This volume investigates the problems with which the contemporary reader of Layamon's Brut is faced: To what extent is the archaic feel of the Brut part of a deliberate aesthetic strategy of Layamon's? For what sort of audience could it have been written? How can one define its relation to older or more recent texts and traditions? What ideological stance (if any) is to be deduced from the work? The seventeen articles in this book tackle the different issues from a variety of fields: codicology and palaeography; Linguistics, stylists and syntax; the socio-political dimension of the work and its possible audience; the tradition upon which Layamon was drawing, and his contribution to later writers; literary theory and more general issues such as gender and spatial symbolism in the Brut. A number of essays present a synthesis of points of view, specifically intended to provide students with a yardstick against which to measure the more controversial articlesin the volume. Contributors: MARIE-FRANÇOISE ALAMICHEL, ROSAMUND ALLEN, STEPHEN K. BREHE, BETH BRYAN, ARTHUR WAYNE GLOWKA, MARSHAL S. GRANT, DOUGLAS MOFFAT, YOKO IYEIRI, LESLEY JOHNSON, FRANÇOICE LE SAUX, JAMES I. McNELIS III, JAMES NOBLE, HERBERT PILCH, JANE ROBERTS, ERIC G. STANLEY, CAROLE WEINBERG, KELLEY M. WICKHAM-CROWLEY, NEIL WRIGHT Dr FRANCOISE LE SAUX lectures in Medieval English language and literature at the University of Lausanne.