Piers the Plowman

By -

Piers the Ploughman, by William Langland

At long last, I can proudly say that I have finished Piers the Plowman!  I would rather read this than the Romance of the Rose any day, but it was in fact rather long and on the repetitive side.

This is a long alliterative (but unrhymed) poem in Middle English, written about 1360 or later.  I read it in a modern English translation--a very old Penguin copy.  (Those old Penguin paperbacks must have been very well-made; the spine is still perfectly sound and flexible though it dates from about 1960 or so.)  The whole thing is a huge allegory in the form of a series of visions about life, faith, and how we should live.   There is a lot of social criticism, and even more theology, much of which is a little weird by medieval Catholic standards.

I was glad that I had read A Distant Mirror before tackling this text, because Tuchman mentions Langland several times and explains much of the background.  Piers the Plowman was written partly in reaction to the ravages of the Black Death and to the society that was so hard hit by it. 

The poet spends much of the text trying to find out how to live properly by searching for Do-well, Do-better, and Do-best, who will be able to tell him what to do.  He meets endless allegorical characters who give him their perspective, and later on he meets Abraham (complete with patriarchs living happily in his bosom), sees the life of Jesus along with His crucifixion and the harrowing of Hell, and finally sees the Anti-Christ.  So there is sort of a religious history of the world included, though it has so many speeches and allegorical figures that it's hard to tell what's going on.

Comments

  1. SerenaNovember 1, 2012 at 2:31 AM

    I never in a million years ever thought I would see someone online review this text! I mean EVER. I had to read the C text version of this work in a seminar in college and it bored me to tears. We had to read it aloud in middle english and interpret the text which was written in middle english.

    I presume this was not the case with the Penguin modern text, and maybe I'd take a look at it, if this didn't cause me nightmares. :)

    But regardless, I applaud you for reading this.

    ReplyDelete
  2. SerenaNovember 1, 2012 at 2:32 AM

    Sorry for the rant....i was just aghast to see this title again.

    ReplyDelete
  3. JeanNovember 1, 2012 at 7:56 AM

    Ha! Reading the whole thing in Middle English does sound like torture, so you have my sympathy. This was much easier!

    Rant away--I don't mind. :) (I just did a rant the other day on Atlas of Love!)

    ReplyDelete
  4. SerenaNovember 1, 2012 at 10:19 AM

    I think that torture is just too fresh for me to attempt a modern one...lol

    ReplyDelete
  5. FaithNovember 4, 2012 at 5:54 PM

    I read this in my Medieval Lit class in college but we had the cookiest (sp?) English professor who loved Old English/Middle English and would read long passages aloud with brilliant over the top drama. She was a trip! So I actually have fond memories of this.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more