Recent scholarship and criticism have renewed our understanding the place of lyric poetry in literary history. In this talk given Oct. 20, 2016, Seth Lerer explores the relationship among the medieval and early modern traditions of the lyric in English to argue for the latter's creative readings of the former and for a revised sense of periodization that sees continuities of language, social function, and authorial identity in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England. Lerer is a Distinguished Professor of Literature and former Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of California in San Diego.