James Simpson

• Harvard University

Almost every interpretative university discipline in or adjacent to the Humanities makes routine, unproblematic appeal to intention as an interpretative move. By proscribing intentionalism as an instrument of interpretation, Literary Criticism is the outlier among adjacent and not so adjacent disciplines. The introduction to the special issue “Inte...

This volume is the third in the series and covers verse written in the period 1400 to 1500. The volume is organized in four sections: Contexts (Chapters 1–7), Transmission (Chapters 8–10), Topics and Genres (Chapters 11–23), and Poets (Chapters 24–28). The opening section, after an introductory chapter, considers the various historical contexts rel...

There are few matters of such moment in any given culture as the relation of deserving and reward. Understand a given culture's system of reward, and you understand that culture's structure and values. How, then, could both Liberalism and left-wing historians have been so wrong, for so long, about the way Reformation theology defined works and meri...

James Simpson’s central hermeneutic perception for knowledge in the Humanities is that cognition is re-cognition. Before we can know, we must already have known. He examines this paradox with reference to literary examples of facial recognition from, in particular, Chaucer and his reception in the early modern period. Linking literary face to textu...

Ricardian works of visual and literary art hover between two models of theatricality: the bungle and the scripted challenge to royal authority. Many of the works of Chaucer and his contemporaries raise the spectre of opposition to authority before they seek to close it down. With varying emphases, however, the act of closing down the dangers of opp...

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion . Andrew Hiscock and Helen Wilcox, eds. Oxford Handbooks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. xlvi + 802 pp. $150. - Volume 71 Issue 4 - James Simpson

Google Ngram Viewer reports that usage of the word interrogation has been climbing steadily since 1942. liberals will of course argue, not without force, that the George W. Bush administration's embrace of “enhanced interrogation” (i.e., torture) drove the recent steady rise. To that sound point one might, however, also advance a less palatable obs...

Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation is an extraordinary book. Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation is a shockingly bad book. This essay explicates the force of these contradictory statements. On the one hand, the potential of Gregory's understanding of periodization may be applauded; his reading may likewise be applauded: there are excep...

This title is part of the the Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature series, edited by Paul Strohm. This book examines cultural history and cultural change in the period between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries, a period spanning the medieval and Renaissance. It takes a dynamically diachronic approach to cultural history a...

Volume 1 of a two-volume edition. Full Text available at http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/simpson-pevereley-hardyng-chronicle One of a handful of texts written in the twilight years of Henry VI’s reign, John Hardyng’s first Chronicle offers a compelling insight into the tastes, hopes, and anxieties of a late fifteenth century gentleman...

The psalms are routinely considered to be sources of comfort and occasions of thanksgiving. In this essay I present a different, and opposite function for the psalms: that of expressing an intense state of isolation, threat, hatred and self‐annihilation. So far from supplying what sixteenth‐century readers called ‘comfortable words’, the psalm tran...

Chapter 22 of harriet beecher stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) adumbrates the child Evangeline’s Bible reading to the adult slave Tom. Evangeline, we learn, prefers “Revelations and … Prophecies.” These biblical books are not wholly intelligible either to Evangeline or to Tom, but both characters are drawn to these genres in particular, since they...

The Thebaid of Statius (d. 94 CE) provides the great model of militarist catastrophe for the European Middle Ages and beyond. The Olympian gods, humans (often excellent, justice-loving humans), and the Furies each participate in a relentless dialectic of inciting each other to furious, exhausting, and destructive combat. Emotion dominates the poem’...

Our language for the truths of literature is reformist and nominalist; our experience of reading is, by contrast, habitual and idealist. Contrary to the way we talk about what kind of new, liberatory truths literature expresses, our reading practice itself is grounded in long-standing forms of recognition. Every time we interpret we recall deep sea...

This essay is a rebuttal to Debora Shuger's 2008 essay, "The Reformation of Penance," in which she takes aim at revisionist Reformation scholarship, and in particular at James Simpson's Reform and Cultural Revolution, published in 2002, as exemplary of the error of the revisionists with regard to penance. Her larger charge against the revisionists...

Which comes first: institutions or selves? Liberal democracies operate as if selves preceded institutions, since electors choose their institutional representatives, who themselves vote to shape institutions. Liberal ideology, indeed, traces its genealogy back to heroic moments of the lonely, fully formed conscience standing up against the might of...

This concluding chapter takes a brief look at the changes that took place among traditional producer countries in Europe and then offers some comments concerning the obstacles facing the producers in the New World. It finishes with reflections on the extent to which the organization of the wine industry today is the result of changes that took plac...

Post-Reformation recusant institutions produced exceptionally important witnesses to the pre-Reformation English mystical tradition. Those same offshore institutions also produced some new contemplative texts of their own, as did some very isolated figures still in England. Despite this preservation and production, however, the mystical tradition w...

Festschriften often speak about the career of their dedicatee as if that career were over. Such, happily, is not the case with C. David Benson who, although soon retiring from the University of Connecticut at Storrs, is deeply engaged in a large and fertile writing project. David has no interest in the retrospective, self-regarding gaze; instead, h...

The deepest periodic division in English literary history is between the "medieval" and the "early modern," not least because the cultural investments in maintaining that division are exceptionally powerful. Narratives of national and religious identity and freedom; of individual liberties; of the history of education and scholarship; of reading or...

Study of the writings of John Lydgate offers attractive, multiple challenges for scholars of Middle English at all levels. Certainly the bibliographical and textual work on the Lydgate corpus done in the first half of the twentieth century made critical reassessment possible. And certainly the readiness of historicist scholarship, over the last twe...

The Wilton DiptychWilliam Langland, Piers PlowmanJohn Gower, Confessio AmantisRoyal Theatre: The Knight's TaleNotesReferences and Further Reading

Whilst it is reasonably assumed that there extended from the Merovingian period a long tradition of oral poetry in France which embraced the lyric, hagiography, epic and drama, a tradition which drew on Indo-European traditions, more localised folklore, and historical events, it is certain that vernacular French literature i.e. What has been set do...

Chaucer and Malory are the only Middle English writers whose literary afterlife has been pretty well continuous from the fifteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Study of Chaucer in particular reveals the pressures and contours of Middle English studies with especial clarity. Many recent studies have focussed on aspects of Chaucer’s reception, espe...

This book capitalizes on brilliant recent work on sixteenth-century iconoclasm to extend the study of images, both their making and their breaking, into an earlier period and wider discursive territories. Pressures towards iconoclasm are powerfully registered in fourteenth and fifteenth-century writings, both heterodox and orthodox, just as the use...

English and American Literature and Language Version of Record

In this 1995 study James Simpson examines two great poems of the later medieval period, the Latin philosophical epic, Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus (1181–3), and John Gower's English poem, The Confessio Amantis (1390–3). Simpson locates these works in a cultural context dominated by two kinds of literary humanism: the absolutist, whose philosophic...

For the Methode of a Poet historical is not such, as of an Historiographer. For an Historiographer discourseth of affayres orderly as they were donne … but a Poet thrusteth into the middest, euen where it most concerneth him, and there recoursing to the thinges forepaste, and diuining of thinges to come, maketh a pleasing Analysis of all. Spenser,...