While poets have traditionally inhabited cultural margins prophets have brought poetic
language to the center of cultural debate not foretelling the future so much as diagnosing the
present. This exciting collection of nine essays examines the range of social and political
implications that inflects poetic discourse from the Old English and Latin texts of the
Anglo-Saxon world to the Scotland and England of the Renaissance. Whether saints' lives
Germanic heroic epics chronicles or satiric poems the works discussed in this book retain
their verbal power if not their political influence into our own time.
