Ardis Butterfield. The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War

ones of ‘courtly’ and ‘popular’ texts. These ‘clerical romances’ foreground questions of good governance and kingship and can be seen as the ‘literary counterparts’ to the central tenets found in the Magna Carta – and are as such additional examples of the collaboration between the nobles and clerical writers. Medieval contexts do not invalidate independent modern readings, but as this nicely produced volume shows, “there are aspects of medieval texts that will remain stubbornly inaccessible in any other context other than a medieval one” (Introduction, 7).