The Oxford English Literary History
Volume 2: 1350-1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution
James Simpson
Reviews and Awards
"The new Oxford English Literary History series [is] destined to become a standard academic source.... Advanced undergraduates will join lifelong learners in praising these volumes as sources of renewed and renewable literary energy."--The Providence Journal
"A bold, bravura performance, and an important book.... Simpson can write with equal brilliance across both the secular and the religious.... Simpson writes so well and discriminatingly that Reform and Cultural Revolution is a pleasure to read."--Times Literary Supplement
"Surveys of literary history rarely break new ground.... But the second volume in the successor series to the venerable Oxford History of English Literature will snap some scholarly heads back.... If you think of the English 15th century as a dull slough between brilliant Chaucer and brilliant rebirth, read this book and think again."--Virginia Quarterly Review
"Designed to challenge traditional period designations, this volume is one of the few literary histories that moves from Chaucer and William Langland through the death of Henry VIII. Much is gained in this redrawing of the borders.... The volume, moreover, proves to be one of the most satisfying sustained discussions of the potential liabilities and continuing usefulness of the terms 'medieval' and 'early modern'.... The book includes powerful readings of major and minor figures, and organizes its mass of materials in ways that are at once conceptually meaningful and pragmatically useful."--Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
"[An] excellent and challenging book.... Reform and Cultural Revolution will fundamentally alter our understanding of what distinguishes the two periods [of Medieval and Renaissance]."--Speculum
"The second volume of the Oxford English Literary History brilliantly covers 1350-1547, to the death of Henry VIII. It will be standard."--Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance