Paul J. Patterson is an Assistant Professor at Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia. His article, “Reforming Chaucer: Margins and Religion in an Apocryphal Canterbury Tale,” in Book History (2005), lays out the groundwork of his current project on the reception of Chaucer and other medieval (especially radical religious) texts in England in the sixteenth century. He is
interested in the unprecedented expansion in the availability and ownership of books in early modern London, Oxford, and Cambridge and the way that this began to formalize literary and textual criticism in the period. He is editor of the Middle English Mirror to Devout People, also known as the Speculum devotorum, for the Early English Text Society.