Piers Plowman

This article considers the significance of the ‘blered’ eye as a figure for covetousness in Piers Plowman and ‘The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’. Piers Plowman refers to the ‘blered’ eye in its account of the false pardoner, the confession of Covetise, and the Samaritan’s image of the three things that drive a man from his house, while the Canon’s Yeoman describes his own ‘blered’ eyes as a consequence of his master’s alchemical experiments. ‘Blereynesse’ named a condition where the eye became watery or rheumatic, which was understood to be contagious and often moralised in terms of spiritual confusion. To ‘blere’ a person’s eye was also an idiom for trickery and deception. The ‘blered’ eye was further associated with Leah from the book of Genesis, whose own ‘blereynesse’ was read to represent the spiritual confusion of the Old Law in relation to the New, and of the active life in relation to the contemplative. The article argues that Langland and Chaucer drew on the symptoms of the ‘blered’ eye, and on its interrelated moralised, idiomatic and allegorical meanings, to describe covetousness as a characteristically ‘unkynde’ sin, which alienates people from ‘kynde’ relationships and obscures the significance of ‘kynde’ knowledge. As a condition that makes it hard to see, ‘blereynesse’ figures the confusion that arises from ‘unkynde’ covetousness in these tales, while, as a contagious condition, and as an idiom for trickery, it speaks to the complex forms of deception and self-deception by which one person’s covetousness might extend to other people. Through its association with Leah and the active life, the imagery of the ‘blered’ eye reinforces the connections between ‘unkynde’ covetousness and economic work in these poems. Through its association with Leah and the Old Law, meanwhile, ‘blereynesse’ becomes part of the way the poems relate contemporary covetousness to larger historical narratives, moving from a golden age to a corrupt present in ‘The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’, and from a sinful present to a redemptive future in Piers Plowman.

This is the first part of what is projected to be a sustained, multifaceted exploration of the relationship between William Langland's late-fourteenth-century alliterative satire Piers Plowman and traditions in early English culture that are 'vernacular' in more than the purely literary sense, The juxtaposition will also encompass 'the lered and the lewed': the man of letters who authored to poem  and the men of words who performed vernacular song and narrative. Composition will be sequential, as the topic cannot be encompassed within a single paper, and cumulative, as the aspects dealt with in the respective studies are not segments that can be easily excised and treated in isolation, so that focus on any one is achieved only at the price of severing significant connections with the others. The first part, "A Fair Field full of Folklore?" covers Langland's expressed attitudes to various forms of vernacular culture, particularly song, rumour and narrative, as performed by the 'folk' or professional entertainers.

My undergraduate dissertation, written at the University of Sheffield. This dissertation aims to incorporate Henri Lefebvre's 'Production of Space' into a reading of 'Piers Plowman', which assesses the breakdown of feudalism, the incresed use of material culture by the church and the portrayal of the body.

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Law and Literature addresses the need for an authoritative guide  through the bewildering maze of medieval law as well as the need for concise examples of how the law infiltrated literary texts. The Companion combines accessible essays written by leading specialists in legal history with essays exploring literary conversations with the law in the works of later medieval authors
from Chaucer to Malory. The first half of this book contains detailed introductions to legal concepts, practices, and institutions in medieval England. In the second half, experts cover a number of texts and authors from across the later medieval period whose verse and prose can be understood as engaging with the law. In this way, the Cambridge Companion to Medieval Law and Literature forms the basis for students wishing to explore this rich area or for scholars to familiarise themselves with literary uses of the law.

ISBN: 9781316632345

University o( Western Ontario London. Ontario /// t/'fii hillt-/i/iaiini liilwij iind in iluii iiiincpLiic iit the Ihty of Daorn Hi/, ttmi^clci tt'it/i iiii. tronifn's schullc hhwcn iind n-y.wn iillc men tlutt luuUen suffial eii'th iith thai the tvorltl nuts formtdjioni Heth to lytte. itnel sfhiiUc t'onifu in body [ttnrij soiillc tu iu^^cnnnt hcfort the fair of otire lord in the I'li/f of losiiphitth. And ihv doom ^thitllc hcu on /'stir dity snch tymc iis onre lord III om. And thv tlom a lull hc^ ynnv such haurt-iis ourc (hidj descended to hcllt' anddispoyled it, for iit stuh ht/toe sth/tlhe despoyle the worlilandIcde his ihosow to hlissf. and the othnr schallt' he eondempne to perpettiellepeyues. And thaniie schalle etifry man hatic after his dissert, ottthergode or ettyllrbut yif the mercy of (iodpasse his ri^htivisness.

This essay explores the history of three closely-related but not equivalent concepts, terribilis (terror), horribilis (horror), and timor Domini (fear of God) as they are used in the Latin Bible and medieval literature. While ‘terror’ denotes an immediate physical response to something utterly alien and unknowable, ‘the fear of God’ is, in Bernard of Clairvaux’s phrase, a ‘friendly terror’, what Job, to his ultimate profit, experiences when God reveals to him a universe that, while very frightening, is wholly measured. Unlike the other two, ‘horror’ was an aesthetic term, serving both to characterize a hair-raising experience and a stylistic effect. (Note that page refs. in brackets are to the published essay.)

 The Greek Philosophers, who spoke of such abstract things as Beauty and Truth and Justice, could personify them. The rhetorical tradition of the ancients made the term "allegory" familiar, defining it as "continued metaphor" or "saying one thing and meaning another,"…As belief in myths broke down, the narratives were treated in a critical light as psychological or physical allegories…The Neoplatonic tradition, merging with various religious gnosticisms, produced visionary accounts of the workings of the universe…  Barney, "Allegorical Visions", p.123

Middle English Literature

The second part of the anthology including examples of Middle English Literature starting with Sir Gawain and Canterbury Tales. The anthology is intended as a source of texts for students.

English Literature – An Anthology for Students. Volume 1 - From the Old English Period to the Eighteenth Century. Poznań: Dom Wydawniczy Rebis, 2010, pp. 512.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Among the unsung heroes of the resurgence of writing in English in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are the unbeneficed-that is, unemployed or underemployed-clergy, many of whom earned full or partial livings in various mundane ecclesiastical jobs, in administrative writing offices, or as freelance scribes Twentieth-century scholars of church history referred to these unbeneficed clergy as the "clerical proletariat": a "submerged" class of clergy who had only their daily labor to live upon and whose competence was almost always underestimated. 1 In one sense they were a "proletariat," but in another sense the Marxist analogy breaks down for the Middle Ages, because their scribal work gave them a certain access to a "means of production": in this case, the power to wield the pen, -and many of them did so in the service of various kinds of protest literature and, more generally, writing for hitherto neglected vernacular audiences. 2 Whether it is accurate to say that they created these new audiences or that the audiences were already eager for vernacular texts and they merely obliged-or some combination of both-their agency was by any measure a critical factor in the rise of English literature. Since a great deal of Middle English literature was anonymously authored and copied, getting at the evidence for the role of this clerical underclass is not easy. But the fingerprints of the "clerical proletariat" at work in Middle English book production often appear both internally in texts and outwardly in the manuscripts themselves, leaving a trail of clues for us to follow.

In this article, I explore the potential that Magian symbolism offered for Edward III's political purposes in the middle decades of the fourteenth century. Now most familiar as a symbol of devotion, the Three Kings' appeal as a legendary model of kingship has been ignored, and their prominence in Edward's reign should not be seen as merely incidental to his program of building a symbolic vocabulary of sacral kingship. The story of the Magi paired exotic mystical authority with a European currency that complemented his other, more Anglocentric, models of mythic kingship, St. George and Arthur. Edward's image-making program helps explain why the fourteenth century Historia Trium Regum might have attained such great popularity in England, how this text was likely read, and why several other works of fourteenth century art and literature attempt to link Magian symbolism with Plantagenet kingship. Within this context, we should read the Historia Trium Regum as a robustly political text, rather than only a devotional one. Reading the Historia as a work designed to appeal to the political imagination helps us understand a " Magian " model of kingship that was promoted under Edward, but has been glossed over by political historians because it amounted to little in terms of practical politics. It has been ignored by literary scholars as well, because it doesn't fit prevailing new historicist models of how sacral kingship operated ideologically.

Despite the widespread suffering caused by the Black Death in England from 1347-1351, few contemporary accounts of the plague or descriptions of plague bodies themselves survive. However, the absence of explicit representation should not be taken as an absence of widespread psychological effect on the medieval population; rather, the scars and anxieties of the plague very much marred the individual and collective psyche of plague survivors as it did their bodies: we just need to know where to look for them.
This paper undertakes a search for representations of plague anxiety, for the ways that literature registered-- implicitly and explicitly-- the deep-seated trauma and cultural anxiety resulting from the Black Death from the mid to late 14th century; specifically, it reexamines bodies represented in 14th century devotional and literary texts as bodies suffering from the physical and psychological ravages of The Black Death. Sometimes plague is the overt subject of the text, as in Langland’s Piers Plowman. In other cases, such as Chaucer’s “Pardoner’s Tale,” plague is not named, but represented obliquely through a common set of metaphors. In some instances, trauma is revealed in the description of physical manifestations of sinfulness, as in the Dead Sea’s striking resemblance to a plague bubo in the Pearl Poet’s “Cleanness,” or as the crucified body of Christ resembles a plague-ridden body in Julian of Norwich’s Showings. By reexamining these texts through the lens of plague anxiety, we can see the influence plague-ridden bodies had on late 14th century Britons.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Since Piers Plowman occupies a central place in the study of medieval English literature, much attention has been paid to the vexed question of the poem's authorship. This justified interest in revealing the human agent behind the family of interrelated versions of the poem, usually named A, B, and C, continues to feed a vibrant industry of speculative scholarship on the person behind the poem. This article reassesses the relevance of the 'Langland' myth for the contemporary reception of the poem, and argues that medieval audiences of the B Version associated the work with a 'Long Will' author-persona. In this context, the case of a previously unnoticed Norfolk poacher in the weeks leading up to the 1381 rising, a William Longewille, and his encroachment on the estate of the former sheriff and tax collector Richard Holdych echo the Ploughing of the Half-Acre in Piers Plowman, in particular as it is presented in the B Version of the poem. As a result, this article proposes that both the A and B Versions of the poem may have been available to (some of) the rebels of 1381, and that the B Version may have circulated in Norfolk along Cluniac and Benedictine networks before and after the unrest.

This article explores the different interpretations of the phrase ‘Brevis oratio penetrat celum’, ‘A short prayer pierces heaven’, that circulated in late medieval England. It argues that the phrase was often used to think about the efficacy of laypeople’s prayer in a context where laypeople were increasingly able to access traditionally clerical knowledge. The article considers texts that identify the phrase as a ‘comoun prouerbe’, texts that link it to the Paternoster, and texts that explain it with reference to academic discourse about atomism, before turning to Piers Plowman, where the phrase provokes some complex reflections on the way that different forms of knowledge might be internalized and articulated as devotion.

Examining a moment where the female figure of Pride claims phallic potency in a particular, perhaps accidental, moment in the C-text of Piers Plowman, this essay asks: what can medieval studies do for transgender/transsexual scholarship, and vice versa? A certain version of medical discourse about transsexuality affirms a split between the body and the soul (as when it is said that a trans person has a 'female soul within a male body') that seems rather medieval in its near-allegorical dualism. However, the moment when the figure of Pride, personified as a female being, claims to be 'stiffest under the belt' in a moment of boastful confession, a different medieval model of trans consciousness is offered, that of a female-to-male person's courage to be themselves, which this essay reads alongside the journalistic account of Brandon Teena. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2010) 1, 157–164.

without commission. Again depicting his native town in the background, the composition is uniquely without one-point perspective. As a result, the image seems less formal than other works. It has a sense of intimacy that bespeaks private devotion, and may, in fact, be one of the first works of art an artist painted for himself and his heirs, to keep and cherish. It was among his possessions when he died. Piero went blind shortly before his death, but not before he had written his will with his own hand. SEE ALSO VISUAL ARTS AND CATHOLICISM.

Europe. 2 Two classical stories known in the Middle Ages can serve to locate the center of the spectrum of riddle contests. Both end in failure to solve a riddle. In one, the poet Homer dies because he can't solve a riddle posed to him by some fisher boys: "We have what we did not find; what we did find we left behind." 3 Similarly, in a contest between the Greek soothsayers Calchas and Mopsus, Calchas dies for shame when he cannot say how many apples are on a certain tree. 4 More famously, Oedipus succeeds in solving the riddle of the Sphinx, but his story is the kind in which the riddle challenge leads to a more serious game that begins when the challenge seems done. 5 The Sphinx's riddle itself exemplifies enigmas that are far from random but rather gain resonance within a larger story, such as Oedipus's tragic self-discovery. These classical stories imply that even a master of the game, whether he answers well or not, will in the end be mastered by it.

Accounts of Piers Plowman’s early modern reception tend to emphasize antiquarians and Protestant reformers, “readers for action” who used the poem for professional and political ends as an object of study or as evidence for ecclesiological polemic. This article discusses copies of the Crowley and Rogers editions of Piers Plowman now in the Bancroft and Beinecke Libraries, annotated by provincial readers in Derbyshire and Suffolk respectively, in order to articulate an alternative model of reception defined by “idleness” rather than action. The traces left by these “idle readers,” who had no clear professional investment in the poem or its contents, reveal a different way of engaging with the poem: distracted, pleasure-seeking, open to humor and surprise. Their responses suggest that not all early modern readers understood the poem as a useful artifact from a distant medieval past, but could treat it as a living document in their own moment. Because idle readers lack the readily identifiable motivations of reformers and antiquarians, however, they present methodological challenges to critics and book historians. Claims made about them must therefore be tentative and open to uncertainty.