To compose an encyclopedia of “medieval literature” of the world is a daunting prospect, since it involves a significant period of time (more than 1,000 years) and a remarkable number of literary traditions (European, Middle Eastern, Persian, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean—and important subcategories of each). Nevertheless, this book is intended to make general sense of that dizzying array of texts and traditions for beginning students of the era, by selecting the foremost texts and writers from each of the major traditions of Europe and Asia. While there are also African and American texts based on oral traditions that may extend back into medieval times, the written texts that we have of these compositions are modern renditions of ancient oral material, and so I have not included them here