Chamberlin's focal point for this synthesis is the concept of ambiguity, which has played an important role in the liberal arts tradition and in medieval discourses regarding reading and preaching - discourses that are fundamental to Langland's poetic ways with words. His work takes its place among other recent attempts to retrieve medieval literary theory, making it possible for it to inform the reading of medieval literature, but places this theory within a particularly wide context. Chamberlin claims that the excess of meaning ambiguity gives language is at least as important to the...