The conscious origin of this book (of its unconscious origins the less said the better) lies in a course of lectures given in the English Faculty at Cambridge. These were then summarized as a paper read at Harvard and at Pennsylvania State University in 1986 and published as ‘The Medieval Poet as Voyeur’, in The Olde Daunce: Love, Friendship, Sex and Marriage in the Medieval World, ed. Robert R. Edwards and Stephen Spector (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), pp. 57–86, © 1991 State University of New York, to whom I am grateful for permission to use most of the paper here in revised form. Subsequently the material, now vastly expanded, became the basis of two courses of graduate seminars given at the University of Virginia; I am greatly obliged to the participants in ENMD 961 (1989) and ENMD 983 (1990) for the enthusiasm and critical sharpness with which they helped me to think about many of the texts and issues discussed in the book.

In earlier versions parts of the book have been published as follows. Chapter 5 incorporates substantial parts of ‘Marie de France and Her Middle English Adapters’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 12 (1990), 116–56; grateful acknowledgments to the publishers (the New Chaucer Society) and to the editor. Chapter 9 is based on ‘Secrecy, Listening, and Telling in The Squyr of Lowe Degre', Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20 (1990), 273–92; grateful acknowledgments to the publishers (Duke University Press) and editors.