A Companion to Piers Plowman is the first comprehensive guide to William Langland's fourteenth-century masterpiece. Until now no single volume has discussed the broad range of issues raised here, nor have previous studies drawn on such an internationally distinguished group of Langland scholars. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990. A Companion to Piers Plowman is the first comprehensive guide to William Langland's fourteenth-century masterpiece. Until now no single volume has discussed the broad range of issues raised here, nor have previous studies drawn on such an internati

Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature explores the relationship of divine creativity, poetry, and ethics in William Langland's fourteenth-century dream vision. These concerns converge in the poem's rich vocabulary of kynde, the familiar Middle English word for nature, broadly construed. But in a remarkable coinage, Langland also uses kynde to name nature's creator, who appears as a character in Piers Plowman. The stakes of this representation could not be greater: by depicting God as Kynde, that is, under the guise of creation itself, Langland explores the capacity of nature and of language to bear the plenitude of the divine. In doing so, he advances a daring claim for the spiritual value of literary art, including his own searching form of theological poetry. This claim challenges recent critical attention to the poem's discourses of disability and failure and reveals the poem's place in a long and diverse tradition of medieval humanism that originates in the twelfth century and, indeed, points forward to celebrations of nature and natural capacity in later periods. By contextualizing Langland's poetics of kynde within contemporary literary, philosophical, legal, and theological discourses, Rebecca Davis offers a new literary history for Piers Plowman that opens up many of the poem's most perplexing interpretative problems.

The fourteenth-century Piers Plowman is one of the most influential poems from the Age of Chaucer. Following the character Will on his quest for the true Christian life, the three dream narratives that make up this work address a number of pressing political, social, moral, and educational issues of the late Middle Ages. Míceál F. Vaughan presents a fresh edition of the A version, an earlier and shorter version of this great work. Unlike the B and C versions, there is no modern, affordable edition of the A version available. For the first time in decades, students and scholars of medieval literature now have access to this important work. Vaughan’s clean, uncluttered text is accompanied by ample glossing of difficult Middle English words. An expansive introduction, which includes a narrative summary of the poem, textual notes, detailed endnotes, and a select bibliography frame the text, making this edition ideal for classroom use. This is the first classroom edition of the A version since Thomas A. Knott and David C. Fowler’s celebrated 1952 publication. Based on an early-fifteenth-century manuscript from the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, Vaughan’s text offers a unique rendition of the poem, and it is the first modern edition not to attribute the poem to William Langland. By conservatively editing one important witness of Piers Plowman, Vaughan takes a new generation of students to an early version of this great medieval poem.

Originally published in 1969 Piers Plowman is a collection of 12 original essays by leading academics on Piers Plowman. As a combined volume, this collection forms a substantial introduction and a comprehensive account of the poem, its background and textual problems. The book’s essays reflect the diversity, and vigour of criticism in the field of medieval literature and opens new perspectives in the study of one of its finest poems.

By examining the various versions of the poem, Dr Goldsmith shows that the enigmatic Piers Plowman is a consistent figure despite many apparent contradictions.

Reader's Guide Literature in English provides expert guidance to, and critical analysis of, the vast number of books available within the subject of English literature, from Anglo-Saxon times to the current American, British and Commonwealth scene. It is designed to help students, teachers and librarians choose the most appropriate books for research and study.

For pious Christians of every age, the question of ultimate concern has been salvation: What is necessary to ensure the soul's eternal bliss? During the Middle Ages, within the Church itself, the guidelines were clear: baptism, reception of the sacraments, an attempt to put into practice the teachings of Christ. But a theological debate arose on the possibility of salvation for those outside the Church, who fell into two basic categories: those who had been offered the Christian faith but had refused it, & those who, for reasons of chronology or geography, lacked the opportunity to join the Church but lived as virtuously as possible. Two categories of these "virtuous pagans" who received special attention were the classical poets & philosophers of Greece & Rome, & the Old Testament patriarchs. From the standpoint of human reason, it seemed especially unfortunate that these two groups should be damned eternally. This study discusses the theological background of this issue; the Virtuous Pagan in legend & in Dante; St. Erkenwald's Harrowing of Hell; & "Piers Plowman": Issues in Salvation & the Harrowing as Thematic Climax.

Critics of Piers Plowman have often behaved as if the great fourteenth-century English poem were written by committee, Written Work marks a major shift in orientation by focusing on William Langland instead of Piers Plowman. The five original historicist studies collected here are less concerned with searching for Langland's identity in medieval records than with examining the marks, even scars, left on him by the history he touched. Derek Pearsall studies what Langland knew about London—its geography, economics, and social life—and the way his focus on the city shifted in the course of revising the poem. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton examines the conditions for authorship and publishing in late fourteenth-century England and uncovers evidence of Langland's struggles to attract patronage and maintain control over the text and circulation of Piers. Anne Middleton's stunning chapter explores how the long shadow of fourteenth-century labor laws fell across Langland as he reworked his text. Ralph Hanna III examines the conflicting demands of manual and intellectual labor on the poet, while Lawrence M. Clopper uncovers the deep impressions that contemporary controversies about Franciscan poverty made on Langland and his life-work. Each of the chapters unfolds from Langland's apologia, the extraordinary autobiographical passage unique to the last of the three distinct versions of Piers Plowman that have come down to us.