Contents

pp v-viii

List of Illustrations

pp ix-x

Contributors and Editors

pp xi-xii

Acknowledgments

pp xiii-xiv

List of Abbreviations

pp xv-xvi

Simpson: An Interim Report

pp 1-10

PART I - THE HERMENEUTICS OF RECOGNITION

pp 11-12

1 - The Shock of the Old: Recognition in the Humanities; The 2022 Morton W. Bloomfield Memorial Lecture

pp 13-34

2 - “Stuffed with Divine Words”: Undigested Texts in Early Medieval England

pp 35-48

3 - The “Physician’s Tale” and Chaucer’s Art of Prosopopoeia

pp 49-66

4 - “Troilus can afford to fall in love … with whomsoever he will”: Free Will and Recognition in Troilus and Criseyde

pp 67-84

PART II - GENRE AND FIGURE

pp 85-86

5 - Rarely Obscure and Not a Genre: Medieval Allegorical Narrative

pp 87-106

6 - “Thynke nat the contrary”: Field Notes in the Ecology of Medieval Romance

pp 107-120

7 - Filling in the Lines: Text, Image, and Late Medieval Literary Forms

pp 121-146

8 - Catching at Words: The Literal, the Metaphorical, and the Obvious

pp 147-164

PART III - CULTURE AND INSTITUTIONS

pp 165-166

9 - Petition, Justice, and Peace in Piers Plowman

pp 167-182

10 - In Place of the Past: Saint Erkenwald’s Versions of Conversion

pp 183-200

11 - Proverb and Satirical Time: The Digby Poems and Their Fifteenth Century

pp 201-222

12 - Common Style and the Bourgeois Ethos in John Lydgate’s Dietary

pp 223-238

PART IV - REFORMATIONS

pp 239-240

13 - Rewriting Robert the Devil: Thomas Lodge and Medieval Romance

pp 241-258

14 - Iconoclasm and the Epigraphic Image

pp 259-274

15 - The Letter Kills but the Spirit Gives Life (2 Corinthians 3:6): Or, What Happened to Enemy Love?

pp 275-292

16 - James Simpson’s Freedoms: An Appreciation

pp 293-300

James Simpson’s Publications from 1984 to 2024

pp 301-310

Bibliography

pp 311-344

A Note on the Bloomfield Conferences

pp 345-346