In this important article Steve Hindle, the leading historian of the local state and the pre-1834
Poor Law, considers the different ways in which parish and township authorities labelled …

This essay takes up the problem of agency in Piers Plowman by considering the failure of
the ploughing of the half acre in passus 6 in terms of the political ecology of agrarian …

In early modern Europe, branding (including branding on the face) was a significant form of
criminal punishment. It inflicted intense pain, left a permanent mark on the skin, and …

Abstract The Natural Order offers a new framework for the study of economics and ecology
in medieval British literature. This study uncovers the mechanisms whereby discourses of …

My dissertation is a political and cultural history of corporal punishment in the Carolingian
empire. I examine the shape and significance of discourses and representations of corporal …

Abstract 'A Complaint against Blacksmiths', unique to BL, MS Arundel 292, may gesture
towards fourteenth-century legislation against night-time work, yet is underpinned by delight …

The personified agents of allegory, according to Angus Fletcher, can represent two possible
types:'abstract ideas or [...] actual, historical persons'. 1 But what of the attempt to personify …

Abstract The Ecology of Reform offers a new literary history of English vernacular reformism
from William Langland to Edmund Spenser, uncovering a deep genealogy of political …

This thesis argues that Langland's bodies are of fundamental importance to his allegory.
Langland sees the body as the principle vehicle through which the words and ideas in his …

This dissertation examines select medieval discourses of whiteness, both somatic and non-
somatic, and their imbrications with the affective, the material, and the social registers of late …