Awards

• Winner of Haskins Gold Medal 2010 (United States)
• Winner of Haskins Gold Medal from the Medieval Academy of America 2010 (United States)
• Winner of John Ben Snow Prize 2007 (United States)
• Winner of John Ben Snow Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies 2007 (United States)

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9780268033231

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Reviews

Books Under Suspicion is an enormously learned and important book that promises to decisively change the traditional story of religious censorship in pre-Reformation England. . . . This is a book to be read slowly and often. It will change the landscape of late medieval spirituality in England and provides a new, richer, and more dangerous context for many of our best-loved authors. -- The Medieval Review

Books Under Suspicion is an enormously learned and important book that promises to decisively change the traditional story of religious censorship in pre-Reformation England. . . . This is a book to be read slowly and often. It will change the landscape of late medieval spirituality in England and provides a new, richer, and more dangerous context for many of our best-loved authors. --The Medieval Review With Books Under Suspicion, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton has accomplished something remarkable. This far-reaching study does nothing less than shift the paradigms with which we think about such fundamental categories as heterodoxy, orthodoxy, theology, and revelation in relation to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English religious cultures. Her original, painstaking study of manuscripts also leads us to revise our thinking about major canonical English writers including Chaucer, Langland, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe . . . No scholar or student of Middle English literature, or medieval English religion, should be without this sophisticated, groundbreaking volume. --Church History Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's Books under Suspicionis among the major books of the decade in medieval English studies. In this monumental volume on academic freedom and its discontents, Kerby-Fulton has given us nothing less than a new intellectual history of theological pluralism, dissent, and the limits of tolerance in the late Middle Ages. . .. --The Catholic Historical Review Books Under Suspicion is an enormously learned and important book that promises to decisively change the traditional story of religious censorship in pre-Reformation England. . . . This is a book to be read slowly and often. It will change the landscape of late medieval spirituality in England and provides a new, richer, and more dangerous context for many of our best-loved authors. The Medieval Review With Books Under Suspicion, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton has accomplished something remarkable. This far-reaching study does nothing less than shift the paradigms with which we think about such fundamental categories as heterodoxy, orthodoxy, theology, and revelation in relation to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English religious cultures. Her original, painstaking study of manuscripts also leads us to revise our thinking about major canonical English writers including Chaucer, Langland, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe . . . No scholar or student of Middle English literature, or medieval English religion, should be without this sophisticated, groundbreaking volume. Church History Kathryn Kerby-Fulton s Books under Suspicionis among the major books of the decade in medieval English studies. In this monumental volume on academic freedom and its discontents, Kerby-Fulton has given us nothing less than a new intellectual history of theological pluralism, dissent, and the limits of tolerance in the late Middle Ages. . . . The Catholic Historical Review Books Under Suspicion is an enormously learned and important book that promises to decisively change the traditional story of religious censorship in pre-Reformation England. . . . This is a book to be read slowly and often. It will change the landscape of late medieval spirituality in England and provides a new, richer, and more dangerous context for many of our best-loved authors. The Medieval Review With Books Under Suspicion, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton has accomplished something remarkable. This far-reaching study does nothing less than shift the paradigms with which we think about such fundamental categories as heterodoxy, orthodoxy, theology, and revelation in relation to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English religious cultures. Her original, painstaking study of manuscripts also leads us to revise our thinking about major canonical English writers including Chaucer, Langland, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe . . . No scholar or student of Middle English literature, or medieval English religion, should be without this sophisticated, groundbreaking volume. Church History Kathryn Kerby-Fulton s Books under Suspicion is among the major books of the decade in medieval English studies. In this monumental volume on academic freedom and its discontents, Kerby-Fulton has given us nothing less than a new intellectual history of theological pluralism, dissent, and the limits of tolerance in the late Middle Ages. . . . The Catholic Historical Review Books Under Suspicion is an enormously learned and important book that promises to decisively change the traditional story of religious censorship in pre-Reformation England. . . . This is a book to be read slowly and often. It will change the landscape of late medieval spirituality in England and provides a new, richer, and more dangerous context for many of our best-loved authors. -- The Medieval Review With Books Under Suspicion , Kathryn Kerby-Fulton has accomplished something remarkable. This far-reaching study does nothing less than shift the paradigms with which we think about such fundamental categories as heterodoxy, orthodoxy, theology, and revelation in relation to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English religious cultures. Her original, painstaking study of manuscripts also leads us to revise our thinking about major canonical English writers including Chaucer, Langland, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe . . . No scholar or student of Middle English literature, or medieval English religion, should be without this sophisticated, groundbreaking volume. -- Church History Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's Books under Suspicion is among the major books of the decade in medieval English studies. In this monumental volume on academic freedom and its discontents, Kerby-Fulton has given us nothing less than a new intellectual history of theological pluralism, dissent, and the limits of tolerance in the late Middle Ages. . .. -- The Catholic Historical Review

The excitement one gains in reading Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's work is exceeded only by the awareness of the richness of scholarship yet to come that will continue to explore the wide range of theological speculation and revelatory prophecy in late medieval England. -Comitatus Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's Books under Suspicion is among the major books of the decade in medieval English studies. In this monumental volume on academic freedom and its discontents, Kerby-Fulton has given us nothing less than a new intellectual history of theological pluralism, dissent, and the limits of tolerance in the late Middle Ages. -The Catholic Historical Review With Books under Suspicion, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton has accomplished something remarkable. This far-reaching study does nothing less than shift the paradigms with which we think about such fundamental categories as heterodoxy, orthodoxy, theology, and revelation in relation to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English religious cultures. Her original, painstaking study of manuscripts also leads us to revise our thinking about major canonical English writers, including Chaucer, Langland, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe. . . . [N]o scholar or student of Middle English literature, or medieval English religion, should be without this sophisticated, groundbreaking volume. -Church History Kathryn Kerby-Fulton concentrates on the reign of Richard II . . . and contends that total censorship was a more subtle process before the uniformity imposed by the printed book. . . . I am sure that [the] book will spark controversy, making many of us re-examine old assumptions. -Times Literary Supplement Kerby-Fulton's monumental work serves modern scholars as a guide to the complexity of English manuscript culture as it relates to visionary writing and the censoring pressure it both invited and resisted. Engaging with the demands of Books under Suspicion will take the reader into a world of medieval writing and reading that cannot be contained by our own sense of disciplinary boundaries. -Rocky Mountain Review Kerby-Fulton's admirable book is necessary reading for all who are interested in the textual culture of England at the end of the middle ages. -The English Historical Review Kerby-Fulton's book simply rewrites the history of heterodoxy in late medieval England. . . . It would be hard to walk away from the book with any assumptions intact about medieval England's insularity, its impermeability to Continental heterodoxy, and its total domination by Wycliffism. . . . Kerby-Fulton's stunning codicological work is the book's greatest resource, and its ambition its most admirable trait. She has done a great service to the profession with this book, and it will prove a monument of literary scholarship in years to come. -Yearbook of Langland Studies In Books Under Suspicion, Kerby-Fulton brings this second image of medieval culture brilliantly to life in the specific instance of attitudes toward revelatory writing in England from 1329 to 1437, a period of robust tolerance, and on the whole, as she puts it, 'an age of failed censorship.' . . . Books Under Suspicion is bound to mark a turning point in scholars' understanding of the pervasive cultural awareness and tolerance of heterodox theology in late-medieval England. That turning point will be evident not only in scholars' use of the wealth of information and insight that Kerby-Fulton makes available in this book but also in the new research it will stimulate. -Journal of the Early Book Society In many ways, this is a bravura display of book history. By building her study of manuscripts as much as texts, Kerby-Fulton has-perhaps fully, for the first time in an English context-uncovered the complex dynamics of learned communities in the Black Death period, the undermighty nature of the Oxford and Cambridge schoolrooms by comparison with the intellectual inventiveness and intrigue, and the publishing power of the communities of mendicants, monks, and professional clerks in the provinces. -American Historical Review Kerby-Fulton examines textual suppression or acceptance of heresies in late medieval England beyond those related to the Lollard movement of John Wycliffe. -Research Book News Kerby-Fulton modestly claims that hers is but a beginning study that only suggests lines of enquiry. Possibly, but her detailed study and observations make this a bedrock for further study on Medieval censorship. It belongs in academic libraries supporting graduate study in religious or literary history. -Catholic Library World Books Under Suspicion offers much for the study of early modern religion and literature . . . [It] will surely be required reading for all scholars of late medieval English literary and intellectual history for at least decades to come, inspiring as it does not so much suspicion as admiration. -Sixteenth Century Journal

<p> Books Under Suspicion is an enormously learned and important book that promises to decisively change the traditional story of religious censorship in pre-Reformation England. . . . This is a book to be read slowly and often. It will change the landscape of late medieval spirituality in England and provides a new, richer, and more dangerous context for many of our best-loved authors. -- The Medieval Review

Author Information

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton is Notre Dame Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author and editor of a number of books, including most recently Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), co-edited with Linda Olson.

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