In this volume the editors write about resurrecting the pagan past in the urban spaces of 14th-century England. The political role of Virgil's "Aeneid" in the Uprising of 1381 is considered and uses the narrative of St Erkenwald as a departure for a profound meditation on death and melancholy.

Jody Enders dramatically contrasts the intentionality implicit in two fatal accidents that were also theatrical spectacles, one in medieval Paris and one in modern Los Angeles. And Jocelyn Wogan-Browne's magnificant analytical survey of recent research on female reading communities takes a critical new look at the way in which we deploy the foundational concept of 'community' in histories of medieval reading and literacy. Essays by four leading younger scholars complete this volume with complementary yet highly distinctive perspectives on martyrdom, sainthood, and virginity. Robert Mills considers how the visualization of martyrs' suffering in words and image can be a signifier of erotic pleasure; Sarah Salih evaluates the particular eroticism of the sponsalia Christi; Catherine Sanok reads Pearl through the lens of hagiography and Marxist genre theory; and Nancy Warren's new research on Colette of Corbie looks at the reformist power of female monasticism in the Hundred Years War.

List of illustrations
Introduction: Remembering after Postmodernism
Aeneas in 1381
Crypt and Decryption: Erkenwald Terminable and Interminable
Medieval Death, Modern Morality, and the Fallacies of Intention
A Man is Being Beaten
Queering Sponsalia Christi: Virginity, Gender, and Desire in the Early Middle English Anchoritic Texts
The Geography of Genre in the Physician's Tale and Pearl
Monastic Politics: St Colette of Corbie, Franciscan Reform, and the House of Burgundy
Analytical Survey 5: 'Reading is Good Prayer': Recent Research on Female Reading Communities
Index