To examine the Reformation in writing and the writing of the Reformation is to uncover an unfamiliar archaeology of religion: an underground network of text and commentary, of translation and controversy. In this study, Brian Cummings not only provides a new visibility to the complex cultural processes of writing in England and the Continent, he also underlines the significance of the neglected hinterland of grammar during this turbulent period.

Stephen Medcalf (1937-2006) was an essayist, in the best traditional sense of that calling: a writer not of books but of substantial and justly celebrated essays, widely read in the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. Medcalf's abiding question to the world was the Psalmist's: 'What is man that thou art mindful of him?' His was a Blakean sense of Englishness, far from the chocolate-box painting or the television adaptation, and for him the strongest writers were those keenly aware of their roots in the classical, Anglo-Saxon or Celtic past. By gathering together Medcalf's most important...

The original essays in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature mean to provoke rather than reassure, to challenge rather than codify. Instead of summarizing existing knowledge scholars working in the field aim at opening fresh discussion. Instead of emphasizing settled consensus they direct their readers to areas of enlivened and unresolved debate.
The deepest periodic division in English literary history has been between the medieval and the early modern, not least because the cultural investments in maintaining that division are exceptionally powerful. Narratives of...