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...

An innovative work of both economic anthropology and literary history, Arts of Possession draws on philosophical, theoretical, literary, historical, and archival sources and insights to situate the household at the center of the social and cultural imagination of fourteenth-century England.

D. Vance Smith argues that in a period commonly represented as precapitalist there actually existed a sophisticated economic discourse -- and that discourse underlies common forms of representation and the writing of literary texts. His work provides a new historiography of capital and of the development...

An innovative work of both economic anthropology and literary history, Arts of Possession draws on philosophical, theoretical, literary, historical, and archival sources and insights to situate the household at the center of the social and cultural imagination of fourteenth-century England.

D. Vance Smith argues that in a period commonly represented as precapitalist there actually existed a sophisticated economic discourse -- and that discourse underlies common forms of representation and the writing of literary texts. His work provides a new historiography of capital and of the development...

This collection of essays argues that any valid theory of the modern should indeed must reckon with the medieval. Offering a much-needed correction to theorists such as Hans Blumenberg, who in his Legitimacy of the Modern Age describes the modern age as a complete departure from the Middle Ages, these essays forcefully show that thinkers from Adorno to i ek have repeatedly drawn from medieval sources to theorize modernity. To forget the medieval, or to discount its continued effect on contemporary thought, is to neglect the responsibilities of periodization.

In The Legitimacy...

This collection of essays argues that any valid theory of the modern should indeed must reckon with the medieval. Offering a much-needed correction to theorists such as Hans Blumenberg, who in his Legitimacy of the Modern Age describes the modern age as a complete departure from the Middle Ages, these essays forcefully show that thinkers from Adorno to i ek have repeatedly drawn from medieval sources to theorize modernity. To forget the medieval, or to discount its continued effect on contemporary thought, is to neglect the responsibilities of periodization.

In The Legitimacy...

The insight that -the implications of textuality as such- can and must underlie our interpretations of literary works remains one of A.C. Spearing's greatest contributions to medieval studies. It is a tribute to the breadth and significance of his scholarship that the twelve essays gathered in his honour move beyond his own methods and interests to engage variously with -textuality as such, - presenting a substantial and expansive view of current thinking on form in late medieval literary studies. Covering a range of topics, including the meaning of words, -experientiality-, poetic form and...