- The Black Ellesmere Shipman
- Following Chaucer: Offices of the Active Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020)
- The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012).
- Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II (Penn State Press, 2005)
- Dictionary of the Middle Ages, Supplement 1, W. C. Jordan, ed., J. Kaye and L. Staley, associate editors (NY: Charles Scribners Sons, 2004)
- The Book of Margery Kempe, edited and translated (Norton Critical Editions, 2001)
- The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Literature with David Aers (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996)
- The Book of Margery Kempe, complete text, modernized spelling, and notes, Middle English Text Series, TEAMS (The Medieval Institute, 1996)
- Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions (1994).
- The Shepheardes Calender: An Introduction (1990)
- The Voice of the "Gawain"-Poet (1984)
- "Love and Courtship," in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, Supplement 1 (NY: Charles Scribners Sons, 2004)
- "Translating Communitas," in Imagining a Medieval English Community" (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004)
- "Personal Identity," in A Companion to Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000)
- "Pearl and the Contingencies of Love and Piety," in Medieval Literature and Historical Inquiry. Essays in Honor of Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000)
- "The Pearl Dreamer and the Eleventh Hour" in Text and Matter, a New Critical Perspective of the Pearl-Poet (1991)
- "Huntington 140: Chaucer, Lydgate and the Politics of Retelling," (Retelling Tales, 1997)
A number of articles on medieval and Renaissance literature in journals including Studies in the Age of Chaucer, The American Benedictine Review, The Chaucer Review, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Mediaevalia, Modern Philology, Speculum, Traditio, The Spenser Newsletter, Spenser Studies and Studies in Philology; contributions to The Chaucer Encyclopedia; reviews in American Notes and Queries, Mediaevalia et Humanistica, Renaissance Quarterly, Spenser Newsletter, Speculum