Skip to main content

David Aers

James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of English
English
Box 90015, Durham, NC 27708-0015
402 Allen Bldg, Durham, NC

Selected Publications


Calvinist Versions of God: A Revolution in Medieval Tradition

Journal Article Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies · September 1, 2022 Full text Cite

Imagining the Virtues: Medieval and Early Modern Histories

Journal Article Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies · September 1, 2022 Full text Cite

Exploring Christian Literature in the Contemporary and Secular University

Journal Article Christianity and Literature · September 1, 2021 Both of us teach in the Duke English Department and hold secondary appointments in the Duke Divinity School. In this essay, we reflect on impediments to teaching Christian literature in contemporary English departments, in particu-lar the naturalistic, ant ... Full text Open Access Cite

Versions of Election From Langland and Aquinas to Calvin and Milton

Book · November 30, 2020 With meticulous attention to the texts of medieval and early modern theologians, poets, and popular writers, this book argues that we can understand the full complexity of the history of various teachings on the doctrine of election only ... ... Cite

Historians on Chaucer: The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales

Journal Article ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW · 2020 Cite

What is charity? William Langland’s answers with some diachronic questions

Journal Article Religions · August 1, 2019 Charity turns out to be the virtue which is both the root and the fruit of salvation in Langland’s Piers Plowman, a late fourteenth-century poem, the greatest theological poem in English. It takes time, suffering and error upon error for Wille, the central ... Full text Cite

The fortunes of tragedy

Conference Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies · January 1, 2019 Full text Cite

Conversions

Journal Article Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies · September 1, 2018 Full text Cite

Chaucer, langland, and the creative imagination

Book · November 22, 2017 First published in 1980, this study of two renowned later fourteenth century English poets, Chaucer and Langland, concentrates on some major and representative aspects of their work. Aers shows that, in contrast to the mass conventional writing of the peri ... Full text Cite

Routledge revivals: Community, gender, and individual identity (1988): English writing 1360-1430

Book · January 1, 2017 First published in 1988, David Aers explores the treatment of community, gender, and individual identity in English writing between 1360 and 1430, focusing on Margery Kempe, Langland, Chaucer, and the poet of Sir Gawain. He shows how these texts deal with ... Full text Cite

Unintended Reformations?

Journal Article Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies · September 1, 2016 Full text Cite

Introduction

Chapter · March 31, 2016 This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes a middle ground between the recognizability which can only be achieved by location within the canon and the renovation of criti ... Cite

Blake: Sex, society and ideology

Chapter · March 31, 2016 This chapter starts with Blake's 'Visions of the Daughters of Albion', printed in 1793. Blake registers the fact that in such a society sexual energy is a threat to all 'fixed' boundaries and conventional order. Blake makes a connection between the wider s ... Cite

Romanticism and ideology: Studies in english writing 1765-1830

Book · March 31, 2016 First published in 1981.The primary purpose of this book is to serve as an introduction to writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In addition to major Romantic poets - Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelly - the authors discuss wr ... Full text Cite

Community and morality: Towards reading Jane Austen

Chapter · March 31, 2016 This chapter attempts to encourage reflection about such moves by looking at some of the ideological and social dimensions of the way Jane Austen hopes to educate the understanding and feelings of her characters and readers. Although Marilyn Butler has lit ... Cite

Coleridge: Individual, community and social agency

Chapter · March 31, 2016 One of Coleridge's earliest surviving poems is an ode on the destruction of the Bastille. The poem displays some features which are worth noticing because they are not merely the product of youthful incompetence in the use of eighteenth-century modes of pe ... Cite

Wordsworth's model of man in 'The Prelude'

Chapter · March 31, 2016 The dominant stream of commentary on William Wordsworth's work seems to have been much impressed by many Wordsworth's quest for such an 'illusion' was part and parcel of his model of man. This chapter describes Wordsworth's writing as seriously as he himse ... Cite

Beyond reformation?: An essay on William Langland's Piers Plowman and the end of Constantinian Christianity

Book · January 1, 2015 In Beyond Reformation? An Essay on William Langland's Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity, David Aers presents a sustained and profound close reading of the final version of William Langland's Piers Plowman, the most searching Christian ... Cite

Langland on the church and the end of the cardinal virtues

Journal Article Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies · December 1, 2012 Featured Publication This essay argues that William Langland's great poem Piers Plowman poses serious questions both to the tradition of the virtues that Langland inherited and to the possibility of their authentic embodiment in the contemporary Church Langland knew. Moving fr ... Full text Cite

The Eucharist

Chapter · 2011 Cite

English reformations

Journal Article Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies · September 1, 2010 This special issue is devoted to the English Reformations and current historiography. The title intentionally pluralizes the traditionally singular noun Reformation to signify a scope that includes both the early Reformation (through to 1547) and continuin ... Full text Open Access Cite

Salvation and sin: Augustine, Langland, and fourteenth-century theology

Journal Article Salvation and Sin: Augustine, Langland, and Fourteenth-Century Theology · 2009 Cite

Discerning the Body

Chapter · 2008 Cite

Langland

Chapter · 2006 Cite

Reform and cultural revolution: Introduction

Journal Article Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies · January 1, 2005 Full text Cite

Wyclif, Poverty and the Poor

Journal Article Yearbook of Langland Studies · 2003 Cite

Introduction

Journal Article Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies · September 1, 2001 Full text Cite

Sacrifice

Book · 2001 Cite

Sacrifice: Medieval and Early Modern

Journal Article JMEMS · 2001 Cite

Visionary Eschatology: Piers Plowman

Journal Article Modern Theology · January 1, 2000 In its later versions Piers Plowman is a long, complex poem of extraordinary formal, theological, and political complexity. It is one of the greatest Christian poems. Written in a period of unprecedented conflict in English polities, including the Church, ... Full text Cite

Written Work: Review Essay

Journal Article YLS · 1998 Cite

Faith, ethics, and community: Reflections on reading late medieval English writing

Journal Article JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES · 1998 Cite

Preface + From medieval Christianities to the Reformations

Journal Article JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES · 1997 Cite

Reformation is Sin.

Journal Article Perspectives · October 1, 1996 Link to item Cite

A Response [to K. Biddick, "Becoming Ethnographic"]

Journal Article Essays in Medieval Studies · 1995 Cite

Representing the humanity of Christ: devotion and politics in Piers Plowman

Journal Article Yearbook of Langland Studies · 1995 Cite

The Self-Mourning: Reflections on Pearl

Journal Article Speculum: a Journal of Medieval Studies · 1993 Cite

Reflections on Current Histories of the Subject

Journal Article Literature and History · 1991 Link to item Cite

Review of The Language of Chaucer by D. Burnley

Journal Article Literature and History · 1990 Link to item Cite

Reading Piers Plowman: Literature History and Criticism

Journal Article Literature and History · 1990 Link to item Cite

Review of Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature by L. Patterson

Journal Article Essays in Criticism: a quarterly journal of literary criticism · October 1988 Link to item Cite

Humanism Historicized

Journal Article Essays in Criticism · 1988 Cite

Rewriting the Middle Ages

Journal Article Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies · 1988 Cite

Rewriting the Middle Ages, Some Suggestions

Journal Article Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies · 1988 Link to item Cite

The Good Shepherds of Medieval Criticism

Journal Article Southern Review · 1987 Cite

Of propre kynde

Journal Article English · 1986 Cite

Chaucer

Book · 1985 Cite

Review of Re-Reading English by P Widdowson

Journal Article Literature and History · 1983 Link to item Cite

The Parliament of Fowls: Authority, the knower and the known

Journal Article Chaucer Review: a journal of medieval studies and literary criticism · 1981 Link to item Cite

Rational Burning: Milton on Love, Sex and Marriage

Journal Article Milton Studies · 1979 Cite

Criseyde: Woman in Medieval Society

Journal Article Chaucer Review: a journal of medieval studies and literary criticism · 1979 Link to item Cite

Imagination and Ideology in 'Piers Plowman'

Journal Article Literature and History · 1978 Link to item Cite

Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess

Journal Article Durham Univ. Journal · 1977 Cite

Blake and the Dialectics of Sex

Journal Article ELH · 1977 Cite

Authority - Chaucer’s Dream Poetry

Journal Article Essays in Criticism · 1977 Cite

William Blake and the Dialectics of Sex

Journal Article ELH: English Literary History · 1977 Full text Link to item Cite

Review of Medieval Dream Poetry by A.C. Spearling

Journal Article Essays in Criticism: a quarterly journal of literary criticism · 1977 Link to item Cite

Review of Milton, a Structural Reading by DF Bouchard

Journal Article Journal of European Studies (Chalfont Saint Giles) · 1975 Link to item Cite