Elise Wang argues in The Making of Felony Procedure in Middle English Literature that the titular “dark imagining,” i.e., fictional discourse about criminal acts, is key to understanding how medieval laymen defined and executed judgment in felony cases. This slim volume is nimble, incisive, and clear, delivering on the intriguing promise of “small demonstrative gestures” over claims from “an accumulation of evidence” (17), which is the more typical mode of legal history argumentation. As she articulates in her introduction, each chapter pairs close readings of literary texts with records of coroners’ inquests, indictments, and trials to “reveal details of the practice of law” (6).

The first chapter of this book, “Death Investigation,” focuses on the narrative structure of St. Erkenwald, a Middle English poem about the body of an undead judge. Typically, scholars have understood the poem as evidence of transhistorical English unity. Treating it as an imaginatively expanded coroner’s inquest opens new interpretive ground and bolsters the historical approaches typical of scholarship on this poem. Examining Erkenwald as a legal document also enables Wang to strike a blow against the supposition that medieval courts made judgments merely on the basis of reputation or circumstantial evidence. Her second chapter, “The Plea,” argues that pleading is less a matter of abiding by legal rules and more a matter of genre conformity. For Wang, the Placita Corone relies on preexisting literary training to inform its readers how to plead in court. This counters the work’s typical reputation as a useless bundle of “procedural inaccuracy [and] uneven narration” (51), which has led “scholars to wonder what possible purpose it could have served” (51). Instead of joining those who dismiss its worth, Wang argues that the Placita is a mix of anecdote and examples for imitation in court. This is a powerful argument for the reality of institutional form: when medieval (and modern) judges ask for “truth” or “plain style,” they are actually making genre requests that require special knowledge to fulfill.

Wang’s book shines darkly in Chapter 3, “Testimony”: she dexterously redeems a poem with a plodding reputation and leverages it into an unflinching examination of the failure of witnessing in the face of power. The chapter opens with a legal puzzle—in the case of an assault of a coroner, a judge chooses to fine rather than kill the group of men (Simon and his henchmen) who assaulted the coroner. Wang shows that the discrepancy is a form of resistance: clearly, the men themselves are so powerful as to be unassailable, so the judge can only bear witness and record their names instead of punishing them. Likewise, The Pistil of Swete Susan warns about the dangers of local, reputation-based witnessing: if the men who commit the crime are also the “oathworthy” men in the community, their capacity for witnessing becomes a capacity to make truth what they will. A key implication we can draw from this chapter is that Simon’s assault of a coroner is an attempt to dismantle the very system of justice itself. Without a true coroner’s report, murder becomes unable to be tried at all, an implication made possible by careful reading of Chapter 1.

In the fourth chapter of the book, “The Records,” Wang navigates the fraught landscape of Piers Plowman scholarship and emerges with a reading of the Good Thief episode as indicative of Piers’s iterative style as documentary technology. In an unusually clear presentation of its episodic development, Wang argues that Langland’s practice mirrors accretive recording particular to legal documentation of robbery. Since medieval robbery carried a high penalty but a low conviction rate, having a reputation as a robber became a sort of sword of Damocles—while unlikely, execution could strike at any moment. Her short fifth chapter, “Standing Mute,” examines the requirement of consent in English felony law for an accused to stand a jury trial and the use of torture to extract consent. This final chapter examines the previously inconsistently explained complications around silence in a legal context and the court’s extreme response—peine forte et dure, “a torture designed to coerce compliance” (12). Wang’s argument rests on several cases of women’s refusals to acquit—some are released and some executed—but all suffer, paying the price for a system of consent. The epilogue argues that felony is a conception “of the law in the passive voice,” (147) and in a dark imagining of her own, Wang reveals that felony’s lack of definition, its requirement of literature as an aid to law, and its irregular but brutal punishments are features for control of those with little power to begin with.

Wang’s The Making of Felony Procedure in Middle English Literature is more than a bridge between disciplines—it makes a strong argument that scholars have incomplete understandings of medieval law, its procedure, and its practice when they do not put legal documentation and literature in conversation. Her approach brings with it moments of incisive comment on previous scholarly attitudes toward medieval law as well as the damning implications for modern Anglo-American legal practice. There are very few shortcomings in this groundbreaking volume: occasional reminders and definitions for her literary audience, a clearer argumentative line in Chapter 1, and an articulation of the application of her own methodology in Chapter 4 would all be welcome. These occasional scuffs aside, the volume is a methodological triumph, well worthy of imitation, and the reverberations of the clarity of this volume as well as its novel approach will be felt in the fields of medieval politics, law, and literature for years to come.