Emily Steiner is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her BA from Brown University and her PhD from Yale University. She is author of Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature and Reading Piers Plowman. She has also co-edited The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England, with Candace Barrington; Taxonomies of Knowledge: Information and Order in Medieval Manuscripts, with Lynn Ransom; and The Cambridge History of History Writing: England and Britain, 500-1500 with Jennifer Jahner and Elizabeth Tyler. She is Director of the International Piers Plowman Society.

• 1: Paris in Gloucestershire


• 2: Big Form: Trevisa's Vernacular Megagenre


• 3: Radical Historiography: Langland, Trevisa, and the Polychronicon


• 4: Alphabetical Logic: John Trevisa's Index to the Polychronicon and the English Concordance to the Bible


• 5: Encyclopedic Style: On the Properties of Things


• 6: Encyclopedic Verse and Vernacular Science: The Book of Sydrac


• 7: Holy Encyclopedism: Stephen Batman's Middle Ages


• Appendix

Explores reference books in the medieval period including informational texts, encyclopedias, histories, and manuals, with particular attention to John Trevisa's translations and how these influenced the form and development of vernacular English literature.