Essays on Piers Plowman

A collection of essays on Piers Plowman by a distinguished medievalist, some of which elucidate editorial methods and the relation of its three versions, while others explore its poetic imagery and use of allegory.

The late fourteenth-century Middle English poem Piers Plowman is often regarded by the modern reader as a difficult and challenging work in several respects. Its complex narrative mixes human individuals with personified abstractions and historical figures in unpredictable ways, and it is often punctuated by lengthy discussions of religious doctrine or social issues. It is written in an unfamiliar alliterative metre, and incorporates frequent quotations from the Bible in Latin. In consequence, critical work has often been dedicated to explanatory analysis which overlooks the poetical qualities of the work. This collection of essays aims to redress the balance by approaching the poem from another direction altogether: Langland’s poetic creativity. The essays on Langland’s allegory show that it does not reduce the world to a set of abstract non-entities, but rather arises spontaneously and naturally from everyday use of language: as nouns combine with verbs, they spring into action and interact with human individuals to form the drama of human life in the bustling world of fourteenth-century society. Langland’s language is ‘instinct with life’, and shows how that life takes place at the intersection of the material and the spiritual. Latin quotations provide a rich store of images that structure the whole poem, one metaphor linking with another until they create a whole parallel world that gives the material an extra dimension and significance. Other essays deal with some of the ‘difficult’ aspects of the poem: the methods of editing a poem that survives in over fifty manuscripts, or alliterative metre, or the relation of the three major versions of the poem, and its relation to its historical context.