Manuscript Cotton Nero A.x takes its designation from the unique cataloging system of seventeenth-century British antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton's library: busts of historical figures atop shelves provided the organizing principle, such that one found this particular codex under the bust of Roman Emperor Nero, on the top shelf, ten volumes over. (Another famous manuscript, containing Beowulf, is called Cotton Vitellius A.xv.) Cotton Nero A.x contains the only versions of the poems we now know as Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, generally agreed to have been...

"Off the Books": not recorded, not taxed. Under the table, stretching the rules. We conceived of this issue as coinciding with the theme of the 4th Annual Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group (scholars, primarily medievalists, interested in bridging disciplines and testing boundaries) in October 2015. In addition to works by creative writers, we feature here several revised presentations from the BABEL conference. We're glad to host these works for people who presented, performed, experienced, and embodied the conference. We see this issue as a bridge between the creative text and...