A collection of nine essays celebrating the 70th birthday of David Pearsall whose numerous writings promoted the view that literature is the product of particular times and places and always comes from real people'. The thought-provoking and insightful discussions comprise: Langland's obsession with poverty and his use of the pillory as a symbol of spiritual and secular punishment; philosophical and theological mouthpieces in Chaucer; the biographical elements in Pearl , written as a political and religious but also as a graceful and personal expression of the Woodstock family's grief; the questionable authorship by John Lydgate of A Complaint for My Lady of Gloucester' with its enigmatic portrayal of Jacque of Gloucester; England's national reticence, illustrated by the verbal self-restaint and understatement of heroic epic, from Beowulf to A E W Mason's 1902 novel The Four Feathers ; Malory's observations on the paradoxes inherent in chivalry and symbolic absences and presences in the York plays.