Form and Power in Medieval and Early Modern Literature

New and exciting scholarship on medieval and early modern English culture in all its diversity.

This book honours James Simpson, an enormously influential figure in English literary studies. Known for championing once-neglected writers such as Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate, Simpson has also pioneered the field of Trans-Reformation studies, dismantling the barrier between the medieval and early modern periods. He has written powerfully about the history of freedoms, the relationship between literary and intellectual history, and about the category of the literary itself in all its urgency.

Inspired by Simpson's interventions, the essays collected here deal with texts and topics from the eighth to the seventeenth centuries. Langland'sPiers Plowman and Chaucer'sPhysician's Tale andTroilus and Criseyde rub shoulders with Old English riddlesSaint ErkenwaldThe Digby Lyrics, Lydgate'sDietary, and Lodge'sRobert the Devil. Revisionist studies of two much-debated genres - allegory and romance - join forces with chapters on neglected physical features of early books, line-fillers and catchwords, as well as studies of iconoclasm and the histories of enemy love. The volume begins with a piece by the honorand himself, on recognition in literary texts.

List of Illustrations
Contributors and Editors
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Simpson: An Interim ReportDaniel Donoghue, Sebastian Sobecki, and Nicholas Watson
Part I: The Hermeneutics of Recognition
1. The Shock of the Old: Recognition in the Humanities; The 2022 Morton W. Bloomfield Memorial LectureJames Simpson
2. "Stuffed with Divine Words": Undigested Texts in Early Medieval EnglandErica Weaver
3. The "Physician's Tale" and Chaucer's Art of ProsopopoeiaJulie Orlemanski
4. "Troilus can afford to fall in love ... with whomsoever he will": Free Will and Recognition in Troilus and CriseydeLaura Ashe
Part II: Genre and Figure
5. Only Rarely Obscure and Not a Genre: Medieval Allegorical NarrativeNicolette Zeeman
6. "Thynke nat the contrary": Field Notes in the Ecology of Medieval RomanceNicholas Perkins
7. Filling in the Lines: Text, Image, and Late Medieval Literary FormsJessica Brantley
8. Catching at Words: The Literal, the Metaphorical, and the ObviousChris Barrett
Part III: Culture and Institutions
9. Petition, Justice, and Peace in Piers PlowmanYun Ni
10. In Place of the Past: Saint Erkenwald's Versions of ConversionAparna Chaudhuri
11. Proverb and Satirical Time: The Digby Poems and Their Fifteenth CenturySpencer Strub
12. Common Style and the Bourgeois Ethos in John Lydgate's DietaryTaylor Cowdery
Part IV: Reformations
13. Rewriting Robert the Devil: Thomas Lodge and Medieval RomanceCathy Shrank
14. Iconoclasm and the Epigraphic ImageJessica Berenbeim
15. The Letter Kills but the Spirit Gives Life (2 Corinthians 3:6): Or, What Happened to Enemy Love?David Aers
16. James Simpson's Freedoms: An AppreciationJason Crawford
James Simpson's Publications from 1984 to 2023
Bibliography
A Note on the Bloomfield Conferences
General Index