In classic Marxism, the Middle Ages represent something of a paradox: both a prelapsarian pastoral in which peasants are "bound to the soil" with the "guarantees of existence" offered by feudalism, and an expropriative economy that adumbrates the most extreme exploitative tendencies of industrial capitalism. This special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies is devoted to a general rethinking of the Marxist premodern: its contours, its literary and cultural effects, its theoretical afterlife, and its limitations.

Contributors. Andrew Cole, Valerie Forman, Bruce Holsinger, Ethan Knapp, Maura B. Nolan, John Parker, Stephen H. Rigby, D. Vance Smith