Justice joined the faculty in 1987 after a short stint at Washington University, and, one brief absence excepted, hung doggedly about until retirement.
His chronological and geographical focus is impulsive and vagrant, though it usually comes home to the later middle ages in Britain. (It wanders backward from there more often than forward.) He tends to seek out medieval works that think thoughts more interesting, and pose questions more riddling, than the critical tools we bring to bear on them. Thus Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (1994) showed that fourteenth-century peasants had acted on the kinds of analysis historicism might try to subject them to; recent articles (2008, 2012, 2014) argue that medieval belief does not differ from belief as such, and is intelligible only as propositions, assessable in the same way, and having the same chance of truth or falsehood, as any proposition that scholarship might venture; Adam Usk's Secret (Penn, 2015) found that Usk's unnerving little Latin chronicle supplies effects that criticism can describe and explain but nothing that descriptive or symptomatic criticism can generalize.
He is working now on Volume 3 of the Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman; this volume, which treats the poem's third vision—from Thought's entrance to Imaginative's exit—was begun by Anne Middleton.
Currently in progress is volume 3 of the Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman, covering the third vision.
