This book honors the scholarship and, no less, the teaching of James Simpson, one of the most influential figures in medieval and early modern literary studies over the past half century, and perhaps the single figure who has come to represent the center of the field of late Middle English studies in the form it has taken over most of the past twenty-five years in particular. More specifically, it honors Simpson's signal commitment to the distinctive category of the literary. Over the past four decades, his energetic work has illuminated new intersections between literary and more dominant public discourses, while unsettling received hierarchies of power and disrupting intellectual systems centered on periodization, literalism, and liberalism, especially in relation to what he has taught us to call the Trans-Reformation period. At the heart of these interventions is always the transformative and thus central role of literature as agent and instigator, instrument and subject. Simpson's scholarship tests the boundaries of literary history, exposing tacit cultural structures and passive myths of cultural alterity. His contributions have profoundly shaped scholarship on late medieval literature, from nudging the canon to embrace John Gower, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate to influencing how an entire generation of students and scholars approaches William Langland's Piers Plowman. Meanwhile, the revisionist bent of Simpson's cultural narratives continues to dislocate the periodizing wedge that has long been driven between the medieval and the proto-modern. In turn, Simpson's hermeneutics of periodization and his polemical probing of the origin myths of modernity (e.g. humanism, liberalism, literalism, iconoclasm, and Protestant triumphalism) have opened up fruitful paths for thinking about literary and intellectual history over the longue durée.

The book grew out of a conference held at Harvard University in the fall of 2022 to mark the occasion of Simpson's retirement from the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professorship of English, which he held for almost twenty years, six of them as Department Chair.

BOOKS

The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist VII: Manuscripts Containing Middle English Prose in Parisian Libraries. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1989.

Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text. Longman Medieval and Renaissance Library 1. Harlow, UK: Longman, 1990. (Selection repr. in Piers Plowman. Edited by Elizabeth Robertson and Stephen Shepherd. New York: Norton, 2006. 584–91.)

Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille's “Anticlaudianus” and John Gower's “Confessio amantis”. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 2: 1350–1547. Reform and Cultural Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Piers Plowman: An Introduction. Rev. ed. Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies. Exeter, UK: Exeter University Press, 2007.

Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.

Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition. The Clarendon Lectures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Reynard the Fox: A New Translation. New York: Liveright/Norton, 2015.

John Hardyng, Chronicle: Edited from British Library MS Lansdowne 204. Co-edited with Sarah Peverley. Vol. 1. TEAMS Middle English Texts. Kalamazoo, Mich.:

Medieval Institute Publications, 2015.

Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism. Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019.

The Oxford Chaucer. Edited by Christopher Cannon and James Simpson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.

COLLECTIONS AND ANTHOLOGIES

Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature: Essays in Honour of G. H. Russell. Edited by Gregory Kratzmann and James Simpson. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1986.

Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England. Edited by Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England. Edited by Larry Scanlon and James Simpson. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.

“The Middle Ages.” Edited by Alfred David and James Simpson. Volume A of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt and M. H. Abrams. 8th ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.

The Morton Bloomfield Lectures, 1989–2005. Edited by Daniel Donoghue, James Simpson and Nicholas Watson. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010.

Literary scholars have had little reason to think of Signet clerks or the French secretaries who crafted missives for Lancastrian kings and their consorts. A notable exception is George Ashby (d. 1475), the author of three substantial poems, including the Active Policy of a Prince and A Prisoner's Reflections. I have recently identified Ashby's hand, attributing to him eleven documents as well as CUL, MS Mm.4.42, the holograph text of Active Policy of a Prince. This essay will introduce and identify the handwriting of a number of Lancastrian Signet clerks and French secretaries of Henry V and Henry VI. As such, this will be the first discussion not only of their hands, but also of the scripts used by these two closely coordinated offices. Together with its companion piece, ‘The Handwriting of Fifteenth-Century Privy Seal and Council Clerks’, this essay will help to delineate the use of the secretary family of scripts in the four main writing offices that relied on it in England's central government: the privy seal secretary, which was also in use in the Council during the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V; the lettre-courante-based secretary script of the Signet; and the French lettre courante deployed by the king's French secretaries.

SIGNET CLERKS

In the course of the fourteenth century, the Privy Seal, which used to serve the monarch's personal communication, became increasingly involved in general government and inter-office communication. The Privy Seal developed into a clearing-house for government business with a wide remit, from conducting foreign correspondence to issuing warrants for the Great Seal. With the Privy Seal ceasing to function solely or predominantly as the king's private seal, a third seal began to assume such functions. This seal was initially called the ‘secret’ seal, but towards the end of Edward III's reign the keeper of this seal was called the king's secretary, and the seal itself became known as the Signet. Unlike the other writing offices, such as Chancery, Exchequer, or Privy Seal, which were based in Westminster, the Signet was headquartered in Windsor Castle, although its clerks were mobile, constantly accompanying the king and his secretary.