This timely volume examines the commitments of historicism in the wake of New Historicism. It contributes to the construction of a materialist historicism while, at the same time, proposing that discussions of work need not be limited to the clash between labour and capital. To this end, the essays offer more than a strictly historical view of the complex terms, social and literary, within which labour was treated in the medieval period. Several of the essays strive to reformulate the very critical language we use to think about the categories of labour and work through a continually doubled engagement with modern theories of labour and medieval theories and practices of labour.

Conceptualizing Labor in the Middle Ages; M.Uebel The Idioms of Women's Work and Thomas Hoccleve's Travails; C.Batt 'As If She Were Single'; B.Gastle 'The Workman is Worth His Mede'; K.Crassons The Carpenters Company and Lay Spirituality in Late Medieval England; M.Addison Amos Reconstructing English Labor Laws; A.Musson Branding and the Technologies of Labor Regulation; K.Robertson The Displacement of Labor in Wynnere and Wastoure; B.Harwood Scribal Hermeneutics and the Genres of Social Organization in Piers Plowman; A.Cole Poetic Work and Scribal Labor in Hoccleve and Langland; E.Knapp The Erasure of Labor: Hoccleve, Caxton, and the Information Age; W.Kuskin

KELLIE ROBERTSON is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, USA.

MICHAEL UEBEL is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, USA.