Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History

Brian Cummings is Professor of English at the University of Sussex and was founding Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies from 2004 to 2008. He received his BA and PhD at Cambridge University, and before moving to Sussex was Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He is the author of The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford University Press, 2002), a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year for 2003. A paperbackedition of this book appeared in July 2007. He has also published widely in journals such as English Literary Renaissance and Studies in Church History , and is a contributor to The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (1999) and The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).James Simpson is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University (2004-). He was previously Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge (1999-2003). He is a Life Fellow of Fellow of Girton College and an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His books include Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text (Longman, 1990); Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry (Cambridge University Press,1995); Reform and Cultural Revolution, being volume 2 in the Oxford English Literary History (Oxford University Press, 2002) (winner of the British Academy Sir Israel Gollancz Prize, 2007); and Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Harvard University Press, 2007) (winner of the SilverMedal, 2008 Independent Publisher Book Awards, religion category). He is currently writing about iconoclasm in the Anglo-American tradition.