Download or read book Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth century Apocalypse written by Morton Wilfred Bloomfield and published by New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers U. P. This book was released on 1962 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relates the work, in both form and content, to its 14th century intellectual environment.
Download or read book The World of Piers Plowman written by Jeanne Krochalis and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-09-16 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Next to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, William Langland's Piers Plowman is perhaps the best-known literary picture of fourteenth-century England. Langland's work, more socially concerned and critical than Chaucer's, reflected an age of religious controversy, social upheaval, and political unrest. The World of Piers Plowman puts the reader in touch with the sources that helped shape Langland's somber vision. The representative documents included in this book, often cited in connection with the poem yet difficult to come by, disclose the background of Piers Plowman in social and economic history as well as folklore, art, theology, homilies, religious tractates, and chronicles. The seven sections into which the readings are divided illustrate ideas concerning (1) the heavens, the universal Church, England, and London; (2) material and spiritual abuses; (3) the most influential literary genres of the period; (4) exempla, moral tales from hagiography, sermon literature, and tracts on moral theology; (5) types of practical instruction available to the devout layperson; (6) the multiple meanings in many literary works; and (7) the moment of death, the judgments on the soul, and the torments and rewards of the afterlife.
Download or read book A Companion to Piers Plowman written by John A. Alford and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature written by George Watson and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1974 with total page 1296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Manor the Plowman and the Shepherd written by Ordelle G. Hill and published by Susquehanna University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the early sixteenth century, the agrarian landscape changed to more pastoral land, more enclosures, and a decrease in (or a rearrangement of) manorial lands. Increased population and an abundance of labor created economic tensions that caused moralizers to cry out for reform, but there is no evidence pastoral lands decreased even by the end of the century. In literature, the plowman tradition continued to exist in such forms as the remarkable sermon by Bishop Latimer, but more often than not it was viewed nostalgically as part of the past, and used to address the problems brought about by the pastoral economy of the sixteenth century. The plowman can be identified even as late as Spenser's Faerie Queene where he assumes the moral associations of the fourteenth-century type, and in Sidney where the plowman becomes the unsympathetic buffoon.
Download or read book The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman Volume 2 written by Andrew Galloway and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman, Volume 2, by Ralph Hanna, deliberately addresses the question of the poem's perceived "difficulty," by indicating the legitimate areas of unresolved dilemmas, while offering often original explanations of a variety of textual loci.
Download or read book Revelation and the Apocalypse in Late Medieval Literature written by Justin M. Byron-Davies and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2020-02-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book will equip the reader with a stronger understanding of the religious and historical background to these late medieval texts. It will provide insight into the influence of the biblical Apocalypse upon the literature of the period in a systematic way. Importantly, by treating the writings of Julian of Norwich and William Langland as contemporaneous the book balances the female and male approaches to and engagement with the biblical Apocalypse.
Download or read book The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman Volume 5 written by Andrew Galloway and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2006-02-22 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full commentary on Piers Plowman since the late nineteenth century is inaugurated with the publication of the first two of its five projected volumes. The detailed and wide-ranging Penn Commentary places the allegorical dream-vision of Piers Plowman within the literary, historical, social, and intellectual contexts of late medieval England, and within the long history of critical interpretation of the poem, assessing past scholarship while offering original materials and insights throughout. The authors' line-by-line, section by section, and passus by passus commentary on all three versions of the poem and on the stages of its multiple revisions reveals new aspects of the poem's meaning while assessing and summarizing a complex and often divisive scholarly tradition. The volumes offer an up-to-date, original, and open-ended guide to a poem whose engagement in its social world is unrivaled in English literature, and whose literary, religious, and intellectual accomplishments are uniquely powerful. The Penn Commentary is designed to be equally useful to readers of the A, B, or C texts of the poem. It is geared to readers eager to have detailed experience of Piers Plowman and other medieval literature, possessing some basic knowledge of Middle English language and literature, and interested in pondering further the particularly difficult relationships to both that this poem possesses. Others, with interest in poetry of all periods, will find the extended and detailed commentary useful precisely because it does not seek to avoid the poem's challenges but seeks instead to provoke thought about its intricacy and poetic achievements. Andrew Galloway's Volume 1 treats the poem's first vision, from the Prologue through Passus 4, in all three versions, accepting the C text as the poet's final word but excavating downward through the earlier B and A texts. Stephen Barney's volume completes the framework for the commentary, dealing with the final three passûs of the poem, extant only in the B and C versions. Subsequent volumes will be the work of Ralph Hanna, Traugott Lawler, and Anne Middleton. Overall, The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman marks a new stage of concentrated yet wide-ranging attention to a text whose repeated revisions and literary and intellectual complexity make it both an elusive object of inquiry and a literary work whose richness has long deserved the capacious and minutely detailed treatment that only a full commentary can allow. Perhaps no poem in English appeals more than Piers Plowman to those readers who understand Yeats's "fascination with things difficult," yet The Penn Commentary will enable generations of readers to share in the pleasures and challenges of experiencing, engaging with, and trying to elucidate the difficulties of one of the towering achievements of English literature.
Download or read book Piers Plowman written by George Kane and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-01-13 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The major edition of the three versions of Piers Plowman which the Athlone Press is in the process of publishing and of which Professor Kane is the general editor was not planned to include discussion of the authorship of the poem. The editors were agreed at the outset in believing that no real case for multiple authorship had been established in the course of the debate initiated by J. M. Manley in 1906, and they felt that a majority of Middle English scholars would support this view. They were satisfied that the hypothesis of single authorship was the best hypothesis to account for all aspects of the relation between the versions of the poem. However, the recent appearance of a book comparing the A and B versions in the belief that they were not written by the same man led Professor Kane to make a survey of the arguments advanced in support of multiple authorship and to examine again the evidence for single authorship. This re-assessment was originally undertaken without specific reference to the new edition of the three versions, but the unexpectedly positive character of Professor Kane's findings has a bearing on the edition by materially reducing the hypothetical element in the editorial position. The results of the inquiry are therefore published as a supplementary volume to the text edition and in an identical format.
Download or read book The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages written by Richard Kenneth Emmerson and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative overview of the influence of the Apocalypse on the shaping of the Christian culture of the Middle Ages.
Download or read book The Virtuous Pagan in Middle English Literature written by Cindy L. Vitto and published by American Philosophical Society. This book was released on 1989 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book From the Brink of the Apocalypse written by John Aberth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for the first edition: "Aberth wears his very considerable and up-to-date scholarship lightly and his study of a series of complex and somber calamites is made remarkably vivid." -- Barrie Dobson, Honorary Professor of History, University of York The later Middle Ages was a period of unparalleled chaos and misery -in the form of war, famine, plague, and death. At times it must have seemed like the end of the world was truly at hand. And yet, as John Aberth reveals in this lively work, late medieval Europeans' cultural assumptions uniquely equipped them to face up postively to the huge problems that they faced. Relying on rich literary, historical and material sources, the book brings this period and its beliefs and attitudes vividly to life. Taking his themes from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, John Aberth describes how the lives of ordinary people were transformed by a series of crises, including the Great Famine, the Black Death and the Hundred Years War. Yet he also shows how prayers, chronicles, poetry, and especially commemorative art reveal an optimistic people, whose belief in the apocalypse somehow gave them the ability to transcend the woes they faced on this earth. This second edition is brought fully up to date with recent scholarship, and the scope of the book is broadened to include many more examples from mainland Europe. The new edition features fully revised sections on famine, war, and plague, as well as a new epitaph. The book draws some bold new conclusions and raises important questions, which will be fascinating reading for all students and general readers with an interest in medieval history.
Download or read book Songes of Rechelesnesse written by Lawrence M. Clopper and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sketches Piers Plowman's reformist agenda for the Franciscan friars
Download or read book New Directions in Medieval Mystical and Devotional Literature written by Amy N. Vines and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-07-15 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Directions in Medieval Mystical and Devotional Literature honors the career and scholarship of Denise N. Baker. Contributors include both early career and established scholars, and the collected essays examine a broad range of medieval mystical and religious literature, such as the writings of Julian of Norwich and William Langland.
Download or read book Political Allegory in Late Medieval England written by Ann W. Astell and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ann W. Astell here affords a radically new understanding of the rhetorical nature of allegorical poetry in the late Middle Ages. She shows that major English writers of that era—among them, William Langland, John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Gawain-poet—offered in their works of fiction timely commentary on current events and public issues. Poems previously regarded as only vaguely political in their subject matter are seen by Astell to be highly detailed and specific in their veiled historical references, implied audiences, and admonitions. Astell begins by describing the Augustinian and Boethian rhetorical principles involved in the invention of allegory. She then compares literary and historical treatments of key events in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, finding an astonishing match of allusions and code words, especially those deriving from puns, titles, heraldic devices, and personal cognizances, as well as repeated proverbs, prophecies, and exempla. Among the works she discusses are John Ball's Letters and parts of Piers Plowman, which she presents as two examples of allegorical literature associated with the Peasants' Revolution of 1381; Gower's allegorical representation of the Merciless Parliament of 1388 in Confessio Amantis; and Chaucer's brilliant literary handling of key events in the reign of Richard II. In addition Astell argues for a precise dating of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight between 1397 and 1399 and decodes the work as a political allegory.
Download or read book Reading Piers Plowman and The Pilgrim s Progress written by Barbara A. Johnson and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Centering her discussion on two historical "ways of reading"--Which she calls the Protestant and the lettered - Barbara A. Johnson traces the development of a Protestant readership as it is reflected in the reception of Langland's Piers Plowman and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Informed by reader-response and reception theory and literacy and cultural studies, Johnson's ambitious examination of these two ostensibly literary texts charts the cultural roles they played in the centuries following their composition, roles far more important than their modern critical reputations can explain. The reception of these two works, revealing as it does changing ideas concerning the nature and status of books as well as the stature of authors, documents the means by which a culture shapes and is shaped by texts. Johnson argues that much more evidence exists about how earlier readers read than has hitherto been acknowledged. The reception of Piers Plowman, for example, can be inferred from references to the work, the apparatus its Renaissance printer inserted in his editions, the marginal comments readers inscribed both in printed editions and in manuscripts, and the apocryphal "plowman" texts that constitute interpretations of Langland's poem. Conditioned more by religious, historical, and economic forces than literary concerns, Langland's poem became a part of the reformist tradition that culminated in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. By understanding this tradition, Bunyan's place in it, and the way the reception of The Pilgrim's Progress illustrates the beginning of a new more realistic fictional tradition, Johnson concludes, we can begin to delineate a more accurate history of the ways literature and society intersect, a history of readers reading.
Download or read book The Lost History of Piers Plowman written by Lawrence Warner and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-12-07 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the recent outpouring of scholarship on Piers Plowman, Lawrence Warner contends, we know much less about the poem's production, transmission, and readership than one might think. When did William Langland write each of the three versions of the poem, and when did they enter wide circulation? What role did scribes and other agents play in these processes? The Lost History of "Piers Plowman" engages with these questions to bring about a fundamental shift in our understanding of the genesis and development of the Middle English poem. According to received history, the poem exists in three distinct, chronological versions, the A, B, and C texts, with most scholars agreeing that Langland completed the B text—the version most familiar to modern readers—around 1377-78. Challenging much of the prevalent wisdom about the poem, Warner argues that the received B text is not an integral poem aligned with a single author but, rather, two groups of manuscripts, each of which, because of scribal activities, takes on varying amounts of what we now call C version matter. Through close textual analysis, he reveals that the B text is a conflation of an ur-B text with a collection of passages that belong to the C version of circa 1390, demonstrating that the circulation of the C text actually predates that of the B. The Lost History of "Piers Plowman" is a groundbreaking and provocative work that establishes an entirely new paradigm for the study of one of the central works of Middle English literature. It will be of interest to scholars and students of textual studies, editorial theory, and medieval history.
