These texts chart their authors' disenchantment with the limitations of romance and of their own careers, yet they also form an alternative canon of vernacular writing, which is both self-referential and self-questioning.

But the critical tradition has been too decorous. Neither neo-Christian pieties nor high-political allegory can account for the works' audacity and surprise, or the popular investment in both their form and meaning.

Visionary Philology combines nuanced and incisive close reading of the poetry of Geoffrey Hill with detailed scholarship and fresh archival work, examining Hill's work in relation to the history of language and of the study of language.

Contains the text of the poem in three versions: the Auchinleck ms , Ms Harley 3810, and Ms Ashmole 61.

By tracing parallel experiences of political defeat in the lives of their contemporaries, Nicholas Roe argues against any generalized pattern of withdrawal from politics.