Last Words

Sebastian Sobecki is Professor of Medieval English Literature and Culture at the University of Groningen. His research concentrates on literature from the fourteenth century to the Reformation, especially scribes, archives, and manuscripts; ideas of authorship and literary culture; and law, travel, and politics in literature. He is the author of Unwritten Verities: The Making of England's Vernacular Legal Culture, 1463-1549 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015) and The Sea and Medieval English Literature (D.S. Brewer, 2008). His other books include Medieval English Travel: A Critical Anthology (OUP, 2019), edited with Anthony Bale, A Critical Companion to John Skelton (D.S. Brewer, 2018), with John Scattergood, and The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature, edited with Candace Barrington. He edits the journal Studies in the Age of Chaucer.

In Last Words, Sebastian Sobecki brings together two fields of inquiry that have rarely if ever been linked: manuscript studies and philosophy of the mind ... The only chapter in which there is no wholly new archival discovery is that on Lydgate.

• The Indexical Self: An Introduction 1: Ecce patet tensus: The Trentham Manuscript, In Praise of Peace, and John Gower's Autograph Hand 2: The Series: Thomas Hoccleve's Year of Mourning 3: Parting Shots: Richard Caudray's Libelle of Englyshe Polycye 4: Lydgate's Kneeling Retraction: The Testament as a Literary Palinode 5: The Signet Self: George Ashby's Autograph Writing Afterword: Pragmatic Selves