This collection of essays focuses on the processes of intellectual transmission in medieval and Renaissance literature, paying particular attention to the ways in which knowledge passes from one generation to the next. Each essay considers, either literally or in terms of textual transmission, the creative tensions inherent in the relationship between old and new, past and present, and master and student. Contents include: the originality of the Scyld Scefing episode in Beowulf * three 12th-century kings and their successors in some Middle English chronicles * culture and dispute in Dialogus de Scaccario * age, argument, and allegory in The Parlement of the Thre Ages * the generous father and the spendthrift son in The Franklin's Tale * reinterpreting the later life of Isabelle of France (c.1296-1358) * the heterodoxy of Sir John Clanvowe's The Two Ways * Shakespeare, Thomas More, and the Princes in the tower * the 'English brut tradition' in an Irish and Welsh context * Wordsworth and Chaucer's Manciple's Tale