In this volume the editors write about resurrecting the pagan past in the urban spaces of 14th-century England. The political role of Virgil's "Aeneid" in the Uprising of 1381 is considered and uses the narrative of St Erkenwald as a departure for a profound meditation on death and melancholy.

New Medieval Literatures is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures. Volume 5 is marked by a preoccupation with origins or beginnings: the return to some of the foundational texts of the "modern," here Marx, Freud, and classical Marxist literary criticism; or how the Middle Ages thematized its own antecedents, in the founding myth of imperial Rome, the originary force of martyrdom, and the reformist foundations of monasticism.