A volume selecting from Jill Mann’s many essays on late medieval English literature is virtually inevitable, but no less welcome. Through a continuing forty-year career, she has established great authority in medieval Latin and English literary scholarship and criticism, from whose Middle English side the fifteen essays here, first published between 1981 and 2009, are selected. These all sustain Mark Rasmussen’s felicitous title: not only Mann’s “life in words,” but also “life” — social, economic, psychological, and ethical — in language and narrative form, amounting to philology in a broad sense.

This commitment was visible in her earliest, and in some ways, fairly or not, still most widely known and influential study, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (1973). There Mann demolished simple ideas of Chaucer’s realism and direct topicality by demonstrating his reworkings of literary traditions to produce “The General Prologue,” showing that Chaucer’s manipulations of medieval “estates satire” created an effect of realism by erasing claims of objective morality and, as Mann repeatedly indicated, portraying society as a plethora of professionally relativist moral universes. This patient demonstration contributed a great deal to the sophisticated historicizing approaches to medieval literature then emerging. Subsequent attention to how Chaucer participates in a world of late medieval affinities or contractual social relations, how he explores the centering of literature on the complexities of the self’s relation to history or society, how he indicates the early stages of “wry self-fashioning” that became the signature of the Renaissance, all drew something, acknowledged or not, from Mann’s early project (see, respectively, Paul Strohm, Lee Patterson, and Stephen Greenblatt).

Yet Mann’s criticism has never sought mainly to situate late medieval literature in social and political contexts, even though many of the essays here elucidate their works’ economic and social visions. Mann’s comparison of Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s notions of “worth” via their attention to Criseyde (Cressida) as an object of exchange by men; Mann’s discussion of the slippery sense of “sufficiency” and other terms of economic thought, such as “credit,” in a range of works by Chaucer and the Pearl poet; Mann’s consideration of “need” versus “market-value” in the many contracts and transactions of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, all demonstrate how resourceful late medieval writers were — and Mann herself is — in treating questions fundamental to a culture shifting toward mercantile modes of exchange and social structure.

But it has always been clear that Mann is chiefly committed to pursuing literature in terms of intertextuality, diction, plot, and genre, especially aspects of those leading into ideas and ethical topics with which her authors themselves might have been consciously concerned. The results are unusually free of critical skirmishes. Indeed, Mann’s restraint in engaging any secondary works is partly why her results yield unexpected perspectives. At the same time, she is perhaps too disengaged from criticism on subjects that carry long lineages of discussion, including perspectives that the original authors would never have been likely to discuss directly or in terms that go beyond the categories of literature itself (this was the thrust of some criticism of her 1991 book on Chaucer’s feminism). The impression of Mann’s reluctance to engage with criticism, much less theory, is stronger than usual in this collection because there has been no effort to update references to criticism. In some cases this seems a missed opportunity. For instance, it is indeed resurrecting a “long outmoded” term to invoke the late 1960s idea of a “happening” as a parallel to medieval aventure (as Mann notes Derek Brewer did in 1970 [248]) — all the more since so much important criticism has subsequently appeared concerning what performance might mean, in textuality, narrative, theatricality, and identity, including gender.

One might therefore either admonish or applaud criticism that doesn’t generally speak to local, fleeting scholarly arguments or positions, or seek widely for parallels or anticipations of its own claims. Yet just as some essays here have much to offer considerations of wider social perspectives, so others have relevance to other theory, including Freudian or Lacanian frameworks — and vice versa. The four essays on Malory, for instance, variously discuss an ideal of “wholeness” perpetually shattered into “distance” and social disarray in the Morte d’Arthur, leaving a haunting principle of desire for unity that is neither social nor religious but “realized only on the plane of narrative” (331). Engagement with Mann’s readings by those who would emphasize social, gender, or other theory remains potentially as productive now as it ever has been, so long as they recognize that her commitment remains to explicate the force of language and literary form, especially as the focuses of ethical and intellectual problems with which the writers she chooses consciously grappled. That purpose or method is aptly celebrated by this volume, indeed, more emphatically so than her work generally has been amid the many scholarly realms to which it has so significantly contributed.