Author Description

"Now and again a study appears that in its particular combination of authorial talents, new materials, and fresh approach dramatically moves our shared scholarly enterprise forward. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's Books Under Suspicion is precisely such an achievement. Kerby-Fulton is at once a careful and sensitive literary reader, a learned and rigorous intellectual historian, and an able writer of crisp English prose. The subject of Books Under Suspicion is the anxious world of late medieval English readers and writers. Censorship arises only when people believe that books matter. Kerby-Fulton shows us with admirable learning just how passionately the arbiters of religious orthodoxy and social order thought they mattered in late medieval England. The book is, among other things, an important new chapter in the history of ideas and the passionate contest for their control." --John V. Fleming, Princeton University "In her monumental Books Under Suspicion, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton offers a brilliantly nuanced, sharply revisionist account of intellectual freedom in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She presents us with a far less insular England than we are used to seeing--an England swept by fierce, invigorating, often stormy theological winds from across the Channel. In this narrative Lollards rub shoulders with Joachite prophets, Free Spirit mystics, Continental visionaries, and radical Ockhamists, and the most threatening targets of censure or censorship are not necessarily the ones we would have guessed. Kerby-Fulton brings unparalleled precision to her study of tolerance and repression directed at 'the left wing of orthodoxy.' " --Barbara Newman, Northwestern University "In this ambitious study of the circulation and censorship of visionary theologies in later medieval England, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton undertakes a thorough overhaul of what we think we know about many aspects of English religious thought and o