In the book's opening, Schiff argue that the concept of an Alliterative Revival--the allegedly unified fourteenth-century resuscitation of Anglo-Saxon prosodic practices aimed at countering a Francophile South-- is a nationalist formulation that has reduced criticism's ability to engage with the variety of social and political contexts for late-medieval alliterative verse. Schiff explores the ways in which the nationalist assumptions of a critical Revivalism obscure late-medieval poetic meditations on class consolidation, gendered regional economics, imperial politics, and unstable textual cultures. Schiff analyzes transnational translation politics in William of Palerne and its French source, Guillaume de Palerne, and undermines the notion that alliterative verse was stubbornly Anglocentric. While examining anti-imperialist energies in the Northwest Midlands of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Schiff illuminates the powerful role of women in a zone dynamized by militarism. In a chapter focused on Arthurian texts of the unstable Anglo-Scottish marches, Schiff asserts that nationalist assumptions about alliterative verse disallow us to see practices such as military side-switching and trans-regional poetics. Turning to the socio-material background for the Piers Plowman Tradition, Schiff asserts that alliterative poets were at times on the cutting edge of writing technologies that played a pivotal role in politicized poetry. Schiff concludes that Alliterative Revivalist nationalism obscures both the alterities of pre-national polities characterized by regionalist and imperialist energies, and also precludes us from appreciating crucial continuities between late-medieval and post-national epochs that share fluid notions of territorial space and political identity.