In Last Words, Sebastian Sobecki brings together two fields of inquiry that have rarely if ever been linked: manuscript studies and philosophy of the mind ... The only chapter in which there is no wholly new archival discovery is that on Lydgate. * Jane Griffiths, Studies in the Age of Chaucer * Sebastian Sobecki's ambitious monograph, Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England, challenges our perspective of reading late medieval texts and authors as remnants of the distant past, disconnected as we are from the language and contexts of fifteenth-century literature. Instead, Sobecki argues, we should view these textsby Gower, Hoccleve, Lydgate, and Ashbyas closer contemporary audiences would have, 'created for a specific audience with direct access to the author and a full understanding of a text's fabric of allusions' (p. 7). * Kate Ash-Irisarri et al., The Year's Work in English Studies * Sobecki's close readings of Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate show the tensions that remain within social identities. His detailed archival and codicological work adds significantly to the investigations of contemporary scholars, for whom late medieval textual culture is not just a medium for transmitting works but an environment for composing, reading, and understanding them. * Robert R. Edwards, Speculum * When texts have been severed from the primary audiences that could fill in any such blanks, then present-day scholars are left to make the attempt. That is the task Sobecki has set himself, and which he is pursuing with admirable energy and enthusiasm. * Alastair Minnis, Medium Ęvum *
