Public Piers Plowman
Modern Scholarship and Late Medieval English Culture
304 pages | 19 illustrations | 6 x 9 | 2003
ISBN 978-0-271-02315-1 | cloth: $53.00 sh
ISBN 978-0-271-02475-2 | paper: $28.00 sh
Winner of a 2004 Choice Award for an Outstanding Academic Title
"As valuable in its learned accuracy as it is provocative in its efforts to critique pursuits of the poem as a spiritual or literary autobiography, Benson√âs study selectively but successfully limns a √∂public culture where the phenomenon of Piers was at home." —A. Galloway, Choice
"David Benson tackles the difficult and vital question of Piers Plowman's engagement with its history by getting down to the basics of the text, the circumstances of its production, and the real world from which it emerged. His historical re-envisioning of Piers is exactly what Langland's poem, at this stage in its career, needs. Public Piers Plowman is a major achievement." —Derek Pearsall, Harvard University
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.
Public Piers Plowman is divided into two parts. The first is an extended essay on what Benson calls the "Langland myth." He traces the evolution of Piers scholarship and demonstrates the limitations of treating Piers as a direct expression of the poet's life and intellectual views. Well over a century after its creation, the Langland myth remains dominant in studies of the poem, blocking other potentially fruitful approaches.
In the second part Benson offers an alternative history for the poem. Although Piers is usually compared with high art and thought, such as that of Chaucer or scholasticism, Benson approaches it from a broader public context, using representative examples from vernacular writing, parish art, and civic practices. He argues that Piers reached a wide contemporary audience because, far from being an expression of the author's own life and opinions, it was securely rooted in the common culture of its time and place.
Public Piers Plowman is an ambitious work that dares to confront a true literary masterpiece. In the process, it makes this great poem more accessible, exciting, and necessary to modern readers.
C. David Benson is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He has published widely on medieval literature.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: 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 Two: 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