The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman (Cambridge Companions to Literature)
Cambridge University Press, 2/13/2014
EAN 9781107401587, ISBN10: 1107401585
Paperback, 290 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm
Language: English
Piers Plowman has long been considered one of the greatest poems of medieval England. Current scholarship on this alliterative masterpiece looks very different from that available even a decade ago. New information about the manuscripts of the poem, new historical discoveries, and new investigations of its literary, cultural and theoretical scope have fundamentally altered the very meaning of Langland's art. This Companion thus critically surveys traditional scholarship, with the aim of recuperating its best insights, and it ventures forth into newer areas of inquiry attuned to questions of social setting, institutional context, intellectual and literary history, theory, and the revitalized fields of codicology and paleography. By proceeding through chapters that offer cumulatively wider views as well as stand-alone analyses of topics most crucial to understanding Piers Plowman, this Companion gives serious students and seasoned scholars alike up-to-date knowledge of this intricate and beautiful poem.
Introduction
studying Piers Plowman in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway
Part I. The Poem and its Traditions
1. Major episodes and moments in Piers Plowman B Helen Barr
2. The versions and revisions of Piers Plowman Ralph Hanna
3. Literary history and Piers Plowman Steven Justice
4. Allegory and Piers Plowman Jill Mann
Part II. Historical and Intellectual Contexts
5. The Rokeles
an index for a 'Langland' family history Robert Adams
6. Religious forms and institutions in Piers Plowman James Simpson
7. Political forms and institutions in Piers Plowman Matthew Giancarlo
8. Christian philosophy in Piers Plowman Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway
9. The non-Christians of Piers Plowman Suzanne Conklin Akbari
Part III. Readers and Responses
10. Manuscripts and readers of Piers Plowman Simon Horobin
11. Plowman traditions in late medieval and early modern writing Lawrence Warner
12. Piers Plowman in theory Nicolette Zeeman
Guide to further reading.