This essay collection is gathered on the occasion of the retirement of Denise N. Baker, Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. New Directions in Medieval Mystical and Devotional Literature draws together the work of young and early career scholars who have worked with Baker as students as well as peers who have published her work, contributed to collections Baker has edited, and have been inspired and influenced by her wide-ranging and important scholarship over the past four decades. This collection includes studies of the wide variety of the texts and topics that have been the subject of Baker’s scholarly work, from the importance of philosophical and intellectual history in Julian of Norwich’s Showings and Langland’s Piers Plowman, to the gendered nature of martyrdom in medieval hagiography, to the preoccupation of architectural memorialization in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. These essays bridge the often wide gap between scholarship on medieval mystical texts, such as the writings of Julian of Norwich and the Cloud of Unknowing author, and scholarship on the work of major medieval vernacular authors such William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer.

Kempe's work is accompanied by an introduction, a map of medieval England, a Kempe lexicon, and explanatory annotations. "Contexts" collects primary readings that illuminate The Book of Margery Kempe. Included are excerpts from The Constitutions of Thomas Arundel, Meditations on the Life of Christ, The Shewings of Julian of Norwich, The Book of Saint Bride, and The Life of Marie d'Oignies by Jacques de Vitry. "Criticism" includes nine varied interpretations of the autobiography, written by Clarissa W. Atkinson, Lynn Staley, Karma Lochrie, David Aers, Kathleen Ashley, Gail McMurray Gibson, Sarah Beckwith, Caroline Walker Bynum, and Nicholas Watson. A Selected Bibliography is also included.

An examination of how The Book of Psalms shaped medieval thought and helped develop the medieval English literary canon. The Book of Psalms had a profound impact on English literature from the Anglo-Saxon to the late medieval period. This collection examines the various ways in which they shaped medieval English thought and contributed to the emergence of an English literary canon. It brings into dialogue experts on both Old and Middle English literature, thus breaking down the traditional disciplinary binaries of both pre- and post-Conquest English and late medieval and Early Modern, as well as emphasizing the complex and fascinating relationship between Latin and the vernacular languages of England. Its three main themes, translation, adaptation and voice, enable a rich variety of perspectives on the Psalms and medieval English literature to emerge. TAMARA ATKIN is Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature at Queen Mary University of London; FRANCIS LENEGHAN is Associate Professor of OldEnglish at The University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford Contributors: Daniel Anlezark, Mark Faulkner, Vincent Gillespie, Michael P. Kuczynski, David Lawton, Francis Leneghan, Jane Roberts, Mike Rodman Jones, Elizabeth Solopova, Lynn Staley, Annie Sutherland, Jane Toswell, Katherine Zieman.

For centuries England's writers used the metaphor of their country as an island garden to engage in a self-conscious debate about national identity. In "The Island Garden: England's Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell, "Lynn Staley suggests that the trope of Britain as an island garden catalyzed two crucial historical perspectives and thus analytic modes: as isolated and vulnerable, England stood in a potentially hostile relation to the world outside its encircling sea; as semi-enclosed and permeable, it also accepted recuperative relationships with those who moved across its boundaries. Identifying the concept of enclosure as key to Britain's language of place, Staley traces the shifting meanings of this concept in medieval and early modern histories, treatises, and poems.Beginning with Gildas in the sixth century, Staley maintains that the metaphor of England as the island garden was complicated, first, by Bede in the eighth century and later by historians, polemicists, and antiquarians. It allowed them to debate the nature of England's identity in language whose point might be subversive but that was beyond royal retribution. During the reign of Edward III, William Langland employed the subjects and anxieties linked to the island garden metaphor to create an alternative image of England as a semi-enclosed garden in need of proper cultivation. Staley demonstrates that Langland's translation of the metaphor for nation from a discreet and royal space into a communally productive half-acre was reformulated by writers such as Chaucer, Hoccleve, Tusser, Johnson, and Marvell, as well as others, to explore the tensions in England's social and political institutions. From the early thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, English treatments of the biblical story of Susanna capture this self-conscious use of metaphoric language and suggest a perspective on law, individual rights, and conscience that is ultimately crucial to England's self-conception and description. Staley identifies in literary discourse a persistent argument for England as a garden that is enclosed yet not isolated, and that is protected by a law whose ideal is a common good that even kings must serve." The Island Garden "is a fascinating and focused exploration of the ways in which authors have developed a language of place to construct England's cultural, social, and political identity. "Lynn Staley's" The Island Garden: England's Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell i"s a capacious, erudite, ruminative, recursive work that explores the complex web of discourses that composed the identity and history of England. Staley shows us the ways in which writers formed a range of images for England as they engaged with different political contexts. Hers is not a unilinear, teleological history; rather, we encounter a patient display of continuity in the resources of historical imagination from medieval to early modern." --David Aers, Duke University