Chaucer Langland and Fourteenth-Century Literary History

Anne Middleton's essays have been among the most vigorous learned and influential in the field of medieval English literature. Their 'crux-busting' energies have illuminated local obscurities with generous learning lightly wielded. Their historically- and theoretically-informed meditations on the nature of poetic discourse traced how the generation of Chaucer and Langland devised a category of the literary that could embody a ethos of engaged worldly consensus and make that consensus available to imaginative and rational consideration. And their reflections on the enterprise of literary study found a rational way free of cant to understand the work of the literary scholar. This volume reprints eight essays: ’The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II’ ’Chaucer's 'New Men' and the Good of Literature in the Canterbury Tales’ ’The Physician's Tale and Love's Martyrs: 'Ensamples Mo than Ten' as a Method in the Canterbury Tales’ ’The Clerk and His Tale: Some Literary Contexts’ ’Narration and the Invention of Experience: Episodic Form in Piers Plowman’ ’Making a Good End: John But as a Reader of Piers Plowman’ ’William Langland's 'Kynde Name': Authorial Signature and Social Identity in Late Fourteenth-Century England’ ’Life in the Margins or What's an Annotator to Do?’ It includes one essay previously unpublished ’Playing the Plowman: Legends of Fourteenth-Century Authorship.’