The essays collected here have in common the concept of boundaries, which is defined according to discipline, and movement through boundaries. The essays cover a range of topics and periods. The first section consists of literary approaches to boundaries, ranging widely in subject matter from Norman drama to sixteenth-century goodnight ballads. The second section includes mainly historical studies of such topics as social mobility in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain, post-1453 Byzantine identity, and Milanese Renaissance musical genres. Individually and as a group, the essays contribute fresh insights into well-known and some less familiar works of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Contributions include: Linda Georgianna, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae: lessons in self-fashioning for the bastards of Britain’; Robert L.A. Clark, ‘Eve and her audience in the Anglo-Norman Adam’; John Damon, ‘Seinte Cecile and Cristes owene knyghtes: violence, resignation, and resistance in the Second Nun’s Tale’; Elaine R. Miller, ‘Linguistic identity in the Middle Ages: the case of the Spanish Jews’; Emily Steiner, ‘Medieval documentary poetics and Langland’s authorial identity’; Patricia Marby Harrison, ‘Religious rhetoric as resistance in Early Modern goodnight ballads’; Jami Ake, ‘Mary Wroth’s willow poetics: revising female desire in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’; Annabel Patterson, ‘The human face divine: identity and the portrait from Locke to Chaucer’; Jonathan Harris, ‘Common language and the common good: aspects of identity among Byzantine emigres in Renaissance Italy’; Nolan Gasser, ‘Beata et venerabilis Virgo: music and devotion in Renaissance Milan’; Elspeth Whitney, ‘Sex, lies, and depositions: Pierre de Lancre’s vision of the witches’ sabbath’; Laura Hunt Yungblut, ‘Straungers and aliaunts: the un-English among the English in Elizabethan England’.
