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]

An analysis of Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale” as a consideration of medieval accounts of the ‘new’ and the ‘newfangeled.’

Contribution to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s The Postcolonial Middle Ages.

Medieval studies and the so-called Theory Wars.

contribution to Beidler, Ed., Masculinities in Chaucer (Boydell & Brewer, 1998).

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