CiNii Books - Public Piers Plowman : modern scholarship and late medieval English culture

The fourteenth-century alliterative poem Piers Plowman was widely popular in its own day. The number of its surviving manuscripts ranks just below that of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Although the poem has been the subject of some interesting recent critical scholarship, it continues to be marginalized by medievalists and non-medievalists alike. According to C. David Benson, this is because the tendency of modern criticism has been to read Piers as an autobiography mired in the singular intellectual obsessions of its author or as a recondite exploration of theological and political issues. In Public Piers Plowman, Benson returns the poem to the center of late medieval English culture by treating it as a public rather than a personal or elite work. In the process, Benson makes this great poem more accessible, exciting, and necessary to modern readers.

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Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: Piers Plowman and Modern Scholarship 1. The History of the Langland Myth 2. Beyond the Myth of the Poem: Is There a Text in These Manuscripts? 3. Beyond the Myth of the Poet: Looking for Langland in All the Wrong Places Part II: Piers Plowman and the Public Culture of Late Medieval England 4. Public Writing: Mandeville's Travels and The Book of Margery Kempe 5. Public Art: Parish Wall Paintings 6. Public Life: London Civic Practices Bibliography Index

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Public Piers Plowman : modern scholarship and late medieval English culture

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