Download or read book The Piers Plowman Glossary written by George Kane and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2005-08-10 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Glossary is designed as a companion to William Langland's dream vision poem, Piers Plowman, widely regarded as the greatest literary work in Middle English before Chaucer. It glosses and explains over 5000 English words, and foreign words used as if English, in the A, B and C texts of Piers Plowman printed in the critically-acclaimed Athlone editions. Where possible, it illustrates words with examples from all three versions. The first glossary to Piers Plowman was compiled in 1886 by Sir William Skeat but there has been no attempt, until now, to provide a new glossary that takes account of the considerable advances in Middle English scholarship over the last century. This new Glossary gives particular attention to the distinctive problems inherent in its subject, how the texts were preserved, written and received in their time. It takes account of the dialectical and morphological variations between the three texts; the grammar of Langland's style; the richly figurative texture of the rhetorical language used in the poem; and the remoteness of many elements in its content from modern culture and its values.
Download or read book Piers Plowman written by Joseph Wittig and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2001-08-01 with total page 891 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a complete Concordance to the A, B and C texts of Piers Plowman in the Athlone Press editions. Each word in the vocabulary of the three versions (approximately 5,400) is listed alphabetically in its order of occurrence within the particular version, in the succession A, B, C. Except for a few words of extremely frequent occurrence such as the definite and indefinite articles, common conjunctions and the personal pronouns (all these are indexed) each occurrence of each word is listed within its line of context. Words of similar spelling are, where called for, lexicographically distinguished, as are parts of speech. A system of cross-reference to a headword allows for the variety of spelling and dialect forms, and those forms and their frequency are given after the headword. The Latin and French elements in the three texts are concorded in Appendices. The Concordance will prove to be an indispensable tool for the study of the content, language and style of Langland's poems.
Download or read book A Guidebook to Piers Plowman written by Anna Baldwin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2007-03-21 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Langland's poem Piers Plowman is one of the most popular and widely-studied Middle English works. This comprehensive, readable guide leads the student chronologically through the entire text and is designed to be read alongside it. Assuming no previous knowledge, readers are introduced to characters, plot and argument in way that enables them to enjoy and analyse the text for themselves. A Guidebook to 'Piers Plowman': - Clarifies and explores Langland's thinking - Contextualises the religious, political and social issues he raises - Details the genres and sources the poet uses - Employs up-to-date bibliographical knowledge to offer alternative critical interpretations and suggest ways of relating these to the poet's key concerns - Explains Langland's historical, theological and psychological assumptions in helpful inserted text boxes - Features illustrations and suggestions for further reading Concise and approachable, this is an invaluable tool to help students appreciate the originality and modernity of Langland's poetry.
Download or read book Piers Plowman written by Míċeál F. Vaughan and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
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 Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature written by Rebecca Davis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-08 with total page 289 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 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 Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman Volume 1 written by Andrew Galloway and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 507 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.
Download or read book William Langland s Piers Plowman written by Kathleen M. Hewett-Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of newly written essays provides a fresh examination of some of the issues central to the study of this poem, including an exploration of its relevance to contemporary literary theory and to 14th century culture and ideology.
Download or read book Nature and Salvation in Piers Plowman written by Hugh White and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 1988 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of the natural recurs throughout Piers Plowman. This book seeks to show that the idea holds a central place in Langland's understanding of the way in which man is saved. This understanding develops over the course of the poem under the kynde wit and kynde knowing, his presentation of Kynde as God, and his understanding of what is involved in being kynde. It shows how, for all the difficulties he finds with it, Langland remains faithful to the idea of the naturaland how that idea repays this faith, enabling profound meditation on the roles of man and God in respect of man's salvation and, more broadly, on the relationship between God and man.
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 The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman Volume 1 written by Andrew Galloway and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2006-03 with total page 520 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.
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 Preaching and Narrative in Piers Plowman written by Alastair Bennett and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-11 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 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 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 Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages written by Arvind Thomas and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-03-14 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.
