This book explores the making of human identities and agency in English communities from 1350 to 1600. The volume is informed by a commitment to historical research and interdisciplinary analysis, combined with attention to hermeneutic issues raised in the work on critical theory which has emerged in the last thirty years.
Written by historians and literary critics from both Britain and the United States, the book is concerned with the diversity of medieval culture and its texts. Altogether the essays offer a powerful challenge to the dominant aspects of the paradigm which has shaped the writing of the transformation of English culture in the 16th century and point to areas of surprising continuity where much previous criticism has posited decisive discontinuities. The book also offers important and provocative ways of understanding the forms of power and identity in medieval communities, which are independent of current neo-Foucauldian fashions.