Publications

Books


Edited books


Articles

  • “Killing Authors: Skelton’s Dreadful Bouge of Court,” in Form and Reform: Reading the Fifteenth Century, edited by Kathleen Tonry and Shannon Gayk (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 180-96
  • “Visionary Writing in England, 1534-1550s,” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Mysticism, edited by Vincent Gillespie and Samuel Fanous (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 249-64
  • “’Not Just a Museum’? Not so Fast,” for a special volume (“Something Fearful”: Medievalist Scholars on the “Religious Turn” in Literary Criticism) of Religion and Literature 42 (2010), 141-61
  • ‘“And that was litel nede”: Poetry’s Need in Robert Henryson’s Fables and Testament of Cresseid’, in Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature, edited by Christopher Cannon and Maura Nolan (Cambridge: Brewer, 2011), 193-210
  • “Introduction,” co-written with Brian Cummings, for Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, edited by Brian Cummings and James Simpson, Twenty-First Century Approaches, 2 (Oxford University Press), 1-9
  • “Place,” for Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, edited by Brian Cummings and James Simpson, Twenty-First Century Approaches, 2 (Oxford University Press), 95-112
  •  “Premodern Shakespeare,” co-written with Sarah Beckwith, for Premodern Shakespeare, edited by Sarah Beckwith and James Simpson, a special issue of The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40 (2010): 2-5
  • “Rhetoric, Conscience and the Playful Positions of Sir Thomas More” for The Oxford Handbook to Tudor Literature, 1485-1603, edited by Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 121-36 (This volume won the Sixteenth Century Society's Roland H. Bainton Prize, 2010)
  •  “Sixteenth-Century Fundamentalism and the Specter of Ambiguity, or The Literal Sense is Always a Fiction” for Writing Fundamentalism, ed. Klaus Stiersorfer and Axel Stähler (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 133-54
  •  “John Lydgate,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Literature, edited by Larry Scanlon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 205-16
  • “The Economy of Involucrum: Idleness in Reason and Sensuality,” in Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian, and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee, edited by Andrew Galloway and R. F. Yeager (University of Toronto Press, 2009), 390-414
  • “Vernacular Literary Consciousness, c. 1100 – c. 1500: French, German and English Evidence,” with Kevin Brownlee, Tony Hunt, Ian Johnson, Alastair Minnis, and Nigel F. Palmer, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, volume 2, The Middle Ages, edited by Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson, paperback edition (incorrectly not listed as such in the hardback edition), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 422-71
  • “Tyndale as Promoter of Figural Allegory and Figurative Language: A Brief Declaration of the Sacraments,” for Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 245 (2008): 37-55
  •  “Bonjour Paresse: Literary Waste and Recycling in Book 4 of Gower’s Confessio amantis,” The Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture, Publications of the British Academy, 151 (2007), 257-84
  • “Diachronic History and the Shortcomings of Medieval Studies,” in Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England, edited by David Matthews and Gordon McMullan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 17-30
  • “Making History Whole: Diachronic History and the Shortcomings of Medieval Studies”, in e-Colloquia, 3 (2005)
  • “Confessing Literature,” English Language Notes 44 (2006): 121-26
  •  “Introduction,” in John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, ed. Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), co-written with Larry Scanlon, pp. 1-11
  • “’For al my body…weieth nat an unce’: Empty Poets and Rhetorical Weight in Lydgate’s Churl and the Bird,” in John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, ed. Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 129-46
  • “Chaucer as a European Writer,” in The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Seth Lerer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 55-86
  • “An Appendix of Literary Terms,” in Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8, Co-Editor Alfred David, General Editor Stephen Greenblatt (W. W. Norton: New York. 2006), 19 pages
  • “Consuming Ethics: Caxton’s History of Reynard the Fox,” in Studies in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts in Honour of John Scattergood, edited by Alan Fletcher and Anne-Marie D’Arcy (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), pp. 321-36
  • “Subjects of Triumph and Literary History: Dido and Petrarch in Petrarch’s Trionfi and Africa,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35 (2005): 489-508. Translated and republished as “Soggetti di trionfo e storia letteraria: Didone e Petrarca nell’Africa e nei Trionfi di Petrarca,” in Petrarca: canoni, esemplarità, edited by Valeria Finucci (Rome: Bulzoni, 2006), 73-92
  • “Saving Satire after Arundel: John Audelay’s Marcol and Solomon,”in Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale, Essays in Honour of Anne Hudson, edited by Ann Hutchison and Helen Barr (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 387-404
  • “Not the Last Word,” being a reply to review articles for a number of JMEMS wholly dedicated to consideration of Reform and Cultural Revolution, JMEMS, 35 (2005), 111-19.
  • “Pecock and Fortescue,” for A Companion to Middle English Prose, edited by A. S. G. Edwards (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), pp. 271-88
  • “Martyrdom in the Literal Sense: Surrey’s Psalm Paraphrases,” Medieval and Early Modern English Studies (South Korea), 12 (2004), 133-165
  •  “Humanism,” in Dictionary of the Middle Ages. Supplement 1. William Chester Jordan, Editor in Chief (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004), pp. 279-82
  • “Chaucer’s Presence and Absence, 1400-1550,” A Chaucer Companion, edited by Jill Mann and Piero Boitani, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge  University Press, 2003), pp. 251-69
  • “Faith and Hermeneutics: Pragmatism versus Pragmatism,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 33 (2003), 215-39
  • “The Rule of Medieval Imagination,” in Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England, edited by Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 4-24
  • “The Power of Impropriety: Authorial Naming in Piers Plowman,” in William Langland’s Piers Plowman: A Book of Essays, edited by Kathleen M. Hewett-Smith (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 145-165
  • “Grace Abounding: Evangelical Centralisation and the End of Piers Plowman,” Yearbook of Langland Studies, 14 (2000), 1-25
  • “Bulldozing the Middle Ages: the Case of “John Lydgate,” New Medieval Literatures, 4 (2000), 213-42
  • “Medieval Literature, Class 1,” in The University of Cambridge Virtual Classroom, 2000-
  • “Contemporary English Writers,” in A Companion to Chaucer, edited by Peter Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 114-32 
  • “The Sacrifice of Lady Rochford: Henry Parker’s Translation of De claris mulieribus,” in “Triumphs of English”: Henry Parker, Lord Morley, Translator to the Tudor Court. New Essays in Interpretation, edited by Marie Axton and James P. Carley (London: British Library Publications, 2000), pp. 153-69
  • “Violence, Narrative and Proper Name: Sir Degaré, “The Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney,” and the Anglo-Norman Folie Tristan dOxford,” in The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, ed. Jane Gilbert and Ad Putter (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 122-41
  • “Breaking the Vacuum: Ricardian and Henrician Ovidianism,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 29 (1999), 325-55
  • “Ethics and Interpretation: Reading Wills in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 20 (1998), 73-100
  • “Hoccleve,” “Usk” and “Beast Fable” entries for Medieval England: An Encyclopaedia, General Editor, Paul E. Szarmach (New York: Garland, 1998), 111-12.
  • “The Other Book of Troy: Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae in Fourteenth and Fifteenth-Century England,” Speculum, 73 (1998), 397-423. Reprinted in Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism (Detroit, Mich. : Gale Research Co.), Volume 90 (forthcoming)
  • “Ageism: Leland, Bale and the Laborious Start of English Literary History, 1350-1550,” New Medieval Literatures, 1 (1997), 213-35
  • ““Dysemol daies and Fatal houres”: Lydgate’s Destruction of Thebes and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,” in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays in Honour of Douglas Gray, edited by Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 15-33
  • “Desire and the Scriptural Text: Will as Reader in Piers Plowman,” in Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages, edited by Rita Copeland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 215-43
  • “Nobody’s Man: Thomas Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes,” in London and Europe, edited by Julia Boffey and Pamela King  (London: Westfield Publications in Medieval Studies, 1995), pp. 150-80
  • ““Ut Pictura Poesis”: A Critique of Robert Jordan’s Chaucer and the Shape of Creation,” in Interpretation Medieval and Modern: J.A.W.Bennett Memorial Lectures, eighth series, edited by Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), pp. 167-87
  • “The Death of the Author?: Skelton’s Bowge of Court,” in The Timeless and the Temporal, Writings in Honour of John Chalker, edited by Elizabeth Maslen (London: Queen Mary and Westfield College, 1993), pp. 58-79
  • “The Information of Genius in Book III of the Confessio Amantis,” Mediaevalia, 16 (1993, for 1990), 159-95
  • “’After Craftes Conseil clotheth yow and fede’: Langland and the City of London,” in England in the Fourteenth Century, Proceedings of the Harlaxton Conference, 1991, edited by N. Rogers (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1993), pp. 111-129
  • “The Information of Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus: a Preposterous Interpretation,” Traditio 47 (1992), 113-160
  • “Madness and Texts: Hoccleve’s Series,” in Chaucer and Fifteenth Century Poetry, edited by Janet Cowen and Julia Boffey, King’s College London Medieval Studies, 5 (London: King’s College, London, 1991), pp. 15-29
  • “The Constraints of Satire in Mum and the Sothsegger and Piers Plowman,” in Langland, the Mystics and the Medieval English Religious Tradition, edited by Helen Phillips (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 11-30
  • “Poetry as Knowledge: Dante’s Paradiso XIII,” Forum for Modern Language Studies, 25 (1989), 329-43
  • “Ironic Incongruence in the Prologue and Book I of Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Neophilologus, 72 (1988), 617-32
  • “Spirituality and Economics in Passus I-VII of the B-Text of Piers Plowman,” The Yearbook of Langland Studies, 1 (1987), 83- 103
  • “The Role of Scientia in Piers Plowman,” in Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature: Essays in Honour of G.H.Russell, edited by Gregory Kratzmann and James Simpson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1986), pp. 49-65
  • “From Reason to Affective Knowledge: Modes of Thought and Poetic Form in Piers Plowman,” Medium Aevum, 55 (1986), 1-23
  • “The Transformation of Meaning: a Figure of Thought in Piers Plowman,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 37 (1986), 1-23
  • “Dante’s “Astripetam Aquilam” and the Theme of Poetic Discretion in the House of Fame,” Essays and Studies, n.s. 39 (1986), 1-18
  •  “Et Vidit Deus Cogitationes Eorum: a Parallel Instance and Possible Source for Langland’s Use of a Biblical Formula at Piers Plowman B.XV.200a,” Notes and Queries, n.s. 33 (1986), 9-13
  • “Spiritual and Earthly Nobility in Piers Plowman,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 86 (1985), 467-81

Non-Scholarly Essays & Media Appearances