Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History

The deepest periodic division in English literary history has been between the medieval and the early modern, not least because the cultural investments in maintaining that division are exceptionally powerful. Medievalists and early modernists never talk much with each other. Instead, historians of culture remain locked into tightly bound chronological units. This is always a pity, but more so with regard to late medievalists and early modernists, since the boundary line between them continues powerfully to define cultural identities. Narratives of national and religious identity and freedom; of individual liberties; of the history of education and scholarship; of the very possibility of persuasive historical consciousness itself: all these histories, and more, derive from the break with the medieval, but that break is rarely held up to inspection. This volume initiates discussion on many fronts in which both periods look different in dialogue with each other.