Public Piers Plowman

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, Bensons study selectively but successfully limns a public culture where the phenomenon of Piers was at home. A. Galloway Choice Benson provides a thoroughly useful, timely, and provocative engagementment with Piers Plowman and its critical tradition. A. 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 C. David Bensons Public Piers Plowman opens Langlands great poem to new readings and broader understanding by placing it both generally and very specifically within many elements of the public culture of late fourteenth-century England. Part Two of this book should continue to yield sustenance to lovers of this poem and its many meanings, most of them, no doubt, yet to be discovered. Joe Ricke Sixteenth Century Journal

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 I: 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 II: Piers Plowman and the Public Culture of Late Medieval England 4. Public Writing: Mandevilles Travels and The Book of Margery Kempe 5. Public Art: Parish Wall Paintings 6. Public Life: London Civic Practices Bibliography Index