edited by Steven Justice & Anne Middleton 
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 It includes one essay previously unpublished, ’Playing the Plowman: Legends of Fourteenth-Century Authorship.’