Writing and Rebellion England in 1381 [Paperback]

In this compelling account of the peasants' revolt of 1381, in which rebels burned hundreds of official archives and attacked other symbols of authority, Steven Justice demonstrates that the rebellion was not an uncontrolled, inarticulate explosion of peasant resentment but an informed and tactical claim to literacy and rule.

Focusing on six brief, enigmatic texts written by the rebels themselves, Justice places the English peasantry within a public discourse from which historians, both medieval and modern, have thus far excluded them. He recreates the imaginative world of medieval villagershow they worked and governed themselves, how they used official communications in unofficial ways, and how they produced a disciplined insurgent ideology.

Steven Justiceis Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Original, courageous, and exemplary. . . . This will prove to be one of the most significant and energizing works of recent decades. David Wallace, editor ofThe Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature

A thoroughly accomplished and groundbreaking piece of historicist medievalism, and a 'local' study that resonates in an extraordinarily sensitive and promising way with problems that are worrying and entrancing literary and cultural studies in general. . . . Justice's work powerfully addresses issues that have emerged in the controversies over essentialism and performativity in feminist and ethnicity and queer theory, over alteritism and intimacy in post-colonial theory, and over subversion and containment in new historicism. . . . IfWriting and Rebellionwere to do no more than recharge the practice of medieval scholarship, draw attention to the textuality of 1381, and establish the importance of 1381 to Ricardian culture as a whole, thereby guiding us to a new reading of that period, it would be a wonderful book; it does all these things, but its implicationslÓ,