Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt. By Robert J. Meyer-Lee. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 300. $90.

In this elegant and engagingly written study, Robert J. Meyer-Lee examines the figure of the laureate poet from the first overt English translation of Petrarch's verse in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde to the second, roughly one hundred and fifty years later, in the work of thomas Wyatt. this is hardly untrodden territory; over two decades ago Richard Helgerson's Self-Crowned Laureates (1983) effectively charted the significance of the laureate title for the poetry of the later Renaissance, while the rehabilitation of the poetry of the fifteenth century, to which Poets and Power powerfully contributes, has already been driven forward by the work of Paul Strohm, Seth Lerer, James Simpson and others. but, despite these impressive forebears, Meyer-Lee's study boldly carves out a place for itself, and brings much that is new and insightful to the field.