EN3A0 Poetry and Crisis: William Langland’s Piers Plowman in late medieval culture and society
This module is not currently running
Module convenor: Dr Sarah Wood
Module description and aims
Few literary texts can have been so deeply involved in the historical events and controversies of their day as William Langland’s Piers Plowman, whose title character Piers was adopted as a rallying cry in the major civil rebellion called the Peasants’ Revolt. Endlessly revised by its author and repeatedly abandoning and deconstructing its own narratives, Piers has been described as a work on the verge of artistic breakdown, and it is a poem produced by intellectual and social crisis as well.
This module will study Piers as a medieval hypertext, connected to a wide range of medieval genres and opening windows onto some of the major intellectual and social issues of its time: labour and poverty, law and government, the sources of knowledge and the value of education, the salvation of non-Christians and the state of the Church. Sections of the poem related to major themes will be studied alongside a variety of contemporary writings that engage with the same issues and ideas; these texts will include legal and historical documents, satirical poetry, polemic, and religious vision. Students will be introduced to some of Langland’s major revisions to his work in its successive ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’ versions as well as to some of the poem’s later spin-offs by other authors and to its first printing by a Protestant polemicist in the sixteenth century. They will also gain some understanding of the various forms in which the text appears in its medieval manuscripts and how those manuscripts register readers’ interest in the poem’s ability to speak to major social and intellectual concerns.
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Pre-requisites
Students are expected to have studied EN121 Medieval to Renaissance English Literature, or to have equivalent prior reading knowledge of Middle English.
Bibliography (link to Talis Aspire)
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