Piers Plowman

10 Key excerpts on "Piers Plowman"

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  Communication, Translation, and Community in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period

  New Cultural-Historical and Literary Perspectives

  • Albrecht Classen(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  ¹ That complexity is a result of several different elements. A poem that underwent expansions and revisions at least three times during the period between the1360s and the 1390s, Piers Plowman is a response to the very heart of social and religious challenges that specifically relate to the  This essay relies on the B text version of Piers Plowman as edited by George Kane and E. Tal- bot Donaldson, Piers Plowman: The B Version (Berkeley, CA, and London: University of California Press, 1988). Daniel F. Pigg, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110776874-007 problems of linguistic signs, how they signify and how they may be abused in the process of daily encounter. Rooted in a traditional, realist notion of signs and their meanings, William Langland explores a world that he believes is on the brink of its own destruction as a result of the corruption of systems that pro- duce meaning. In the first portion of the poem (Prologue-Passus VII, entitled by scribes as the Visio), Langland depicts a society in which the clergy are barely able to read the service in Latin, where the meaning of words has been upended in the confessional, and where documents themselves have contributed to the shattering of meaning. Piers himself seems to be an important key to many of these elements of restoration of the social and religious order, even if the poem keeps moving his role into a more distant future. But Langland is not an existentialist in the sense of simply waiting for Godot to return. There is much that remains that can simply be reformed. To understand how this problem has happened, Langland gives us three worlds through a kind of anthropological thick description in which he explores the circuits of power relations and communications: the world of the court, the world of the confessional, and the world of pardons.

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  A Companion to Piers Plowman

  • John A. Alford(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  They are more likely to try to reconstruct his thought through his literary procedures than vice versa. David Aers (1980) thus substantially reframes in late twentieth-century terms the familiar nineteenth-century assumption that poets "represent" the typical views and common perceptual equipment of their societies. Many richly detailed topical studies published in the last twenty years have situated Piers Plowman in a late fourteenth-century intellectual climate and social landscape which differs markedly from the version current a cen- tury or even fifty years ago. Among these are Janet Coleman's study of the moral theology of the late medieval nominalist philosophers as it bears on the concerns of the poem (1981), and some valuable analyses of the detailed knowledge of legal practice and theory shown by the poem (Birnes 1975; Alford 1977a, 1988; Baldwin 1981; Stokes 1984). Substantial revisions in the broader picture of later fourteenth-century English life have been provid- ed by recent historical work in two related areas: the thought and influence of Wyclif and the Lollard movement, and the social forms of literacy and learning (McFarlane; Hudson). These studies have altered significandy the terms within which questions of the writer's religious heterodoxy, social and political attitudes, and reception by readers have been posed. The literary form, as well as the social context, of the poem has also been illuminated by recent studies of its late medieval literary and intellectual milieu. Unlike the works of Chaucer, which readily acknowledged their many debts to several "maistres" in the classical and medieval literary tradition, Piers Plowman yields to "sources and analogues" study little trace of its im- mediate literary antecedents and possible models: it appears that what Chaucer called "alle poesie" played little part in Langland's conception of

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  The Broadview Anthology of British Literature Volume 1: The Medieval Period - Third Edition

  • Joseph Black, Leonard Conolly, Kate Flint, Isobel Grundy, Don LePan, Roy Liuzza, Jerome J. McGann, Anne Lake Prescott, Barry V. Qualls, Claire Waters(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Broadview Press

    (Publisher)

  Like its dreamer, Piers Plowman is an experimental work made up of a dizzying array of medieval genres. Its texture is unrhymed alliterative verse, a meter composed of two half-lines bound by alliteration (aa/ax), with two stressed syllables in each half line. But Piers Plowman conspicuously lacks the ornate vocabulary of other alliterative romances, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. late fourteenth century), which have hundreds of synonyms for armor, horse, and sword, preferring instead what early readers praised as Langland’s “plain” style, one that uses the vocabulary of everyday life. Piers Plowman also borrows heavily from that most conventional of medieval genres, 370 William Langland the allegorical dream-vision, in which a sleeper has a vision, converses with personifications, and eventually reaches his goal, usually sex with a noble lady, heavenly salvation, or a privileged vision of the afterlife. Both allegorical dream-visions and alliterative romances are, however, linear narratives, expansive enough to include theological debates, treatises on sin, and social commentary, but, at the same time, inexorably committed to progress. Piers Plowman , despite the fact that it is divided into twenty passus (Latin for “steps”), does not go anywhere at all except progressively deeper into itself. Piers Plowman is also an experimental work because it asks big questions by taking extreme measures with the literary and cultural forms available to its author. In the Prologue, for example, the poet wonders whether a sinner can be a visionary, and if so, what view of the world his vision would reveal.

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  The Cambridge History of English Poetry

  • Michael O'Neill(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4 Langland: Piers Plowman a. v. c. schmidt In 1550 The Vision of Piers Plowman was published (without author’s name) by the Protestant printer and controversialist Robert Crowley, and reprinted twice in the same year. Langland’s great poem had previously been known only in manu- script copies, and as a product of a non-courtly tradition never interested William Caxton, who printed the works of Chaucer, Gower and Malory (1478; 1483; 1485). The first literary critics to notice it were William Webbe (1586), who thought the poet’s ‘dooinges . .. somewhat harshe and obscure’ but judged him ‘a very pithy writer’ and George Puttenham (1589), who found his ‘termes . .. hard and obscure’, offering ‘litle pleasure’. 1 Though read by Spenser, Marlowe and possibly Shakespeare, Piers Plowman sank from sight until Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry (1774–81). Warton found the poet’s ‘extremely perplexed’ manner such as to ‘disgust the reader with obscurities’ but ascribed to the ‘imposed constraint’ of the alliterative metre his ‘constant and necessary departure from the natural and obvious forms of expression’. 2 The poem’s arresting first lines, which Warton quotes, hardly bear this out, however; and though Langland is not as linguistically accessible as Chaucer or Gower, his ‘terms’ will hardly seem ‘hard’ by comparison with the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. If Langland’s poetry is ‘difficult’, this is due not to his language but his thought, his disconcertingly labile use of allegory and his unexpected and (at times) startling imagery, which contrasts strongly with the ‘illustrative’ mode typical of medieval writing. In his famous description of divine love (B-version, Passus i.148–58), heterogeneous conceits tumble forth, catching the light of semi-understanding before rolling into the shadow of semi- mystery.

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  The Middle Ages at Work

  • K. Robertson, M. Uebel, K. Robertson, M. Uebel(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  But, of course, we can acknowledge that local practices, and working social organizations, never would look the same after 1381. Notes I am grateful to Maura Nolan and Fiona Somerset, who supplied me terrific commentaries on this paper. 1. William Benzie, Frederick james Furnivall (1825-1910): Victorian Scholar Adventurer (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1983), p. 52. SCRIBAL HERMENEUTICS 197 2. My sense of this phenomenon, as it relates to Piers Plowman, is gathered from a variety of scholarly work, which I cite in full below, by John Alford, Michael Clanchy, Andrew Galloway, Steven Justice, Anne Middleton, and Paul Strohm. Emily Steiner's, "Langland's Documents," and Bruce Holsinger's reply, are both interesting and certainly relevant; see, respec- tively, Yearbook of Langland Studies 14 (2000): 95-107, 110-13. 3. On second and third traditions, see Ann WAstell, "Response to Clopper's 'Langland and Allegory: A Proposition,' " Yearbook of Langland Studies 15 (2001): 43-46; on the fourth, see Morton Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1952; rpt. 1967). 4. By passus and line, I cite The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Complete Edition of the B- Text, ed. A.V.C. Schmidt (London: Everyman's Library, 1991). 5. Elizabeth Salter, Piers Plowman: An Introduction, 2nd ed.

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  The Gnostic Paradigm

  Forms of Knowing in English Literature of the Late Middle Ages

  • N. Elias(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  15

  Indeed, there is a crisis of faith in the late-medieval period and some critics have argued that Piers Plowman depicts an “inward journey” on the backdrop of said crisis in an attempt to find answers through penitential and redemptive suffering.16 However, while these scholars have emphasized the poem’s place within orthodox tradition and materials, the true emphasis and focus in the poem is not just faith but the search for a certain knowledge that is independent of and surpasses faith. And for that small number of “good men” or perhaps even for the individual alone, grasping or rather regaining that knowledge becomes central and crucial. The question of audience yet again rises in connection to this inward journey where the poem presents a possibility for enlightenment and salvation beyond and away from the church. John Burrow claims that since the poem was written in the vernacular, it was possibly intended for prosperous lay audiences as well.17 But Bloomfield’s earlier point remains significant: given the poem’s macaronic structure and density of complex allusions and ideas, “it is hard to think of a large, popular audience for the work, in spite of John Balls’ reference to Piers in his famous letter of 1381. The poem is too difficult and too allusive to have been enjoyed by the common people or by restless, uprooted clerics. The references to Piers and the poems influenced by it all argue for a medium-sized, literate, thoughtful audience” (Bloomfield 1962, 42). The poem’s possible lay audience then pulls it off its clerical pedestal and into the realm of spiritual secularity, but “it must be remembered that the advocates of secular literature in the Middle Ages were on the defensive. The pagan worldliness of much of it clashed with Christian otherworldliness, and those who loved the ancient poets were hard put to defend their poetry. The only way out, as the accessus and glosses to many a classical and pagan work show, was to argue strongly for the utilitas of such literature, and utilitas meant finding a moral meaning” (Bloomfield 1962, 91) for whatever that morality actually meant or was structured upon. The unique structure and topical ambivalence makes it possible to take the discussion in such heterodox directions. In an essay on the authorial aspect of Piers Plowman

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  Writing and Rebellion

  England in 1381

  • Steven Justice(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  Though her investigations concern mainly clerical traditions of imagery, they nevertheless efficiently foreclose any suggestion that Langland based his Piers Plowman on an already extant "folk" character. Piers Plowman in the Rising 119 poem). 37 The appearance of Piers, Hobbe Robber, and Dowel in Carter's and Ball's letters is another, and the most surprising, instance of this new readership. It is also the most challenging. For one thing, it is not clear which of the rebels might have known Langland's poem, or what they, or she, or he knew of it: was Piers Plowman (at one absurd extreme) the bedtime reading of a thousand insurgents or (at the other) John Ball's distant memory of an evening's conversation? This challenge is both historical and methodological, since it requires a history of literary audience, and implies textual consumption, among the rural working classes, where the ordinary empirical sources for such a history are wholly and almost by definition absent: if some of the rebels did have access to complete or partial manuscripts of Piers Plowman, those manuscripts—for reasons so obvious they don't even need listing—would have been most unlikely candidates for survival. External evidence of other sorts, it is true, gives witness to some knowledge of the poem, 38 and we can construct a hypothetical scenario for its transmission among rebel societies. 39 But 37. See J. A. Burrow, "The Audience of Piers Plowman" Anglia 75 (1957): 373-84; Lawton, "Lollardy and the Piers Plowman Tradition"; Anne Middleton, "The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman," in David Lawton, ed., Middle English Alliterative Poetry and Its Literary Background: Seven Essays (Cambridge, Eng., 1982), 101-23; A. I. Doyle, "Re- marks on Surviving Manuscripts of Piers Plowman" in Gregory Kratzman and James Simpson, eds., Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature in Honour of G.

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  William Langland's Piers Plowman

  A Book of Essays

  • Kathleen M. Hewett-Smith(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1

  There is nothing new about this account of poet and poem, for all its essential claims were made more than a century ago by the first modern editor of Piers, the great Walter W. Skeat.2 Derek Pearsall has declared that Skeat’s work on Piers Plowman marks “the end of the ‘myth’ of the poem, and the beginning of a more accurate historical appraisal of it.”3 Skeat’s monumental labors did sweep away many previous fancies about Piers, but in the process he established a new and more persistent myth, or, more accurately, two closely related and interdependent myths: the myth of the poet’s life (including Malvern, marriage, a marginal clerical life in London, and final return to the West country), which explains and is explained by the myth of the poem (Langland obsessively rewriting his single work to get it right and producing at least three separate versions). By using the term myth for these ideas about poet and poem, I do not mean to dismiss what so many have for so long believed. Myths are often good things and can be very productive—they may even be true. The Langland myth has inspired sophisticated editing and powerful critical interpretations, yet its very success has tended to obscure the awkward fact that the myth is based on very little solid evidence. More importantly, it has blocked other potentially fruitful approaches to Piers Plowman.

  Skeat’s myth, created in the mid-nineteenth century, was a major achievement that satisfied a real need. Previous accounts of the author had offered not much more than a personal name and local habitation, about which there was much dispute. Editors and commentators on Piers could not even agree on what to call the author (“Robert” as well as “William” Langland were proposed, the former long the most popular, not to mention others such as “John Malvern”). In the century before Skeat, there was growing acknowledgement that the many manuscripts of Piers contained radically different versions of the work, but there was no consensus about their number or order.4 Into this confusion about poet and poem, Skeat brought clarity, common sense, and a strong imagination, with results that continue to make him one of the most influential scholars of Piers Plowman

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  Piers Plowman

  Critical Approaches

  • S.S. Hussey(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  A. C. Spearing has said that ‘despite the great quantity of scholarly work that has been done on it [ Piers ], it appears that we are still at the stage of having to make up our minds what kind of poem it is’. 9 Indeed, we must do even more. We must decide what we mean by poetry and whether Piers can justly be considered as a poem at all. Often it seems to be regarded as something requiring explanation rather than response, a philosophical argument made more obscure by being written in the form of a verse allegory, with certain passages being singled out for their poetic value. Perversely, its alleged poetic deficiencies are cited in justification of its extra-poetic interest. M. W. Bloomfield claims that – Langland fails, in part, to satisfy these claims [the contending tensions of his age] completely and in perfect artistic form because his aim is to show the spiritual confusion of his own times. Spiritual confusion demands to some extent artistic confusion. 10 It is hard to believe that an impression of the spiritual confusion in the world can be effectively conveyed by a poem that is at all confused in its own structure. Rather, poetic confusion produces impatience and boredom, and it matters little whether we attribute that confusion to a confused poet or a confused Dreamer. Piers may be explained and even excused by this means, but it cannot be justified. In Piers Plowman, I would claim, it is not possible to distinguish ‘thought’ from ‘expression’. The work is a complete unity in which the poet explores the relationship between the finite and the infinite on a number of inter-related levels, and the Dreamer’s rôle is to represent the finite on all these levels in contrast to Piers Plowman who represents the infinite

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  Piers Plowman

  The Evidence for Authorship

  • George Kane(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  2 CHEL, ii, p. 34. He was apparently following Skeat, who, on Dowden's information, and without inspecting the manuscript, had described Trinity College, Dublin MS D.4.I as * written in the fifteenth century, not very early' (The Visions of William concerning Piers the Plowman, iii, Text C, EETS 54, London, 1873, p. xlviii). 3 'Studies' II, p. 42. For discussion of these ascriptions to Robert Langland see below, pp. 37-46. 26 EXTERNAL EVIDENCE surname; because of opinions on illegitimacy expressed in Piers Plowman its author cannot have been a bastard; therefore, while the poet may have been a son of de Rokayle his name cannot have been Langland. 1 The ascription has even formed part of an argux ment that the author of the B version of Piers Plowman was John of Trevisa. 2 The pluralists' rejection of it included raising the reason/ able question what is meant by the 'book called Piers Plowman'. 3 But the authority and the meaning of this ascription are distinct issues which must be separately examined; the necessary order of considering them will be obvious. The ascription is physically authentic. 4 Manuscript and ascrip/ tion are both very early; the hand of the ascription belongs to 'the beginning of the fifteenth century, perhaps even the turn of the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries'. 5 Even with due allowance for the latitude with which the date *c. 1400' must be interpreted the time of writing of the ascription is within living memory of the composi/ tion of the poem. The writer of the ascription was thus chrono/-logically able to have first-hand knowledge of the identity of the author of Piers Plowman. He was probably also advantageously located: the hand of the ascription is almost certainly that of a brief series of annals written above the ascription on the same last leaf, 6 which exhibit 'a considerable interest in the affairs of the South Wales Border, and a good deal of local knowledge'.

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