Public Piers Plowman: Modern Scholarship And Late Medieval English Culture [Paperback]

C. David Benson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 30, 2005

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

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

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's study selectively but successfully limns a 'public' culture where the phenomenon of Piers was at home. --Andrew Galloway, Choice

This is a book one reads with gratitude, not only for its clarity of exposition and explication but for its facility in locating significance along the interfaces between Piers Plowman, the late-medieval culture from which it originated, and the long history of readers who have attempted to understand it. --Russell A. Peck, Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies

About the Author

C. David Benson is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He has published widely on medieval literature.

Product Details

• Paperback: 283 pages
• Publisher: Pennsylvania State Univ Pr (Txt) (April 30, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0271024755
• ISBN-13: 978-0271024752
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,928,273 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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