Piers Plowman: A Modern Verse Translation
- ISBN-10
- 0786495030
- ISBN-13
- 9780786495030
- Series
- Piers Plowman
- Category
- History
- Pages
- 272
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2014-10-06
- Publisher
- McFarland
- Author
- William Langland
Description
William Langland's 14th-century poem Piers Plowman is a disturbing and often humorous commentary on corruption and greed that remains meaningful today. The allegorical and satirical work revolves around the narrator's quest to live a good life, and takes the form of a series of dreams in which Piers, the honest plowman, appears in various guises. Characters such as Conscience, Fidelity and Charity tumble out of the text alongside Falsehood and Guile, and are instantly recognizable as our present-day politicians and celebrities, friends and neighbors. Along the way social issues are confronted, including governance, economic relations, criminal justice, public finance, marital relations and the limits of academic learning, as well as religious belief and the natural world. This book is a new verse translation of Piers from Middle English which preserves the energy, imagery and intent of the original, and retains its alliterative style. It derives from a 2012 arts festival presentation performed in the priory where Langland--a contemporary of Chaucer--was probably educated.
Get the book
Other editions
Similar books
-
William Langland's "Piers Plowman": The C Version
By William Langland, George EconomouPresents a translation of the poet's third version of the text
-
Piers the Ploughman
By William LanglandThe Friar very soon heard of this, and hurried off to the Bishop to get a licence to do parish work. He came before him as bold as brass, carrying his letters of recommendation, and very soon got written permission to hear confessions ...
-
Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature
By Rebecca Ann DavisRebecca Davis explores the relationship of divine creativity, poetry, and ethics in William Langland's fourteenth-century dream vision.
-
Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages
By Arvind Thomas93 In his Sin and Society in Fourteenth-Century England, Haren follows William A. Pantin, who long ago identified the Memoriale presbiterorum as one of a cluster of penitential works underlying Piers Plowman's vision of reform.
-
Piers Plowman
By William Langland16 Langland's version of John 13:21 and of Matthew 26 : 21-5 ( whence also line 145 ) . 17 Langland's expansion of Matthew 26 : 48-50 . 18 Does not belong in this context at all : it is Matthew 18 : 7 . 19 John 18 : 8-9 .
-
William Langland's "Piers Plowman": The C Version
William Langland's Piers Plowman is one of the major poetic monuments of medieval England and of world literature. Probably composed between 1372 and 1389, the poem survives in three distinct versions.
-
Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma: Riddles, Rhetoric, and Theology
By Curtis A. GruenlerIn this book, Curtis Gruenler proposes that the concept of the enigmatic, latent in a wide range of medieval thinking about literature, can help us better understand in medieval terms much of the era’s most enduring literature, from the ...
-
Piers Plowman: the C-text
By William LanglandThis edition is the first complete edition of the C-text of Piers Plowman since that of Skeat (1886). It has been prepared with recognition of the complexity of the work,...
-
An Introduction to Piers Plowman
By R. Barton Palmer, Tison Pugh, Michael A. CalabreseUseful 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 ...
-
Piers Plowman: The A Version
By William LanglandWhiting, Bartlett Jere, and Helen Wescott Whiting. Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases: From English Writings Mainly before 1500. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968. Trigg, Stephanie, ed. Wynnere and Wastoure.