A Brief History of the Middle English Text Series

Middle english text series

a brief history

1990: First METS volumes published

2018: METS begins a digital revamp of our website and our editions

2020: METS has published 96 volumes and over 1200 texts

1995: METS receives first NEH grant

Mid-1980s: TEAMS: Teaching Association for Medieval Studies is founded

• METS is published in association with the University of Rochester for TEAMS: Teaching Association for Medieval Studies.

• In its 30 year history, METS has been awarded eight grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities for creating scholarly editions and translations.

"It was my thought that...

if we were going to have such an organization as TEAMS, we ought to also have some project that demonstrated its value. And so I put together a proposal to the University of Rochester for the publication of 25 volumes of medieval texts other than Chaucer, Langland, and whatever was available so that we didn’t have to rely on anthologies. The problem with anthologies was they didn’t include the works that we necessarily wanted to teach, and frequently didn’t include complete works. By the time you had taught out of anthologies for one to two years, it was out of date. And so we created the Middle English Text Series."

Russell peck, founder and general editor

open access #goals

METS increases access to medieval texts which occupy an important place in the literary and cultural canon, but which have not been readily available to students or researchers, by publishing texts online on an open access website as well as in affordable print editions.