Emily Steiner describes the rich intersection between legal documents and English literature in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She argues that documentary culture (including charters, testaments, patents and seals) enabled writers to think in new ways about the conditions of textual production in late Medieval England.

Reading 'Piers Plowman' is an indispensable scholarly guide to a magnificent - and notoriously difficult - medieval poem. With 'Piers Plowman', the fourteenth-century poet William Langland proved that English verse could be at once spiritually electrifying and intellectually rigorous, capable of imagining society in its totality while at the same time exploring heady ideas about language, theology and culture. In her study of Piers Plowman, Emily Steiner explores how Langland's ambitious poetics emerged in dialogue with contemporary ideas; for example, about political counsel and gender, the ethics of poverty, Christian and pagan learning, lordship and servitude, and the long history of Christianity. Lucid and comprehensive, Steiner's study teaches us to stay alert to the poem's stunning effects while still making sense of its literary and historical contexts.

Essays studying the relationship between literariness and form in medieval texts. The twenty-first century has witnessed the re-emergence of various kinds of literary formalism, and one project that characterizes most of these diverse formalisms is the effort to distinguish what is precisely literary about their objects of study. The presumed relation between form and the literary that this project presupposes, however, raises questions that still need to be addressed. What is it about form that produces the category of the literary? What precisely is literary about literary form? Can the literary be defined beyond form? This volume explores these questions in the historical and geographical frame of late medieval Britain, across vaunted literary works such as the Franklin's Tale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Towneley Shepherds' Plays, and presumed "non-literary" texts, such as books of hours. By studying texts from a period long priorto literary formalism - indeed, before any fully articulated theory of the literary - the essays gathered here aim to rethink the relationship between form and the literary. Robert J. Meyer-Lee is Margaret W. PepperdeneDistinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Agnes Scott College; Catherine Sanok is an Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. Contributors: Anke Bernau, Jessica Brantley, Seeta Chaganti, Shannon Gayk, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Andrew Klein, Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Ingrid Nelson, Maura Nolan, Sarah Elliott Novacich, Catherine Sanok, Emily Steiner, Claire M. Waters.

Emily Steiner describes the rich intersections between legal documents and English literature in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The literature of this period, from Passion lyrics to Lollard sermons, abounds in documentary language and metaphors. Steiner argues that documentary culture (including charters, testaments, patents and seals) enabled writers to think in new ways about the conditions of textual production in late medieval England. She explains that the distinctive rhetoric, material form and ritual performance of legal documents offered writers of Chaucer's generation and the generation succeeding him a model of literary practice. Covering a wide variety of medieval texts: sermons, lyrics, Piers Plowman, Mum and the Sothsegger, The Book of Margery Kempe, heretical writings and trial records, this study will be of interest to scholars of medieval literary studies and medieval studies in general.

Groundbreaking essays show the variety and complexity of the roles played by inquisition in medieval England. Inquisition in medieval and early modern England has typically been the subject of historical rather than cultural investigation, and focussed on heresy. Here, however, inquisition is revealed as playing a broader role in medievalEnglish culture, not only in relation to sanctions like excommunication, penance and confession, but also in the fields of exemplarity, rhetoric and poetry. Beyond its specific legal and pastoral applications, inquisitio was a dialogic mode of inquiry, a means of discerning, producing or rewriting truth, and an often adversarial form of invention and literary authority. The essays in this volume cover such topics as the theory and practice ofcanon law, heresy and its prosecution, Middle English pastoralia, political writing and romance. As a result, the collection redefines the nature of inquisition's role within both medieval law and culture, and demonstrates the extent to which it penetrated the late-medieval consciousness, shaping public fame and private selves, sexuality and gender, rhetoric, and literature. Mary C. Flannery is a lecturer in English at the University of Lausanne; Katie L. Walter is a lecturer in English at the University of Sussex. Contributors: Mary C. Flannery, Katie L. Walter, Henry Ansgar Kelly, Edwin Craun, Ian Forrest, Diane Vincent, Jenny Lee, James Wade, Genelle Gertz, Ruth Ahnert, Emily Steiner

Required reading for everyone wishing to learn about or research in the field of Wycliffite and Lollard studies. RICHARD REX, QUEENS' COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE Who were the Lollards? What did Lollards believe? What can the manuscript record of Lollard works teach us about the textual dissemination of Lollard beliefs and the audience for Lollard writings? What did Lollards have in commonwith other reformist or dissident thinkers in late medieval England, and how were their views distinctive? These questions have been fundamental to the modern study of Lollardy (also known as Wycliffism). The essays in this book reveal their broader implications for the study of English literature and history through a series of closely focused studies that demonstrate the wide-ranging influence of Lollard writings and ideas on later medieval English culture. Introductions to previous scholarship, and an extensive Bibliography of printed resources for the study of Wyclif and Wycliffites, provide an entry to scholarship for those new to the field. Contributors: DAVID AERS, MARGARET ASTON, HELEN BARR, MISHTOONI BOSE, LAWRENCE M. CLOPPER, ANDREW COLE, RALPH HANNA III, ANNE HUDSON, MAUREEN JURKOWSKI, ANDREW LARSEN, GEOFFREY H. MARTIN, DERRICK G. PITARD, WENDY SCASE, FIONA SOMERSET, EMILY STEINER.

Reading 'Piers Plowman' is an indispensable scholarly guide to a magnificent - and notoriously difficult - medieval poem. With 'Piers Plowman', the fourteenth-century poet William Langland proved that English verse could be at once spiritually electrifying and intellectually rigorous, capable of imagining society in its totality while at the same time exploring heady ideas about language, theology and culture. In her study of Piers Plowman, Emily Steiner explores how Langland's ambitious poetics emerged in dialogue with contemporary ideas; for example, about political counsel and gender, the ethics of poverty, Christian and pagan learning, lordship and servitude, and the long history of Christianity. Lucid and comprehensive, Steiner's study teaches us to stay alert to the poem's stunning effects while still making sense of its literary and historical contexts.

History writing in the Middle Ages did not belong to any particular genre, language or class of texts. Its remit was wide, embracing the events of antiquity; the deeds of saints, rulers and abbots; archival practices; and contemporary reportage. This volume addresses the challenges presented by medieval historiography by using the diverse methodologies of medieval studies: legal and literary history, art history, religious studies, codicology, the history of the emotions, gender studies and critical race theory. Spanning one thousand years of historiography in England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland, the essays map historical thinking across literary genres and expose the rich veins of national mythmaking tapped into by medieval writers. Additionally, they attend to the ways in which medieval histories crossed linguistic and geographical borders. Together, they trace multiple temporalities and productive anachronisms that fuelled some of the most innovative medieval writing.

What would medieval English literature look like if we viewed it through the lens of the compendium? In that case, John Trevisa might come into focus as the major author of the fourteenth century. Trevisa (d. 1402) made a career of translating big informational texts from Latin into English prose. These included Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon, an enormous universal history, Bartholomaeus Anglicus's well-known natural encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum, and Giles of Rome's advice-for-princes manual, De regimine principum. These were shrewd choices, accessible and on trend: De proprietatibus rerum and De regimine principum had already been translated into French and copied in deluxe manuscripts for the French and English nobility, and the Polychronicon had been circulating England for several decades. This book argues that John Trevisa's translations of compendious informational texts disclose an alternative literary history by way of information culture. Bold and lively experiments, these translations were a gamble that the future of literature in England was informational prose. This book argues that Trevisa's oeuvre reveals an alternative literary history more culturally expansive and more generically diverse than that which we typically construct for his contemporaries, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland. Thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century European writers compiled massive reference books which would shape knowledge well into the Renaissance. This study maintains that they had a major impact on English poetry and prose. In fact, what we now recognize to be literary properties emerged in part from translations of medieval compendia with their inventive ways of handling vast quantities of information.