Cultural Reformations : Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History

The deepest periodic division in English literary history has been between the medieval and the early modern. Cultural Reformations, part of the Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature series, initiates discussion on many fronts in which both periods look different in dialogue with each other.

Brian Cummings is Professor of English at the University of Sussex and was founding Director of the Center for Early Modern Studies from 2004 to 2008. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. at Cambridge University, and before moving to Sussex was Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He is the author of The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford University Press, 2002), a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year for 2003. A paperback edition of this book appeared in July 2007. He has also published widely in journals such as English Literary Renaissance and Studies in Church History, and is a contributor to The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature and The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

James Simpson is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. He was previously Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. He is a Life Fellow of Fellow of Girton College and an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His books include Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text, Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry, Ieform and Cultural Revolution, the second volume in the Oxford English Literary History, which won the 2007 British Academy Sir Israel Gollancz Prize, and Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents, winner of the Silver Medal, 2008 Independent Publisher Book Awards. He is currently writing about iconoclasm in the Anglo-American tradition.