"The Owl and the Nightingale" is one of the first and greatest long comic poems in the English language and one of the best-known and most accomplished of all medieval literary texts. By turns both gleefully trivial and allusively serious, it has been described by literary critics as a "most miraculous piece of writing", "a marvel of literary art" and "a truly amazing phenomenon". This the first new English edition of the poem since 1960. It contains a parallel-text translation in modern English, as well as a glossary, notes and introduction. The edition has involved a complete reconsideration of the poem's complex textual history, its linguistic provenance and the practices of its scribes, as well as its possible sources.
