This article surveys the rich ways in which Middle English authors used the word I, considering what it can tell us about the medieval conceptualizations of subjectivity. It argues against the idea of a sharp break between medieval and early modern accounts of selfhood, and in favour of a more sensitive understanding of the genres of medieval first-person writing, suggesting reasons why those genres don't easily correspond to categories of modern life-writing. This article considers allegory, the rhetorical device of the persona, and spiritual and allegorical 'autobiographies' in Middle English in order to arrive at an account of how medieval authors revised the influential accounts of subjectivity that they inherited from late Antique writers like Boethius and St Augustine and dramatized the subject as a site of competing psychological faculties which were in constant dialogue and distress. This article gathers its evidence from, and offers specific readings of a range of Middle English literature by

This essay offers a new reading of William Harvey’s De conceptione, considering for the first time its interest in non-generative conception. Further, it considers the way that Harvey entangles observations about erotic and maternal love in his discussions of the conceiving body. Love provides a context which Harvey reads for information about conception. But, for Harvey, conception and generation are not synonymous. Conceptions can be without as well as with a foetus, and Harvey is at least as interested in non-generation as he is in generation, and false pregnancy as pregnancy. Harvey’s notion of an immaterial or ‘mere’ conception, on which he builds an intricate analogy about the relation of uterus and brain, is designed to accommodate un-reproductive as well as reproductive experience. Reading signs of love – desires, devotions, intimacies – gives Harvey a way of distinguishing between different kinds of reproductive non-events, health and pathology. He offers an extended consideration of wind eggs and uses fictions of the wind to credit the loves of those that produce no offspring as nonetheless creatively conceiving and biologically demonstrative.

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Home is one of the most emotive words in any language but our experience of being at home is historically and culturally specific. This article reviews a range of recent scholarship on the later medieval English urban household in the disciplines of History, Literary criticism and Archaeology. It has been composed collaboratively by the members of the York Medieval Household Research Group. After an introduction tracing the wider context in which all histories of domesticity are located, we focus in on our particular period through a close study of contemporary later medieval vocabularies of homeliness. This is followed by a sequence of short thematic sections addressing the historiography of different aspects the demographic structure, ideological construction and daily and emotional life of the household as reflected in the current interests of members of the group.