This book explores the making of human identities and agency in English communities from 1350 to 1600. The volume is informed by a commitment to historical research and interdisciplinary analysis, combined with attention to hermeneutic issues raised in the work on critical theory which has emerged in the last thirty years.
Written by historians and literary critics from both Britain and the. United States, the book is concerned with the diversity of medieval culture and its texts. Individual chapters consider the self-fashioning of male identities within court culture, medieval Christianity and eucharistic discourses, the emergence of a commercial and national theatre in the sixteenth century, the position of working women across the period, and the history of the subject.
Altogether the essays offer a powerful challenge to the dominant aspects of the
paradigm which has shaped the writing of the transformation of English culture in the sixteenth century and point to areas of surprising continuity where much previous criticism has posited decisive discontinuities. The book also offers important and provocative ways of understanding the forms of power and identity in medieval communities, which are independent of current neo-Foucauldian fashions.