associational Forms in England and Italy. Perspective (1962) (1997) “Some Observations on Method in Ed. The Cambridge History of Medieval Literary Studies” (1969) English Literature (2002) Wendy Scase Piers Plowman and the New Nicholas Watson Anticlericalism (1989) “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular V. J. Scattergood Theology, the Oxford Translation Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of (1972) 1409” (1995)
James Simpson Siegfried Wenzel “Nobody's Man: Thomas Hoccleve's “Chaucer and the Language of Regement of Princes” (1995) Contemporary Preaching” (1976) Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B- Text (1992) Winthrop Wetherbee Reform and Cultural Revolution: The “Latin Structure and Vernacular Space: Oxford English Literary History, Volume 2, Gower, Chaucer, and the Boethian 1350-1547 (2002) Tradition” (1991)
Walter W. Skeat The Chaucer Canon: With a Discussion of the Works Associated with the Name Geoffrey Chaucer (1900)