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.
Download or read book Piers the Ploughman written by William Langland and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2006-01-26 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by a fourteenth-century cleric, this spiritual allegory explores man in relation to his ultimate destiny against the background of teeming, colorful medieval life.
Download or read book William Langland s Piers Plowman written by William Langland and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1996-12 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A gifted poet has given us an astute, adroit, vigorous, inviting, eminently readable translation. . . . The challenging gamut of Langland's language . . . has here been rendered with blessed energy and precision. Economou has indeed Done-Best."—Allen Mandelbaum
Download or read book The Philosophy of Piers Plowman written by David Strong and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-04-26 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines William Langland’s late medieval poem, The Vision of Piers Plowman, in light of contemporary intellectual thought. David Strong argues that where the philosophers John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham revolutionize the view of human potential through their theories of epistemology, ethics, and freedom of the will, Langland vivifies these ideas by contextualizing them in an individual’s search for truth and love. Specifically, the text ponders the intersection between reason and the will in expressing love. While scholars have consistently noted the text’s indebtedness to these higher strains of thought, this is the first book-length study in over thirty years that explores the depth of this interconnection, and the only one that considers the salience of both Scotus and Ockham. It is essential reading for medieval literary specialists and students as well as any cultural historian who desires to augment their knowledge of truth and love.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman written by Andrew Cole and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-13 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive study of the fascinating medieval poem Piers Plowman, consolidating the most enduring work with groundbreaking new research.
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 The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman Volume 2 written by Ralph Hanna and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-03-15 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full commentary on Piers Plowman since the late nineteenth century, the 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 work'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 with its social world is unrivaled in medieval 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. 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. Perhaps more important, his commentary indicates what has not always appeared clear in past approaches—that the poem only "means" in its totality and within some critical framework, and that its annotation needs always to be guided by a sense of Langland's developing arguments.
Download or read book The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman Volume 4 written by Andrew Galloway and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume 4, by Traugott Lawler, creates a complete vade mecum for readers, identifying and translating all Latin quotations, uncovering allusions, providing full cross-reference to other parts of the poem, drawing in relevant scholarship, discussing all differences between the B and C texts, and unraveling difficult passages.
Download or read book The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman Volume 4 written by Traugott Lawler and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-04-04 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The detailed and wide-ranging Penn Commentary on "Piers Plowman" places the allegorical dream-vision of the poem within the literary, historical, social, and intellectual contexts of late medieval England, and within the long history of critical interpretation of the work, 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 with 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. Covering passūs C.15-19 and B.13-17, Volume 4 of the Penn Commentary on "Piers Plowman" creates a complete vade mecum for readers, identifying and translating all Latin quotations, uncovering allusions, providing full cross-reference to other parts of the poem, drawing in relevant scholarship, and unraveling difficult passages. Like the other commentaries in the series, this volume contains an extensive overview and analysis of each passus, and the subdivisions within, large and small, and discusses all differences between the two versions. It pays careful attention to the poem at the literal level as well as to Latin texts that are analogues or even possible sources of Langland's thought and it emphasizes the comedy of the poem, of which these passūs offer a number of examples.
Download or read book Approaches to Teaching Langland s Piers Plowman written by Thomas A. Goodmann and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2018-12-01 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A series of dream visions, Piers Plowman is a moral reckoning of the whole of medieval England, in which every part of society--from church and king to every sort of "folk"--is considered in the light of the narrator's interpretation of Christian revelation. The Middle English poem, rich and beautiful, is a particular challenge to teach: it exists in three versions, lacks a continuous narrative, is written in a West Midlands dialect, weaves a complex allegory, and treats complicated social and political issues, such as labor, Lollardy, and popular uprising. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," discusses the different versions, critical and classroom editions, and translations of the poem, as well as the many secondary sources. Part 2, "Approaches," helps students engage with the poem's versification, understand its protagonist and its treatment of poverty and equity, and discern connections to the work of other medieval poets, such as Dante and Chaucer.
Download or read book Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature written by Rebecca Davis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Reading Piers Plowman written by Emily Steiner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-09 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading 'Piers Plowman' is an indispensable scholarly guide to a magnificent - and notoriously difficult - medieval poem. With 'Piers Plowman', the fourteenth-century poet William Langland proved that English verse could be at once spiritually electrifying and intellectually rigorous, capable of imagining society in its totality while at the same time exploring heady ideas about language, theology and culture. In her study of Piers Plowman, Emily Steiner explores how Langland's ambitious poetics emerged in dialogue with contemporary ideas; for example, about political counsel and gender, the ethics of poverty, Christian and pagan learning, lordship and servitude, and the long history of Christianity. Lucid and comprehensive, Steiner's study teaches us to stay alert to the poem's stunning effects while still making sense of its literary and historical contexts.
Download or read book Preaching and Narrative in Piers Plowman written by Alastair Bennett and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-19 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Langland's Piers Plowman was written and read during a “golden age” of English preaching. The poem describes a world where sermons took many different forms and were delivered in many different contexts, from public events in the life of the realm to pastoral instruction in the parish. It dramatises preaching as part of its allegorical action, showing how sermons shaped their listeners' understanding of the world; it also includes polemical critique of corrupt, self-interested preaching, and offers radical prescriptions for its reform. This book argues that Langland's central insight into the way that sermons moved and engaged their audiences had to do with their characteristic use of narrative. Preachers in the poem address listeners who are absorbed in the concerns of their present moment, and encourage them to new forms of social and spiritual endeavour by locating that moment in a larger, interpreted plot: the story of an individual life, or an emergent community, or of salvation history as a whole. The book employs a critical vocabulary derived from Paul Ricoeur to describe the process by which these narratives are composed, and to show how they mediate and reconfigure their listeners' experiences.
Download or read book Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law written by Arvind Thomas and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-03-07 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a medieval truism that the poet meddles with words, the lawyer with the world. But are the poet's words and the lawyer's world really so far apart? To what extent does the art of making poems share in the craft of making laws, and vice versa? Framed by such questions, Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages examines the mutually productive interaction between literary and legal "makyngs" in England's great Middle English poem by William Langland. Focusing on Piers Plowman's preoccupation with wrongdoing in the B and C versions, Arvind Thomas examines the versions' representations of trials, confessions, restitutions, penalties, and pardons. Thomas explores how the "literary" informs and transforms the "legal" until they finally cannot be separated. Thomas shows how the poem's narrative voice, metaphor, syntax and style not only reflect but also act upon properties of canon law, such as penitential procedures and authoritative maxims. Langland's mobilization of juridical concepts, Thomas insists, not only engenders a poetics informed by canonist thought but also expresses an alternative vision of canon law from that proposed by medieval jurists and today's medievalists.
Download or read book Piers Plowman and Its Manuscript Tradition written by Sarah Wood and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2022-08-16 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full survey of crucial witnesses to the reception of Piers Plowman.
Download or read book The Myth of Piers Plowman written by Lawrence Warner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-06 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revisionary account of the powerful myths that grew up around the production and reception of the great medieval poem. Also available as Open Access.
Download or read book Earthly Honest Things written by A. V. C. Schmidt and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Earthly Honest Things brings together the complete shorter writings of a leading international authority on William Langland. Of A. V. C. Schmidt’s recent two-volume Piers Plowman: A Parallel Text Edition, Derek Pearsall has said in Speculum that ‘By any standards, it is a monumental achievement … resolute, patient, deeply learned … magisterial. … Schmidt … is always interesting and writes with a controlled passion.’ Lawrence Warner in The Medieval Review has called this edition ‘nothing short of awe-inspiring’ and Andrew Galloway in The Yearbook of Langland Studies has noted how ‘under Schmidt’s brilliant attention to the poem’s scenic and poetic originality, an editorial and literary attentiveness shines luminously throughout.’ Including four that are completely new, these twenty-five pieces cover a wide range of topics, from critical essays on the poem’s imagery, structure, themes and intellectual and literary background (including the philosophical, devotional and mystical traditions) to more technical studies of its text and metre. The previously published essays have been thoroughly revised, updated and cross-referenced, and are provided with a full Bibliography and an Index. Together they represent an indispensable companion to the poem for Langland specialists and an exciting introduction for students to one of the most challenging and rewarding masterpieces of medieval English literature.
