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 It includes one essay previously unpublished, "Playing the Plowman: Legends of Fourteenth-Century Authorship."