"An excellent guide for students of Medieval literature who are encountering Langland and Piers Plowman for the first time. This comprehensive volume explains the many elements and contexts of one of the most complex works of a complex era. Textual, scholarly, and critical, this introduction is written by one of the foremost experts on Langland: the scholar selected to prepare the concordance to the three extant versions of Piers Plowman." —the Publisher
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Part of the Authors of the Middle Ages series,
this is a study of both author and work.
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This Norton Critical Edition uses the alliterative verse translation of E. Talbot Donaldson with excellent annotations. Selections are also included in the Middle English original for comparison. This edition also includes sources and backgrounds for the poem, 20 critical essays by leading Medievalists, as well as a glossary and a select bibliography. Simply, the best.
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E. Talbot Donalson wonderful translation in alliterative verse, which closely emulates the flow and feel of the original.
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"'Piers Plowman' inspired a tradition of medieval poems as vehicles for popular criticism. The four full-length works collected here cover vital issues of their day." —The Publisher
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"This is a new annotated translation of the B-text, Langland's own extensive revision of his original text."
—The Publisher.
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"This edition is the first complete edition of the C-text of "Piers Plowman" since that of Skeat (1886). It has been prepared with recognition of the complexity of the work, and also of its significance as a record of social and religious conflict and crises in a turbulent age." —The Publisher
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"Economou's translation preserves the intensity of the poet's verse and the narrative energy of his alliterative long line, the immediacy of the original's story of the quest for salvation, and the individuality of its language and wordplay." —The Publisher
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The definitive edition of the A version.
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The definitive edition of the B version.
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The definitive edition of the C version.
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"This comprehensive, readable guide works chronologically through the entire text of Piers Plowman and is designed to be read alongside it. Assuming no previous knowledge, it equips readers to enjoy and analyse the text for themselves by clarifying Langland's thinking, contextualising the religious, political and social issues raised, detailing the genres and sources he is using, and offering alternative critical interpretations at key points." —The Publisher.
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"Simpson's introductory study is based on the B-text, the most widely read and studied of the three versions of Piers Plowman. Its structure follows that of the poem's eight visions and its introduction situates the poem in literary and political history. This fully revised edition takes account of scholarship over the last 15 years and includes a revised and updated bibliography." —The Publisher.
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"Absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in a serious consideration of Piers Plowman and also for anyone planning critical or scholarly investigation on it (in other words, for all students of the poem, all readers of the poem, and all scholars of the poem."
—Robert Worth Frank, Jr.
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"This ambitious study links William Langland's great poem Piers Plowman to wider medieval enquiries into the nature of intellectual and spiritual desire. Zeeman's radical approach opens up a completely fresh reading of Piers Plowman and sheds light on the history of medieval psychology."
—The Publisher
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"Benson tackles the difficult and vital question of Piers Plowman's engagement with its history by getting down to the basics of the text, the circumstances of its production, and the real world from which it emerged. His historical re-envisioning of Piers is exactly what Langland's poem, at this stage in its career, needs. Public Piers Plowman is a major achievement."
—Derek Pearsall, Harvard University
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"Gillian Rudd's study of language, learning, and the forms of knowledge and authority in Piers and how they are all intimately related, are intricately questioning one another, and are never quite resolved." —Gregory Roper
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"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." —Card Catalog
Synopsis and Table of Contents

"Harwood (English, Miami U.) considers William Langland's great Middle English poem, Piers Plowman, as an expression of a crisis of faith—as the first Middle English poem to have been motivated by the deterioration in theological and philosophical foundations experienced by the 14th-century writer, as argued by Muscatine and Middleton." —Book News, Inc.
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"After exploring the growing dissonance between religious tradition and economic language, this study examines expressions of social discontent, including the actions and communications of the 1381 rebels, William Langland's moral objections in Piers Plowman, and the complaints central to the other "plowman poems" of Langland's imitators. This study argues that Langland and the 1381 rebels exhibit "radical nostalgia"—a longing for agrarian Christian roots that projects the traditional social structure of the past onto a renewed, if not millennial, society." —the Publisher
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"The period in which Langland wrote was volatile and full of colorful and contentious people: Edward III, Richard II, Chaucer, and Wyclif — and Langland.... Clopper presents the voice of this powerful disputant who lived in a period marked by dissent and discontent. This book will be of interest to literary scholars, historians of the late Middle Ages, and scholars in religious studies." —Amazon.com
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"The five original historicist studies collected here are less concerned with searching for Langland's identity in medieval records than with examining the marks, even scars, left on him by the history he touched.... Each of the chapters unfolds from Langland's apologia, the extraordinary autobiographical passage unique to the last of the three distinct versions of Piers Plowman that have come down to us." —The Publisher
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"This catalogue of the 18 extant manuscripts, now located in Cambridge, London, Oxford, Tokyo and California, offers both individual manuscript descriptions and a record of the annotations." —Amazon.co.uk
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"The 50-plus extant manuscripts of Piers Plowman have always posed a puzzle to editors and readers. This work is an account of the editions of the poem which have appeared since 1550, when it was first published by the Protestant reformer Robert Crowley." —the Publisher
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"This book aims to broaden the traditional, literary, view of Langland and his poem in a study of him and his world. The author rejects the view that Langland was primarily a political radical or a prophet of doom and sees him as simultaneously an imaginative poet and a preacher of Christian charity.... The book is intended both as an intrduction to Langland's work and as a contribution to the history of religious thought." —Amazon.com
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"[E]xplores the psychology underlying Passus 8-20 of "Piers Plowman", and by doing so aims to remedy any gaps which may remain in the understanding of Langland's poem, despite previous single articles on separate psychological personifications."
—Amazon.co.uk
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"[O]ffers a detailed reading of the many passages in "Piers Plowman" A,B, and C concerned with marriage and family, and places these passages within the frameworks of contemporary social history, law, theology, exegesis and literature." —Amazon.co.uk
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"The idea of the natural... develops over the course of [Langland's] poem under the kynde wit and kynde knowing, his presentation of Kynde as God, and his understanding of what is involved in being kynde...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."
— The Publisher
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"Dr Scase describes and analyses important but little-known medieval polemics and satires, tracing the emergence of a distinctive 'new anticlericalism' which entailed nothing less than the making of a new anticlerical literature.... Always referring closely to the contemporary controversies, and with constant attention to the detail of the text, she reveals the significance of the poem's anticlericalism." —Amazon
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