Piers Plowman and Its Manuscript Tradition PDF Download

Author: Sarah Wood
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1914049071
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
The first full survey of crucial witnesses to the reception of Piers Plowman.

Author: William Langland
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812215618
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
"A gifted poet has given us an astute, adroit, vigorous, inviting, eminently readable translation. . . . The challenging gamut of Langland's language . . . has here been rendered with blessed energy and precision. Economou has indeed Done-Best."—Allen Mandelbaum

Author: Lawrence Warner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107783097
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Addressing the history of the production and reception of the great medieval poem, Piers Plowman, Lawrence Warner reveals the many ways in which scholars, editors and critics over the centuries created their own speculative narratives about the poem, which gradually came to be regarded as factually true. Warner begins by considering the possibility that Langland wrote a romance about a werewolf and bear-suited lovers, and he goes on to explore the methods of the poem's localization, and medieval readers' particular interest in its Latinity. Warner shows that the 'Protestant Piers' was a reaction against the poem's oral mode of transmission, reveals the extensive eighteenth-century textual scholarship on the poem and contextualizes its first modernization. This lively account of Piers Plowman challenges the way the poem has traditionally been read and understood. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Books Online and via Knowledge Unlatched.

Author: Michael A. Calabrese
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813062709
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
William Langland's allegorical poem Piers Plowman is becoming ever more popular in medieval English literature courses. But most current introductions focus primarily on the B text, leaving a gap in available resources for the poem's study. As Piers Plowman continues to gain academic attention in all its three versions (the A, B, and C texts), teachers and students need a new perspective and new approach to the poem as an evolving whole. This first comprehensive introduction to Langland's masterful work covers all three iterations and outlines the various changes that occurred between each. Useful for individuals reading any version of Piers Plowman, this engaging guide offers a much-needed navigational summary, a chronology of historic events relevant to the poem, biographical notes about Langland, and keys to characters and proper pronunciation. Calabrese's definitive and refreshingly lively volume allows readers to navigate this daunting poem and to contextualize it within the literary history of Western culture.

Author: C. David Benson
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9780859915014
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
The B-version of Piers Plowman, probably the only version authorised by Langland, is the one most frequently read today, and the most influential form of the poem. This catalogue of the 18 extant manuscripts, now located in Cambridge, London, Oxford, Tokyo, and San Marino, California, offers both individual manuscript descriptions and a record of the annotations. The new and detailed codicological descriptions include information on provenance and ownership; a full list of the contents; and a description of the physical make-up and the presentation of each manuscript. The substantial first full account of the various textual annotations in each manuscript (whether produced by the original scribes or later readers) provides the best record available of how Piers Plowman was understood by its earliest audience.

Author: Alastair Bennett
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192886266
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
William Langland's Piers Plowman was written and read during a "golden age" of English preaching. The poem describes a world where sermons took many different forms and were delivered in many different contexts, from public events in the life of the realm to pastoral instruction in the parish. It dramatises preaching as part of its allegorical action, showing how sermons shaped their listeners' understanding of the world; it also includes polemical critique of corrupt, self-interested preaching, and offers radical prescriptions for its reform. This book argues that Langland's central insight into the way that sermons moved and engaged their audiences had to do with their characteristic use of narrative. Preachers in the poem address listeners who are absorbed in the concerns of their present moment, and encourage them to new forms of social and spiritual endeavour by locating that moment in a larger, interpreted plot: the story of an individual life, or an emergent community, or of salvation history as a whole. The book employs a critical vocabulary derived from Paul Ricoeur to describe the process by which these narratives are composed, and to show how they mediate and reconfigure their listeners' experiences.

Author: Hoyt N. Duggan
Publisher: D. S. Brewer
ISBN: 9781843840947
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This CD-ROM continues the ongoing collaborative project devoted to the electronic publication of the medieval and Renaissance witnesses to William Langland's Piers Plowman. The edition of the B-version manuscript known as `R' is especially important because of its status as the only reliable witness for one of the two surviving branches of the B tradition. As is usual for the series, the edited text of the manuscript is presented in four different views -- a diplomatic type-facsimile; a scribal text with indications of scribal error; a critical text with lapsus calami corrected; and an AllTags view that shows all of the editorial interventions on one screen -- along with colour facsimiles and hyper-textual linkages to enable the display of the complex relationships to other B witnesses. Robert Adams is Professor of English at Sam Houston State University, Texas.

Author: G.H. Russell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 11

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Book Description

Author: Misty Schieberle
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1914049284
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Examines manuscripts of Langland, Chaucer, Gower, Nicholas Love and Arthurian tales, alongside other devotional works and archival evidence. Professor Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's scholarship has transformed the study of medieval manuscripts and readers, particularly in the areas of devotional literature, professional scribal production and clerical writing. The essays collected here celebrate and reflect her influence and practice of giving careful attention to material contexts and archival sources when reading literature produced in late medieval England. They offer new interpretations of scribal practices, professional readers' activities, documentary evidence and challenging material and cultural contexts. They also reconsider scholarly practices and assumptions, while demonstrating how manuscript and archival studies can energize scholarship on such varied topics as authority, reader reception, modern editorial perspectives, gender and religious activities.

Author: Carl Kears
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1914049136
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
A fresh close reading of the texts of one of the four surviving major manuscripts of Old English poetry, reappraising Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11 to discover some of the preoccupations of its compliers. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 11 is one of the four major manuscripts of Old English poetry to survive and the only one of these to have had a planned sequence of illuminations. Junius 11 is made up of different poems - Genesis A, Genesis B, Exodus, Daniel and Christ and Satan - compiled to resemble a long narrative that represents salvation history from its violent origins to its Last Days. While the poems draw inspiration from biblical, apocryphal and commentary traditions, they combine in the manuscript to create powerful effects that can also be understood through an appreciation of the distinctive craft and complexity of early medieval vernacular verse. But can the language of the poetry within the manuscript tell us anything about the aims of the Junius 11 project, or the preoccupations of its compilers? This book approaches Junius 11 as an ambitious poetic endeavour that was designed to offer counsel through the medium of Old English verbal art. Tracing thematic language across and between the poems, and offering close readings of them in their manuscript context, MS Junius 11 and its Poetry argues that it is early medieval political ideas represented by the Old English words ræd (good counsel) and unræd (ill counsel) that emerge as the key components underlying the central conflicts of the history of humankind the makers of this manuscript sought to create. The poems themselves, by giving us many examples of rulers and leaders falling to ruin, have the potential to offer their own ræd to those who may have found themselves in relatable positions. But Junius 11 demands work for such gifts. Its poems generate impressions cumulatively and collectively, offering instruction to those who might build connections across pages, demanding audiences become attentive and active readers so that they might find solace and advice in a world that moves towards destruction.