Langland / Weiskott Piers Plowman

A New Annotated Edition of the A-text
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80413-215-9
Verlag: University of Exeter Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

Reihe: Exeter Medieval

The earliest version of William Langland’s Piers Plowman shows this elusive and centrally important fourteenth-century poet inventing the forms that his life’s work will take. Piers Plowman is a sinuous cycle of dream visions in alliterative verse comprehending many aspects of medieval English culture from tavern life, plague, homelessness, and labour politics to religious devotion and theological controversy. At once socially capacious and spiritually electrifying, Langland’s poem was an instant bestseller in its own time and has provoked strong reactions from the fourteenth century to the present.

At under 2,500 lines, the A-text is significantly more compact than the later B- and C-texts, yet it contains much of the poetic thinking that Langland would elaborate in the longer versions. The poem proceeds as a spiritual quest, undertaken by the dreamer Will, to discover how to save his soul, reform church and society, and attain an ethical mode of life in this world. The action oscillates between the cultivated fields of England’s West Midlands and the commotion of London and Westminster.

Piers Plowman poses both textual and interpretative difficulties. This is the first critically considered edition of the A-text supported by an introduction, side glosses, and on-page explanatory notes with undergraduate, postgraduate, and scholarly readers in mind.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Langland, William

Weiskott, Eric

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Lyrik und Dichter
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

Why the A-text?

Title

Author

Dialect

Metre

Genre and macrostructure

Sources

Manuscript circulation and reception

Unresolved questions in contemporary study of Piers Plowman

The present edition

Thematic notes

Note on spelling

Note on pronunciation

Note on the subjunctive mood

Note on the notes

Glossary of common words and affixes

WILLIAM LANGLAND, PIERS PLOWMAN (A-TEXT)

Appendix A. Passus 12: The discourse of Clergy and Scripture continued; Hunger, Fever, and Death; John But’s eulogy

Appendix B. Two passages new in the B revision

Appendix C. Substantial differences from Kane’s text

Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Weiskott, Eric
Eric Weiskott is Professor of English at Boston College. He is the author most recently of Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650 (2021) and English Alliterative Verse: Poetic Tradition and Literary History (2016). He is an editor of the Yearbook of Langland Studies.