Product Description: The first full commentary on Piers Plowman since the late nineteenth century is inaugurated with the publication of the first two of its five projected volumes.The detailed and wide-ranging Penn Commentary places the allegorical dream-vision of Piers Plowman within the literary, historical, social, and intellectual contexts of late medieval England, and within the long history of critical interpretation of the poem, assessing past scholarship while offering original materials and insights throughout...read more

Product Description: This volume brings together a series of key essays by Larry D Benson, well-known for his work in editing the Riverside Chaucer. Of the studies selected, the opening three deal with Old English, recasting the possibilities for the critical study of Beowulf, above all the relation between oral and written literary production...read more

Product Description: A spirited study of a neglected topic, these essays explore the character and uses of annotation from Biblical times to the present. A group of distinguished scholars investigates such subjects as the bullying footnote, the play of note against text, the self-annotation of the Bible, the parasitical commentator, the note as imperial seal, the agonies of modern scholarly publication, the hidden marginalium, and the ways in which supplements to the text tend to push aside the text...read more