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The problem of beginning was invested with increasing urgency in the fourteenth century, imagined and grappled with in the courts, the churches, the universities, the workshops, the fields, and the streets of England. The Book of the Incipit reveals how Langland's poem exemplifies a widespread interest in beginning in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, an interest that appears in such divergent fields as the physics of motion, the measurement of time, logic, grammar, rhetoric, theology, book production, and insurrection.

Smith offers a theoretical understanding of beginning that departs from the structuralisms of Edward Said, the traditional formalisms of A. D. Nuttall, and most medievalist and modernist treatments of closure. Instead, he conceives a work's beginning as a figure of the work itself, and the inception of language as the problem of beginning to which we continue to return.

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