Through interdisciplinary readings of medieval literature and devotional artifacts, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary shows how reliquaries shaped ideas about poetry and poetics in late-medieval England.

This collection responds to the critical legacy of Penn R. Szittya, the recently retired former chair of Georgetown University's English Department. Inspired by Georgetown's Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice and its statement that poetry "traverses the fields of aesthetic, social, political, and religious thought," this work investigates how medieval poetic language reflects and also shapes social, political, and religious worlds. At a moment in contemporary culture when poetry finds its value increasingly challenged, Medieval Poetics and Social Practice looks to the late Middle...

Through interdisciplinary readings of medieval literature and devotional artifacts, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary shows how reliquaries shaped ideas about poetry and poetics in late-medieval England.