Appendix 3 - Brief Biographical Information on the Translators

Summary

The life of Chaucer is, of course, extremely well documented. See e.g. Paul Strohm, The Poet's Tale: Chaucer and the Year that Made the Canterbury Tales (London: Profile Books, 2015); Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992). For Laȝamon, see e.g. Carole Weinberg, ‘“By a noble church on the bank of the Severn”: A Regional View of Layamon's Brut’, Leeds Studies in English n.s. 26 (1995), pp. 49–62; W. R. J. Barron, ‘The Idiom and the Audience of Laȝamon's Brut’, in Laɵamon: Contexts, Language and Interpretation, ed. by Rosamund Allen, Lucy Perry and Jane Roberts (London: King's College London, Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies, 2002), pp. 157–84; John Frankis, ‘Laȝamon or the Lawman? A Question of Names, a Poet and an Unacknowledged Legislator’, Leeds Studies in English n.s. 34 (2003), pp. 109–24.

Conjectural biographies of Robert Mannyng have been drawn up by several scholars, the most comprehensive still being Ruth Crosby, ‘Robert Mannyng of Brune: A New Biography’, PMLA 57 (1942), pp. 15–28. See also Stephen A. Sullivan, ‘Handlyng Synne in its Tradition’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1979, pp. 77–86; Matthew Sullivan, ‘Biographical Notes on Robert Mannyng of Brunne and Peter Idley, the Adapter of Robert Mannyng's Handlyng Synne’, N&Q 41 (1994), pp. 302–4; and Michael Stephenson, ‘Further Biographical Notes on Robert Mannyng of Brune’, N&Q 45 (1998), pp. 284–5. For education within the Gilbertine order, see Brian Golding, Gilbert of Sempringham and the Gilbertine Order, c.1130–1300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 170–87.

For a discussion of the circumstances surrounding Dan Michel's composition of The Ayenbite of Inwyt, see W. N. Francis, ‘The Original of the “Ayenbite of Inwyt”’, PMLA 52 (1937), pp. 893–5. Twenty-four books donated by Dan Michel to the Abbey of St Augustine at Canterbury are described in Max Förster, ‘Die Bibliothek des Dan Michael von Northgate’, Archiv 115 (1905), pp. 167–9.

A full-length biography of Roos has been written by Ethel Seaton, Sir Richard Roos c. 1410–1482: Lancastrian Poet (London: Hart-Davies, 1961), and his authorship of the English Belle Dame Sans Mercy is usually accepted. Roos, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, in Chaucerian Dream Visions and Complaints, ed. by Dana M. Symons (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004).