Form and Power in Medieval and Early Modern Literature

<b>New and exciting scholarship on medieval and early modern English culture in all its diversity.</b><br><br>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.<br><br> Inspired by Simpson's interventions the essays collected here deal with texts and topics from the eighth to the seventeenth centuries. Langland's <i>Piers Plowman</i> and Chaucer's <i>Physician's Tale</i> and <i>Troilus and Criseyde</i> rub shoulders with Old English riddles <i>Saint Erkenwald</i> <i>The Digby Lyrics</i> Lydgate's <i>Dietary</i> and Lodge's <i>Robert the Devil</i>. 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.