Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages explores the formal composition, public performance, and popular reception of vernacular poetry, music, and prose within late medieval French and English cultures. This collection of essays considers the extra-literary and extra-textual methods by which vernacular forms and genres were obtained and examines the roles that performance and orality play in the reception and dissemination of those genres, arguing that late medieval vernacular forms can be used to delineate the interests and perspectives of the subaltern. Via an interdisciplinary approach, contributors use theories of multimodality, translation, manuscript studies, sound studies, gender studies, and activist New Formalism to address how and for whom popular, vernacular medieval forms were made.

Katharine W. Jager is a poet and medieval scholar.  She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown, USA, and has published essays on medieval aesthetics, the masculine performativity of chivalric speech acts, onomatopoeia and multimodality in alliterative verse, and aurality in late medieval English poetry, among other subjects.

Chapter 1: Introduction: Past Vernaculars: The Aesthetic and the Everyday, Katherine W. Jager.- Chapter 2: The Weight of Experience: John Gower and the Peasants' Revolt, Joel D. Anderson.- Chapter 3: 'Stonde Manlyche togedyr in Trewthe': Lyric and Rebellion Among Late Medieval Men, Katharine W. Jager.- Chapter 4: On Bells and Rebellion: The Auditory Imagination and Social Reform, Medieval and Modern, Adin Lears.- Chapter 5: High or Low?: Medieval English Carols as Part of Vernacular Culture, 1380-1450, Lisa Colton and Louise McInnes.- Chapter 6: Rethinking the Passion Lyric: Verbal Devotion, Narrative Variation, and the Poetics of Comfort in Middle English Poetry, Barbara Zimbalist.- Chapter 7: Multimodality and Memory in the Mise-en-page of Guillaume de Machaut's Mass, Kate Maxwell.- Chapter 8: Alchemical Language: Latin and the Vernacular inthe Poetry of Thomas Norton and John Gower, David Hadbawnik.- Chapter 9: Vernacular 'Makynge,' Jack Upland, and the Aesthetics of Antfraternalism, Noëlle Phillips.- Chapter 10: Read It and Weep: Affective and Literate Engagement in Richard Rolle's Meditations and The Book of Margery Kempe, Jessica Barr.