Writing primarily for an audience of medievalists, in his brief afterword to the collection The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages, Fredric Jameson remarks: “Suffice it to say then that allegory, on my reading of it, is always intimately related to a crisis in representation, and that the medieval period is an extraordinary laboratory in which to witness its elaborations.”1 Almost a decade later, in his Allegory and Ideology, Jameson expands on and thus clarifies these remarks. Moving across time and space, from late antique biblical hermeneutics to twenty-first-century world literature, he shows the relevance of this seemingly archaic form to modernity and its crises of representation. For Jameson, allegory—as opposed to allegoresis and symbolic interpretation—promises hermeneutic simplicity and unitary meaning but delivers multiplicity and disruption: I tend to feel that allegory raises its head as a solution when beneath this or that seemingly stable or unified reality the tectonic plates of deeper contradictory levels of the Real shift and grate ominously against one another and demand a representation, or at least an acknowledgment, they are unable to find in the Schein or illusory surfaces of existential or social life. Allegory does not reunify those incommensurable forces, but it sets them in relationship with one another in a way which, as with all art, all aesthetic experience, can lead alternately to ideological comfort or the restless anxieties of a more expansive knowledge.2Jameson’s electrifying remarks capture the discordance inherent to medieval allegorical narrative, to those works that extend the possibility of hermeneutic fixity but, as they disperse into shards and fragments before the reader’s eyes, ultimately show this fixity to be illusory. Within the context of English poetry, this experience of reading premodern allegory, frustrating yet intoxicating, registers perhaps most intensely in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, a fourteenth-century dream vision.This is a poem famously difficult to summarize, one whose various episodes, discontinuous rather than progressive, never seem to cohere into a narrative whole.3Piers Plowman follows its protagonist as he navigates an allegorical landscape in search of a spiritual truth that remains, time and again, nebulous and elusive. In his quest, he encounters—indeed, often verbally spars with—a lengthy catalog of personified abstractions that both aid and subvert his spiritual quest. These personifications are, for the most part, not unchangeable but pliable; they instantiate the “surreal, fluid, and confusing” design of Langlandian allegory.4 This poem’s disruptive form seems to endorse Jameson’s account of allegory and the “crisis in representation” that this mode of writing signals. Yet his account dismisses the literary mode of poems like Piers Plowman: “We will find ourselves reverting again and again to this insight: that it is the disappearance of personification that signals the emergence of modernity.” For Jameson, the personifications of classical and medieval allegory reify an ethical binary of good and evil; they embody “fixed substances or passions” that often devolve “all the way to the caricatural or the stereotypical.”5In their second monographs, Katharine Breen and Nicolette Zeeman—respectively, professor of English at Northwestern and professor of medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge—interrogate the plasticity of medieval personification instantiated in the allegorical experimentation of Piers Plowman and other works. Like Jameson, Breen and Zeeman recognize that the instability inherent to this mode of writing captures the incommensurable and otherwise unrepresentable forces that collide in our experience of the world. However, both medievalists also advance a forceful rebuke to Jameson’s account of personification as a stagnant form—a critique certainly unintended, given the books’ publication dates. Breen’s Machines of the Mind traces the formal and historical development of three traditions of personification that, as she argues throughout the book, are available to medieval authors: Prudentian, Platonic, and Aristotelian. She describes how each type of personification functions as a pliable and complex “engine of thought” that allows writers and readers to think through difficult questions (MM, 8). For instance, in one thirteenth-century poem, personified vices register how sinfulness constitutes a “collective rather than a purely individual” problem; thus the poem proposes “public policy,” rather than private penance, as a solution to social ills (MM, 248–49). The book’s final chapter then describes how these three types of personification all “rub shoulders” in Piers Plowman (MM, 232).Zeeman’s Arts of Disruption focuses closely on moments of allegorical and narrative disjuncture in Piers Plowman, such as those in which the logic of specific personifications comes undone: when their “names remain the same while their actions and words degenerate” (AD, 13). Zeeman’s account of allegory bears a striking resemblance to Jameson’s. This mode of writing is “slippery, contrastive, pugnacious, episodic, contradictory—and not always glossable” (AD, 15). The first three parts of the book describe the pliability and argumentative vigor of Langland’s personifications. They are changeable and hypocritical; they debate and rebuke each other with violent words and gestures. The fourth and fifth parts explore how, by drawing material from the psychosomaticism of Galenic medicine and the unfulfilled quests of grail romance, Langland gestures to the ultimate unknowability of Christian salvation. Moving in and out of Langland’s poem, Zeeman argues boldly that allegory makes meaning out of frictions between narrative structures and bodies of discourse.In years to come, Breen’s and Zeeman’s insightful readings of Piers Plowman and other premodern works will transform the concepts and categories with which scholars in medieval studies talk about allegory. Certainly, medievalists are the primary intended audience for both books. This is especially true of Zeeman’s dense book, evidently written for a narrow community of readers intimately acquainted with Langland’s poem and its critical tradition; summary and context are often scant. Engaging in what Piers Plowman criticism calls “crux-busting,” Zeeman treats the poem as a constellation of enigmas that begs to be solved; she both grapples with and celebrates the poem’s many knots and slippages.6 To a degree, the last chapter in Breen’s book engages in a similar critical mode. She deploys her tripartite theory of personification to explicate the strange behaviors (and, in one especially brilliant case, gender fluidity) of Langland’s allegorical characters. Most of these enigmas—Why does Piers tear the pardon? What do Hawkyn’s tears signify? Why does Piers welcome Hunger into the half acre?—will probably mean little to those readers who do not already eagerly await the annual publication of the Yearbook of Langland Studies. Breen’s and Zeeman’s insightful responses will certainly provide medievalists with those “aha” moments that the best scholarship on Piers Plowman affords. They will also, most likely, spark fierce debates in conferences and specialized journals. For instance, I would reject Zeeman’s conclusion that Hawkyn’s tears signify “a kind of hope” and asseverate instead that they mobilize a critique of unthinking devotional formalism, of just going through the motions (AD, 177). In fact, Zeeman recognizes that the poem voices this worry throughout.However, these two monographs also speak beyond the disciplinary bounds of medieval studies. Breen and Zeeman stake a claim—a claim, for the most part, explicit in the former’s work and implicit in the latter’s—that personification allegory is not an “archaic or archaizing form” symptomatic of a premodern naïveté and designed for pedagogical ease (MM, 9). In their critical imagination, the alterity of the past, with its strange forms and genres, speaks to the concerns and crises of representation of modernity. My account of these books thus aims to expose those analytical moments that disclose the transhistorical vitality of medieval allegory, moments that, throughout both books, are interlaced with rigorous, historically situated engagements with medieval thought.Similar questions animate these two books: How and why do personifications in medieval allegory change? What are the cognitive, ethical, and social affordances of these fluid forms? How does medieval allegory make meaning? However, to answer these questions, Breen and Zeeman employ markedly different methodologies; I find such distinctiveness to be evidence of the rich and varied forms that the writing of literary history can embody. Piers Plowman is the indubitable gravitational center of Zeeman’s monograph. She begins not with the tradition that produced the poem but with the literary and philosophical logic of the work of art itself. After a brief introduction that describes “narrative disruption” as the “stuff of medieval allegorical narrative,” Zeeman plunges her reader straight into the poem’s muddy yet invigorating waters (AD, 15). The animating logic of this singular poem both illuminates and is illuminated by a rich corpus of medieval literature, philosophy, rhetoric, and theology. Zeeman thus continues the critical project of her first book, “Piers Plowman” and the Medieval Discourse of Desire, which explores how the poem’s many moments of “failure, rebuke, and renewal” participate in and disclose a broader history of medieval psychology. In Zeeman’s critical imagination, citations, allusions, and mere resonances assemble into a vibrant network of premodern thought, which constellates around Langland’s poem. Consequently, Zeeman’s footnotes are comprehensive, reminiscent sometimes of a commentary. Most of the author’s claims are supported by and contextualized in a mosaic of premodern sources and modern criticism. The critical pleasure that Zeeman’s work affords is thus not dissimilar to the pleasure of Langland’s poem: a poem that seems to refuse linear reading and that, rife with manifold allusions and biblical and patristic citations, provides the thrill of recognition and documentation.Zeeman’s book is theoretically sophisticated. Moving across this lengthy text, the reader can infer how schools of thought such as deconstruction and psychoanalysis inform her readings of medieval literature and philosophy. However, in contrast to her first book, Zeeman’s theoretical allegiances rarely make it to the body of her text. At times, ripples do form on the surface. It is clear, indeed, that much of Zeeman’s account of allegory as a disruptive art draws from Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that the “fragmentary” nature of allegory denies “the false appearance of totality” (AD, 9).7 At one point, she winks at her reader and suggests that “Langland’s narrator may have discovered the death drive” (AD, 297). A different book could have begun with an extended account of Freudian psychoanalysis and, slowly over the course of a chapter, outlined what it tells us about medieval culture. But Zeeman does not apply modern theory to premodern texts. Rather, as this nod to Freud suggests, she implies that aspects of medieval thought anticipate and thus illuminate modernity’s tools of inquiry. Zeeman’s tactical engagement with modern theory foregrounds the intellectual intricacy of the medieval text; it becomes not the object of theory but theoretical in itself.8In contrast to Zeeman, Breen does not begin with Piers Plowman. Instead, she writes a prehistory to this poem, recuperating and exploring in meticulous detail those moments in intellectual and literary history that made such a poem possible in the first place. Still, although she does not focus on the poem until her book’s final chapter, Piers Plowman is an absent presence throughout. As Breen’s book unfolds, the history of allegory teaches us how to read Piers Plowman. However, one can also sense that the allegorical experimentation of Piers Plowman taught Breen how to read this history. Moreover, unlike in Arts of Disruption, the argumentative animus of Machines of the Mind emerges, in great part, from extensive engagement with twentieth-century criticism. To isolate those rhetorical techniques and modes of thought that produced Langlandian allegory, Breen’s introduction confidently declares that modern criticism has misunderstood medieval personification. What follows is a dazzling rewriting of literary history that emphasizes the complex cognitive and ethical affordances of these strange, seemingly arcane forms. In response to critics as influential as Erich Auerbach, Angus Fletcher, and Gordon Teskey, Breen rejects that personification commits depersonalizing violence against individual subjectivity. Rather, this pliable rhetorical tool, insofar as it represents “a body of data as a human body,” negotiates relationships between individuals and collectives (MM, 2).In this rich introduction, Breen also challenges scholarship that attaches personification allegory resolutely to a particular philosophical school. This genre, Breen explains, is neither inherently nominalist (it tells us that only particulars exist, as advanced by Paul de Man) nor inherently realist (it tells us that only universals exist, as advanced by Johan Huizinga). In fact, personification allegory is “not inherently anything” (MM, 315). De Man’s idiosyncratic attachment to nominalism notwithstanding, Breen’s introduction begins to advance a line of argumentation that traverses most of her book: critics typically assume that medieval personifications embody Platonic universals or Forms, unchanging and stable. For Breen, this Platonizing tendency has led critics to recognize fluid personifications in Piers Plowman and other works as somehow deficient. At this point, Breen’s iconoclastic argumentation falters slightly. Indeed, some of the smartest work on Piers Plowman as early as the mid-twentieth century recognizes the poem’s allegorical fluidity, unattached to a Platonist formalism.9 To my eye, even one of the main objects of Breen’s critique—Jill Mann’s contribution to the Cambridge Companion to “Piers Plowman,” cited recurringly throughout the book—does not advance such a rigid account of personification. Although she does call personification “Platonizing,” Mann does not quite construct a rigid philosophical schema from which all personifications emerge. Rather, she argues that, insofar as it captures the real existence of abstractions, this literary genre is no mere game. Like Platonism, it shows how ideas such as love and hate participate in the sensible world.10 Mann thus anticipates Breen’s claims that personification allegory has conceptual purchase on the social world. Indeed, Breen even acknowledges that, in an earlier essay unfettered by the pedagogical demands of a Cambridge Companion, Mann advances a more flexible account of personification reminiscent of her own category of Aristotelian personification (MM, 206).Breen’s vision of literary history is in no way dimmed by this oversimplification of the critical field. In her introduction, she demonstrates that personification allegory is not tied to particular philosophical positions, especially when the modes of inquiry of these bodies of premodern thought have been mediated and narrowed by modern criticism. Her wide-ranging critique also advances an important corrective to a great deal of historicist work in medieval literary studies that renders the literary epiphenomenal to its historical or intellectual context. Although as early as 1978 Russell Peck warned medievalists that Chaucer (and, I would add, Langland or Gower or any imaginative writer) “is not a logician, nor is he a systematic philosopher,” a great deal of scholarship still seeks to restrict imaginative literature to narrow philosophical viewpoints, in the process circumscribing the imaginative and theoretical work that the literary itself can effectuate, as well as erasing the dynamism of much medieval philosophy.11 Breen captures instead how imaginative literature participates in rather than merely reflects intellectual history, indeed often pushes its boundaries. Machines of the Mind thus avoids what Samuel Otter identifies as the “intoxicating cycle of antagonism or backlash in which ‘form’ and ‘history’ are pitted against each other,” an antagonism that is ultimately untenable.12 Throughout her book, Breen reads closely those early Latinate texts that scholarship tends to reduce either to historical context or to sources for later vernacular poetry. In each chapter Breen takes a text or group of texts that we think we know and, deploying rigorous techniques of philology and close reading, defamiliarizes their operations.Breen’s careful analyses reveal how Roman and early medieval texts—precursors to later poetry as well as imaginative works in their own right—summon personified figures who are not reifications of a fixed ethical binary but inherently mutable. The first part of the book turns to Prudentius’s Psychomachia, a fifth-century poem often referenced but seldom analyzed. Its personifications emerge at the intersection of rhetoric and religion in Roman thought; they grant civic values “a material and bodily presence in moral and political life” (MM, 50). In the poem, personifications like Faith and Chastity are not inherently virtuous; rather, through the repeated performance of righteous acts, they cultivate a habitus of virtue and encourage the reader to do so too.13 This habituation often takes the form of what Breen calls a “transgender identification,” a practice of gender performance through which virtuous personifications willfully renounce their masculine sexuality (MM, 92). In turn, the second part of the book recasts Lady Philosophy—Boethius’s interlocutor in the sixth-century Consolation of Philosophy—as a Platonic daemon: a tutelary figure who is “changeable, emotional—and sometimes even funny” (MM, 148). By identifying Lady Philosophy as a changeable daemon, Breen contravenes scholarship that, to render her numinous, ignores this figure’s metaphysical limitations, perilous femininity, and intermittently absurd actions and dialogue.To some extent, in Arts of Disruption, Zeeman also writes a history of personification, albeit one significantly less systematic than Breen’s. For the most part, her analyses focus on the actions and behaviors of particular allegorical figures, not on the conceptual categories to which these figures belong. In the first three parts of her book, however, Zeeman does recover the origins of Langlandian personification in rhetoric, logic, and pedagogy, and it is there that her richest contribution to the history of medieval personification and the plasticity of this form emerges. Building on David Aers’s Beyond Reformation?, Zeeman explores how the rhetorical technique of paradiastole—the presentation of vice as virtue—produces “hypocritical figures” who embody and dramatize “the instability and slippage of moral postures, institutional positions and theological concepts” (AD, 76). To recall Jameson’s critique of personification, these unstable hypocritical figures do not reify a fixed ethical binary of vice and virtue. In fact, these figures make the reader “constantly alert to the nuance and possibility of slippage in voice, argument, and personification” (AD, 40). For Aers, Langland’s use of paradiastole advances a reformist rejection of an institutional church that, by the end of the fourteenth century, had become increasingly hierarchical and materialistic to the detriment of Christian virtues. Reviews of Beyond Reformation? have both praised and criticized Aers’s desire to find a stable and perhaps unitary message in a poem famous for its cruxes and disruptions. In her own book, Zeeman celebrates Aers’s superb recognition of the relationship between poetic form and moral critique; however, she neither endorses nor rejects his more historicist claims about the poem’s reformist allegiances. Yet in her reading Zeeman stresses the slipperiness inherent to the rhetorical trope of paradiastole, which may signal a tacit disavowal of the staunch ecclesiastical critique that Aers finds in the poem.Thus, like Breen’s Prudentian personification, Zeeman’s “hypocritical figure” is inherently mutable; moreover, it also emerges from a process of rhetorical formation. Zeeman’s discussions of the rhetorical origins of this form call attention to the self-conscious literariness of medieval personification. In her account of the origins and argumentative flexibility of personification debate, Zeeman also emphasizes how this genre produces a fictional or “imaginative space” that aims to investigate terms, categories, and concepts rather than to seek solutions (AD, 163). Her relatively brief remarks about the imaginative origins and functions of personification gesture to an argument about literariness and fictionality that is central to Breen’s book. In her accounts of Prudentian and Platonic personifications, Breen describes how these personifications emerge from and activate complex practices of the imagination. Prudentian personifications are “self-consciously created” rhetorical tools that cultivate virtuous behavior in their readers (MM, 38). In a Christian cosmology, Platonic daemons are not literally real. They are imaginative constructions that require integumental reading, a hermeneutics of suspicion that discerns truths hidden behind a fictional veil. Thus Lady Philosophy and other daemonic personifications “propagate a number of textual characteristics that we now think of as literary” (MM, 200). Although these forms grant conceptual purchase on the material world, they are not, in themselves, real and material.By emphasizing the complexity of thought encoded in these fictional personifications, Breen continues to rebuke twentieth-century scholarship that emphasizes the pedagogical simplicity of premodern personification. Among the many academic villains whom Breen fights in Machines of the Mind, Huizinga may be her greatest and most resolutely vanquished foe. In personification allegory, Huizinga finds evidence of an unyieldingly realist “primitive mind,” unable to understand abstractions except in explicitly substantial terms (MM, 18).14 For Huizinga, the personifications of medieval allegory were, to its contemporaneous audience, literally real, their oneiric contexts notwithstanding. The naive realism of the medieval mind that Huizinga identifies suggests too a medieval mind unable to activate the willing suspension of disbelief that fiction necessitates. For this reason, Breen’s use of the word literary in her account of the Platonic daemon is significant. Indeed, it builds from the groundbreaking work of Anne Middleton, her doctoral adviser, who found in Middle English literature an idea of the literary distinct from other modes of discourse: an authorial self-awareness that interrogates what it means to craft fictions and recognizes the role of these fictional works in the social world.Breen’s work on the literariness of personification allegory tacitly collaborates with the work of literary historians who have recently argued for fiction and fictionality as concepts germane to the premodern.15 These are concepts that have been long viewed, at least by students of later periods in literary history, as alien and anachronistic to the Middle Ages. The work of these scholars challenges influential accounts of literary history that designate fiction as a historical phenomenon, indeed a historical phenomenon first activated in the Enlightenment novel. Breen speaks to similar concerns. For her, to read personification allegory is to read a self-consciously crafted and sophisticated work of fiction, as well as to enjoy the complex cognitive possibilities that its fictional world affords. She thus challenges a teleological vision of literary history that assumes the inherent superiority of the mimetic realism of the modern novel to earlier literary modes for describing the world. As medievalists such as Julie Orlemanski and Carol Symes have argued, the significance of this type of critique extends beyond the critical relationship between premodern and modern European literature. After all, the logic that produces a “primitive” Middle Ages vanquished by Enlightenment thought—a premodern mind unable to separate fact from fiction, concept from body—is similar if not identical to the logic that, insofar as it upholds the mimetic realism of the Western novel as a normative sign of intellectual sophistication, designates non-Western literary expressions that do not fulfill those arbitrary normative standards as somehow deficient, indeed “primitive.”The imaginative vigor of these personifications is perhaps most palpable in Breen’s account of Aristotelian personification. This last piece in her tripartite personification puzzle highlights the purchase that literature, insofar as it engages with empirical reality and encourages attentive and complex modes of thought, can have on the social world. Here Breen identifies two philosophical traditions under the umbrella of Aristotelianism. First, Ockhamist nominalism considers universals concepts that exist in the human mind. Personifications—which, in dream poetry like Piers Plowman, by definition occur within the human mind—function as puzzles or enigmas that prompt readers to think about universals. Thus in Langland’s poem the character Anima functions as a nominalist puzzle that encourages readers “to think about the nature of the soul” (MM, 305). Second, moderate realism understands that cognition moves from the perception of particulars to the knowledge of universals. Following this tradition, personifications abstract their features from an accumulation of particular empirical beings; by consequence, they are “tools for thinking about the universals with which they are associated” and, like Langland’s personifications, can incorporate mimetic detail (MM, 218). Vernacular poetry finds in these Aristotelian personifications a literary form that grants “conceptual purchase on” an increasingly complex social world (MM, 262). This form reduces “overwhelming sensorial experience” into a cognizable “intellectual order” that allows readers to think broadly about economic and social questions (MM, 272). Thus in Piers Plowman the personified Hunger functions as an ethical thought experiment that ultimately leads characters and readers to the conclusion that “hunger is not a fit agent of state power” (MM, 300).Because it is abstracted out of the multiplicity of the empirical world, this latter type of Aristotelian personification becomes “the most promising literary form for representing the rapid social change of postplague England” (MM, 272). Turning to this form, late medieval authors “produce allegories that reflect their self-consciously ‘modern’ worldviews” (MM, 233). Although somewhat tempered by scare quotes, Breen’s use of the word modern is palpably polemical. She is, after all, writing about texts produced in the Middle Ages—that amorphous and expansive period against which modernity defines itself. Breen’s claim signals that modernity is a relational concept, that the second half of the fourteenth century—a period that witnessed radical transformations in social and economic structures following the onslaught of the plague—was once perceived as uniquely modern. Breen thus gestures to the theoretical sophistication, and indeed modernity, of this form. To my eye, this audacious remark signals the broader and transhistorical critical significance of this monograph and, most important, of the premodern literary works that it examines.In contrast to Machines of the Mind, Arts of Disruption does not explicitly recognize the “modernity” of personification allegory. Still, Zeeman does insist that allegory mobilizes strategic practices of “discontinuity and dissonance” within a linear narrative (AD, 15). These disruptions capture “the contingency and multi-dimensionality of being in the world” (AD, 2). In doing so, she tacitly recognizes that the disruptiveness inherent to personification allegory captures a being-in-the-world that later and arguably more sophisticated modes of literary discourse such as mimetic realism fail to capture. Despite the protagonists’ best efforts, in both romance and Piers Plowman, the goal of the quest, whether that be for the Holy Grail or truth itself, remains untenable, an object of unfulfilled desire. As if engaging in a personification debate that is exploratory rather than decisive, Zeeman does not provide her reader with the satisfaction of unitary meaning; she emphasizes, in fact, that the poem does not resolve these multiple theories of salvation. Rather, Piers Plowman deploys the “fundamentally conflictual and disruptive work of allegory” and, in doing so, brings into relief the ultimate unknowability of salvation (AD, 328).This contingent and multidimensional being-in-the-world also emerges forcefully in the larger, often fluid structure of Zeeman’s monograph. At the start of her conclusion, Zeeman admits that “this has been a diverse book” (AD, 371). The diversity of her argument reflects the heterogeneity of medieval spiritual thought. In its rejection of totalizing impulses, the book’s structure resembles the dissonance that, for Zeeman, is inherent to allegory. To me, the book’s lack of unity is not dissatisfying. In fact, it feels like a breath of fresh air in a publication landscape that favors the tightly argued monograph and shuns more exploratory forms of academic writing. Zeeman encourages her readers, as if they were listening to the five movements of a symphony, to recognize echoing reverberations across the book. Like the episodic structure of Piers Plowman itself, the argumentative dissonances of Zeeman’s book capture a fragmentary being-in-the-world; its many parts collide and grate against each other but, refusing any totalizing impulses, do not cohere into the illusory satisfaction of unitary meaning.However, in her conclusion Zeeman also suggests that, akin to Breen’s three modes of personification, these five allegorical modes “rub up against each other” and “make meaning out of their dissonant perspectives” (AD, 381, 374). The gaps and fissures that emerge point to those spiritual processes that cannot be articulated in language, especially the mysterious workings of grace. Zeeman’s concluding remarks are intriguing. Indeed, they hint at the reconciliation of two major critical approaches to Piers Plowman: one that views the poem as a progressive narrative of ecclesiastical reform and spiritual ascent, and one that emphasizes the poem’s failures and discontinuities.16 Still, this final attempt at unity feels unsatisfying. Zeeman has not called attention to those moments in the poem—or in medieval thought more broadly—that place these five allegorical modes in counterpoint. Although she begins to explore questions of grace, her claim that Langland’s textual dissonances bring into being the unspeakable and hidden workings of grace needs and deserves extended treatment elsewhere. Yet perhaps the whole point is that any final attempt at unity must, by necessity, feel unsatisfying.The contributions of Machines of the Mind and Arts of Disruption to debates within medieval studies, and in particular, within the minute subfield of Piers Plowman studies, are many. My reading of these books has focused instead on their broader contributions to literary history and to the history of ideas. Indeed, Breen and Zeeman boldly underscore the central role of medieval aesthetics within these histories. These two monographs thus participate in an important critical tradition that recognizes the centrality of the Middle Ages to critical theory as well as to the concepts and ills that define modernity.17 Criticism in this vein does not apply seemingly anachronistic theory to early writing; rather, it finds in the internal logic of medieval literature and philosophy the foundations that undergird the conditions of modernity and its associated critical thought. However, neither Breen nor Zeeman set out to write a grand récit of (pre)modernity. As literary historians, they aim, first and foremost, to reconstruct the evolution of genres or forms as well as to interrogate their complexity. Their books are, to a great extent, celebrations of that enigmatic poem that has occupied most of their careers, to the bodies of discourse with which it converses, and to the brilliant criticism that it has engendered. This is scholarship that, as Maura Nolan puts it, emphasizes how the medieval work of art, “its moments of surprise, its archaisms, and its modernisms retain their true force within our own present.”18 Especially in those sections that do not scrutinize the intricacies of Piers Plowman but rather turn to other bodies of medieval thought, these two books can sometimes feel like thick descriptive catalogs. They illustrate rather than critique a vast corpus of premodern literature, rhetoric, theology, and philosophy. In doing so, they bring to life the vibrant thought and alterity of a medieval past that imagines sins and virtues as embodied speaking subjects yet feels especially modern.I am grateful to Kyra Sutton and the editorial board of Qui Parle for their transformative feedback and encouragement. I thank also Aaron D. Brown and Steven Justice for advice and support.