Langland's Early Modern Identities / The New Middle Ages (PDF)

Sarah A. Kelen is Associate Professor of English at Nebraska Wesleyan University, USA.

"This volume is well researched and thorough, and seems unlikely to be replaced any time soon as a critical guide to these materials." - Sixteenth Century Journal

"Palgrave's New Middle Ages series, under the editorship of Bonnie Wheeler, continues to publish some of the best new work on medieval literature, history and culture, and Sarah Kelen's book enters this lineup as an admirable contribution to reception-history by tracing the ways that Langland's Piers Plowman has been understood among readers from the Reformation to the early twentieth century...Kelen's book is packed with interesting information, rich in critical insights, and steadily informed by a generous review of current criticism as well as primary sources." - The Medieval Review

"This is a wonderfully fresh and scrupulous guide to, and reflection on, the early modern reception history of Piers Plowman and its maker. Kelen s balanced, witty, and clear treatment of how critics, writers, editors and anthologies have shaped and commented on the poem and the poet provides a vademecum for medievalists wishing to reflect on the development of their materials and assumptions. And like the best studies of medievalism, Kelen s study also offers a new perspective on post-medieval literary and critical history. This is a quietly fascinating guide to a major branch of scholarly and literary postures and outlooks from the Renaissance through the Romantics, which leaves the poem itself freshly mysterious even while showing how it was the center of so many forms of appropriation."-Andrew Galloway, Cornell University

"A perceptive, broad-ranging study. Kelen provides us with an original history of how Piers Plowman and its more shadowy author William Langland were valued by later writers: early on, Piers Plowman was indeed far more widely read, and in contrast with most other medieval writings but in company Chaucer's, it continued to be copied, reprinted and read up to the present day.