Inspired readings
At a fashion-industry dinner in New York last fall, a reporter asked various notables what books they were reading. The famed designer Vera Wang had a distinctive choice: “Fragments and Assemblages,” a book about reading practices in 14th-century London, by MIT literature professor Arthur Bahr — although, as Wang noted, the topic was “out of my comfort zone.” Medieval literature is out of many people’s comfort zones, but Bahr specializes in putting people at ease with the subject, both as a scholar and a teacher. For instance, “Fragments and Assemblages” deduced that medieval readers browsed thorough texts on many topics, as we often do today, because manuscripts stitched together wildly disparate documents, from poems to legal treatises. Bahr’s new book project is an analysis of the mysterious medieval manuscript containing the poems “Pearl” and “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” which he hopes will also make a variety of readers comfortable with...