This article describes a lesson plan I designed to help students explore the complexity of Piers Plowman’s character both in Langland’s poem and beyond it. The lesson employs Piers’ appearances outside Langland’s text, specifically, in the letters written by participants of the Great Rising of 1381, and compares them to an unlikely paralle…[Read more]

This article expands on recent scholarship which treats miracle stories as not just facile devotional tales but complicated texts worthy of analysis. Specifically, it builds on the claims of scholars who have demonstrated that Mary is characterized in sophisticated ways in miracle stories. Focusing on one text in particular, a Marian miracle most…[Read more]

Medieval women are often misrepresented, or just plain missing, from literary historical survey courses.

What is the value of a terminal M.A?

Introduction to special issue of the journal Pedagogy: Teaching Medieval Literature off the Grid

Innocent III’s decree requiring annual confession for all Christians led to the production of an astounding number of religious texts–initially, texts meant for priests to use to educate the laity but then also, and increasingly, texts intended for private consumption by the laity. This article explores the place of these texts in English…[Read more]

This article offers an analysis of the complex and contradictory nature of lay religious texts produced in England at the turn of the fifteenth century. These works are interesting because they include statements of both encouragement to and anxiety about lay Christians who pursue more singular forms of devotion. I focus on one text in…[Read more]

This article explores the unlikely parallels between OJ Simpson’s sensational confessional memoir If I Did It and The Book of Margery Kempe. Similarities between the two can be productive in the classroom.