, ed. Robert J. Meyer-Lee and Catherine Sanok. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. s. Brewer, 2018, xii, 276 pp., 30 b/w ill.

We can always use critical studies that question both what constitutes a literary text in the Middle Ages and what form those texts have, as is the case with the essays collected by Robert J. Meyer-Lee and Catherine Sanok. They define form as “a historically contingent set of attributes defining privileged texts as literature so that the latter may serve particular social, economic, and political interests” (4). They hasten, however, and quite correctly, to warn us about the difficulty in being overly specific in light of the contingency of such formal criteria, which might undermine the entire effort here to some extent, even though they then emphasize again that the articles “meditate upon the question of the relation between form and the literary” (6), as it manifested itself in medieval and late medieval England, which is supposed to be the exclusive terrain covered here, thought that is not always true. Taking us back to this deliberate (?) seesaw, they then return to highlight that in the pre-modern world the differences between literary and non-literary were rather fluid (8). What might then be the focus of this book? The sub-heading of the book itself leaves us a bit puzzled: “Beyond Form,” so why does the introduction then highlight formality issues so centrally?