The World of Piers Plowman (Middle Ages)

Description

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. Cover Contents Introduction PART I: Macrocosm and Microcosm 1. The Universe: The Wise Book of Philosophy and Astronomy 2. The Papal Letter Unam Sanctum, 1302 3. "Englond his a wel god lond . . .," Robert of Gloucester, 1300 4. William Fitzstephen's Description of London, 1180 PART II: Abuses in the Church and the World 5. "The Revelation of Golias the Bisshoppe" 6. Curia, Corruption, and Council 7. Statutory Reform in England 8. Plague, Population, and the Labor Crisis 9. The Peasants' Rebellion of 1381 10. On the Times 11. The Sloane Satires 12. Against the Friars PART III: The Voice of the Preacher and the Heretic 13. Thomas Brinton, Sermon 44, Simul in unum, dives et pauper, 1377 14. The Heretic PART IV: Moral and Miracle: the Saint's Life and the Exemplum 15. Longinus and Veronica: the Legenda Aurea 16. Tales of Saints, Demons, and Relics 17. Nicolas Bozan, from Les Contes Moralisees PART V: Instruction and Action 18. Septenarium 19. The Disticha Catonis: Petyt Caton and Book I 20. "How men that ben in hele sholde visite sike folk . . ." 21. Guild and Fraternity 22. The Book of Physiognomy PART VI: Paysage Moralisee 23. "In place as man may se . . ." 24. Moralisacio sacerdotis 25. From Robert Grosseteste, The Castle of Love 26. Guillaume de Deguilleville, Pilgrimage of the Soul PART VII: This is the Way the World Ends 27. "Wrecchednesses" 28. "The Pryk of Conscience"