In The Wheel of Language, Coley explores representations of speech in English poetry of the later Middle Ages, proposing that the spoken word, both within Ricardian and Lancastrian poetry and within latemedieval English culture, was understood as an efficacious, powerful medium. Representing speech in the poetic text was always a political act, one by which authors were able to criticize and comment upon issues as diverse as the Lancastrian usurpation; the Lollard heresy; and the philosophical, economic, and institutional changes that England witnessed in the fourteenth and fifteenth...