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The world of Piers Plowman / edited by Jeanne Krochalis and Edward Peters.
De Gruyter University of Pennsylvania Press eBook Package Archive 1898-1999 Available online
View online- Format:
- Book
- Series:
- Middle Ages series.
- The Middle Ages series
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Langland, William, 1330?-1400? Piers Plowman.
- Langland, William.
- English literature--Middle English, 1100-1500.
- English literature.
- Manners and customs in literature.
- England--Social life and customs--1066-1485.
- England.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (288 p.)
- Edition:
- 1st ed.
- Place of Publication:
- Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.
- Language Note:
- English
- Summary:
- Next to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, William Langland's Piers Plowman is perhaps the best-known literary picture of fourteenth-century England. Langland's work, more socially concerned and critical than Chaucer's, reflected an age of religious controversy, social upheaval, and political unrest. The World of Piers Plowman puts the reader in touch with the sources that helped shape Langland's somber vision. The representative documents included in this book, often cited in connection with the poem yet difficult to come by, disclose the background of Piers Plowman in social and economic history as well as folklore, art, theology, homilies, religious tractates, and chronicles.The seven sections into which the readings are divided illustrate ideas concerning (1) the heavens, the universal Church, England, and London; (2) material and spiritual abuses; (3) the most influential literary genres of the period; (4) exempla, moral tales from hagiography, sermon literature, and tracts on moral theology; (5) types of practical instruction available to the devout layperson; (6) the multiple meanings in many literary works; and (7) the moment of death, the judgments on the soul, and the torments and rewards of the afterlife.
- Contents:
- pt. I. Macrocosm and microcosm
- pt. II. Abuses in the church and the world
- pt. III. The voice of the preacher and the heretic
- pt. IV. Moral and miracle : the saint's life and the exemplum
- pt. V. Instruction and action
- pt. VI. Paysage moralisee
- pt. VII. This is the way the world ends.
- Notes:
- Description based upon print version of record.
- Includes bibliographical references.
- ISBN:
- 1-283-89916-7
- 0-8122-0578-2
- OCLC:
- 794702273
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