Although the quintessential Renaissance English writer, Shakespeare played an extraordinary role in shaping popular perceptions of the Middle Ages. His history plays depict the conflicts that defined late medieval life: the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses. His poetry is profoundly indebted to Chaucer and other medieval writers. The mystery and morality plays of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had an arguably stronger impact on his dramatic
imagination than the classical dramatists with whom he is more typically associated. Although scholars have long recognized this debt to the Middle Ages, the typically institutional
divisions between medievalists and scholars of the early modern period have prevented fruitful analysis of Shakespeare and the Middle Ages. This volume brings together a distinguished, multidisciplinary group of scholars-medievalists, Shakespeareans, and cultural historians of the medieval and early modern worlds-to rethink the medieval origins of modernity. Shakespeare provides them the perfect focus, since his works turn back to the Middle Ages as decisively as they anticipate the modern
world.
