Emily Steiner received her BA from Brown University and her PhD from Yale. She is the author of Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and has co-edited a collection of essays called The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England (Cornell University Press, 2002). She has also published essays in The Yearbook of Langland Studies, New Medieval Literatures, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and Representations. She is presently working on a book manuscript provisionally titled The Politics of Literary Form. She is particularly devoted to William Langland's great fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman, but her research interests extend to Lollard literature, medieval drama and ritual performance, and Jewish-Christian relations in the Middle Ages. Her teaching interests also include history of the English language, Old English literature, Chaucer, and poetry of all periods.