New Medieval Literatures is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures. Volume 5 is marked by a preoccupation with origins or beginnings: the return to some of the foundational texts of the "modern," here Marx, Freud, and classical Marxist literary criticism; or how the Middle Ages thematized its own antecedents, in the founding myth of imperial Rome, the originary force of martyrdom, and the reformist foundations of monasticism.