Difficult Pasts

Manchester University Press (2023)

Medieval romances were widely condemned by early modern thinkers: the genre of questing knights and marvellous adventure was decried as bloody, bawdy and superstitious. Despite such proclamations, though, the Middle English romance genre remained popular across the early modern period.

Difficult pasts examines the reception of Middle English romances after the Protestant Reformation in England, arguing that the genre's popularity rested not in its violent or superstitious qualities, but in its multivocality. Incorporating insights from book history, reception history and cultural memory studies, Ensley argues that the medieval romance book became a flexible site of memory with which early modern readers could both connect with and distance themselves from the recent 'difficult past', a past that invited controversy and encouraged divided perspectives. Central characters in this study range from canonical authors like Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser to less studied figures, such as printer William Copland, Elizabethan scribe Edward Banister and seventeenth-century poet and romance enthusiast, John Lane. In uniting a wide range of romance readers' perspectives, the book complicates clear ruptures between manuscript and print, Catholic and Protestant, or medieval and Renaissance. Difficult pasts reveals how the romance book offers a new way to understand the simultaneous change and continuity that defines post-Reformation England.

Reviewed by Julia Boffey in SELIM here.

Selected Articles

With Thomas Goodmann. “And I awaked therwith”: Piers Plowman, the Settlement Movement, and Service Learning.

Yearbook of Langland Studies 38 (Forthcoming, 2024).

Correction, Modernization, and Elaboration in a Seventeenth-Century Translation of John Lydgate’s Troy Book.

Studies in Philology 119.3 (2022), 469-94. Learn More

“Profitable” Gower: Commonplacing and the Early Modern Confessio Amantis.

Journal of English and Germanic Philology 121.2 (2022), 202-26. Learn More

"Meeting Lydgate’s Ghost: Building Medieval History in Seventeenth-Century England.

Review of English Studies 71 (2020), 251-271. Learn More

Framing Chaucer's Plowman

Yearbook of Langland Studies 32 (2018), 331-49. Learn More

“Reading Chaucer in the Tower: The Person Behind the Pen in an Early-Modern Copy of Chaucer’s Works.”

Journal of the Early Book Society 18 (2015), 136-57. Learn More