Langland's Early Modern Identities uses the methodologies of cultural studies and the history of the book to show how editors and readers of the sixteenth through the early nineteenth century successively remade Piers Plowman and its author according to their own ideologies of the Middle Ages. Early modern responses to Piers Plowman demonstrate the ideologies by which the canon of English literature came into being. As a case study in the uses to which the early modern period put its narratives of the medieval past, this book should be of interest to both medievalists and early modernists, particularly those interested in the history of reading, publishing history, and the development of the literary canon.

This book uses the methodologies of cultural studies and the history of the book to show how editors and readers of the Sixteenth through the early Nineteenth century successively remade Piers Plowman and its author according to their own ideologies of the Middle Ages.