Jonathan Hughes has written an original and challenging book in which he argues that Dante, Boccacio, Petrarch and Chaucer in different ways all gave women a new and independent voice free from the constraints of Marian imagery. This voice, he argues, was silenced by the attack on vernacular writing mounted by fifteenth century churchmen. This is a wide-ranging book which will provoke discussion and dissent, but it cannot be ignored.

Caroline Barron, Emeritus Professor of History, Royal Holloway University of London, UK

In the fourteenth century the compelling visions which had driven the development of European society were suddenly dispelled: papal monarchy was challenged and cut loose from Rome; Christendom was riven by the West's first continental war, and driven to retreat by the might of the Muslim East; and the very existence of those who worked to support those who prayed and those who fought was now found to hang in the balance of waves of famine and plague. To this tally, Jonathan Hughes suggests we should add another broken dream, the liberation of a literature in the language of the people. At the century's turn, Dante's Divine Comedy showed what cultural, religious, social and psychological transformations might flow from the mother tongue. His epic released a voice that was the polar opposite of the conventional medieval parent: imaginative, irreverent and unruly and, above all, anti-patriarchal. It was seized – Hughes argues, more than any other - by three writers of the next generation renowned in their own time for their creative force, Francesco Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer. Their work gave full throat to personal emotion, popular humour and the power of women but for Hughes still the true ambition of the vernacular was stifled by a Church establishment which renewed its own discourse with the readoption of classical Latin and raised its legal authority by restricting the use of the vernacular. Hughes' thesis is a fitting tribute to the texts that inspired it: like the Divine Comedy, a bold original, as colourful as the Decameron and as steeped in the literary canon as the Canterbury Tales.

James G. Clark, Professor of Medieval History, University of Exeter, UK