Books by Emily (University of Pennsylvania) Steiner

The great fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman is one of the most dazzling literary creations of the English Middle Ages. Emily Steiner's book, indispensable to students and scholars, shows readers how to navigate the poem's experimental poetics, as well as its complex ideas about love, salvation and social justice.

Emily Steiner describes the rich intersections between legal documents and English literature in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She argues that documentary culture (including charters, testaments, patents and seals) enabled writers to think in new ways about the conditions of textual production in late medieval England.