Professor Kenneth Hyde's work explores the written culture of Italy between the 13th and 14th centuries. This volume makes available the completed chapters of Professor Hyde's ambitious but unfinished work, Frontiers of Literacy in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy. To complement and expand upon the themes of the written chapters, this volume also brings together five earlier papers to create the first collection of Professor Hyde's work on this subject. The theme of the unfinished book was defined by Hyde as the ways in which new types of material were committed to writing in Italy between about 1250 and 1450 and new literary genres invented. Among the topics investigated in this book are medieval panegyrics of cities, family chronicles, travellers' accounts of the East, diplomatic correspondence and the reporting of news.