The field of literary studies is today both energized and divided by the concept of history. There is on the one hand a renewed insistence that criticism must foreground the historicity of texts, that to ignore their historical siting is not just to risk misinterpretation but to conceal the critic's own immersion within a historical process that both conditions his understanding and solicits his engagement. Yet there is also no clear agreement on how historicism is to be practiced: voices on the left promoting various forms of Marxism, cultural materialism, and New Historicism are met by both an established concern to preserve canons of critical scholarship and a traditional liberal humanism dismayed by the erasure of the individual apparently entailed by the newer critical formations. In this book, Lee Patterson surveys this terrain in terms of the scholarly discipline that has traditionally insisted upon the priority of the historical, Medieval Studies.