In the first book to examine one of the most peculiar features of one of the greatest and most perplexing poems of England's late Middle Ages -- the successive attempts of Piers Plowman to begin, and to keep beginning -- D. Vance Smith compels us to rethink beginning, as concept and practice, in both medieval and contemporary terms.

The problem of beginning was invested with increasing urgency in the fourteenth century, imagined and grappled with in the courts, the churches, the universities, the workshops, the fields, and the streets of England. The Book of the Incipit reveals how...