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Langland's use of moral distichs from the medieval text known as the Disticha Catonis has been noted but never critically examined as a whole. The figure of 'Cato' and the distichs attributed to him stand out in Piers Plowman. I will begin by placing both Piers and the Disticha in their medieval literary context. Questions of audience and literacy have always been central to Piers, and I will look at the way in which Langland's use of Latin quotations from the Disticha relates to these issues. I will also examine the role of ' Cato' and the distichs in Piers in order to dispell the prevailing critical view that 'Cato' represented a pagan authority. The medieval Christian commentaries which accompanied the Disticha illuminate Piers as well. Critics have often wondered why Langland choose to write in a mixture of languages. 'Cato' and the Disticha are part of the answer. / Graduate

The dissertation examines the early reception of Piers Plowman through the responses of the poem's early readers and copyists in order to revive the context in which the poem was originally read and understood. These responses are derived from manuscript evidence. The dissertation is divided into five chapters, and begins with an examination of the background to the study, previous work on and assumptions about the reception of the poem. This is followed by a discussion of the theory of reception of literary works, and its relevance to MS studies, thus setting out the theoretical basis of the dissertation. A brief discussion of methodology follows. The next three chapters analyse the evidence from the MSS, examining respectively the contributions of the professional book producers in terms of layout, decoration and rubrication; readers' comments, usually in the form of marginalia; and the contribution of the scribes, through alteration of the text. The concluding chapter draws together the evidence from all three areas of analysis and discusses the relevance of the study to the understanding of the poem. There are four appendices, the first providing a list of early poems associated with Piers Plowman in the sixteenth century, and a list of names associated with the poem before Robert Crowley printed the poem in 1550. The other three appendices provide evidence from the MSS, respectively descriptions of all the Piers Plowman MSS; all the professional rubrication from the MSS; full readers' annotation from selected MSS, Digby MS 145, BL Additional 35287, Douce MS 104, and BL Additional 35157, the reader's wordlist from CUL L1 4.14, and glossed words from TCD MS 212. These appendices are included to provide as much evidence as possible from the MSS in a readily accessible form.

The Medieval English dream vision evidence influences from a variety of earlier vision literature, notably the apocalyptic vision and narrative dream. Philosophical visions by Plato, Cicero and Boethius, and Christian revelations of John and Paul contain traits that found their way into the dream poems by Langland, the Pearl poet and Chaucer. The Norwegian ballad Draumkvedet exhibits features that mirror these English visions. Notable characteristics pertaining to the character of the dreamer, the interplay between dreamer and dream, imagery of the vision, and structure, point to a common set of generic influences. Comparing Draumkvedet with its English counterparts demonstrates that they stem from the same tradition. Draumkvedet bares special resemblance to the Dream of the Rood, Piers Plowman and Pearl in its exploration of Christian doctrine and its appeal to the audience.

Thesis--Paris, 1970. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 825-902) and index.

This dissertation explores the utopian and dystopian tones of apocalypticism in medieval secular literature and how literary authors treated the end of time. Beginning with two different representational models of medieval apocalyptic, notably those of St Augustine of Hippo and of Joachim of Fiore, this study examines to what extent selected literary texts adhered to or deviated from those models. Those texts include Marie de France's Espurgatoire seint Patriz, William Langland's Piers Plowman, Geoffrey Chaucer's The Pardoner's Tale, and Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'arthur. This dissertation reveals that several texts subscribed to an expectation of cosmic and personal annihilation, in the Augustinian representation, or of global transformation in the Joachist version. Nearly all of the texts agree in their bleak outlook regarding the end of time, suggesting a climate of fear predominated in the Middle Ages. While the projected Christian eschatological timeline should have fostered hope for the saved, what it produced was often terrors of eternity and emptiness.

In the last ten years the Church of England has tried, by means of two reports leading to what I term the ‘Hind settlement’, to re-configure its provision of theological education. The tensions generated by the attempt to hold together different discourses and to impose regional re-organisation in the context of complex developments both in higher education and in patterns of lay and ordained ministry form the basis of my critique of Hind. I argue that Hind’s recourse to the image of the ‘body of Christ’ in the service of an instrumentalist model of ministry exposes inadequacies of a theological anthropological, Christological and ecclesiological nature. I identify a medieval text, Piers Plowman, as a conversation partner which offers a different way of negotiating an analogously difficult set of issues around learning, discipleship and power. My hermeneutical approach to the poem sees its primary impetus as arising from the constant interplay between the experiences of daily life and the attempt to work out a personal and social understanding of salvation. By comparing the ways in which Hind and Langland explore learning as measurable progress, and lay and clerical models of learning, I propose that Piers Plowman offers some valuable resources to the next stage of the Hind process. Not only does the poem foreground the chaotic co-existence of multiple voices in a marketplace of competing definitions of learning, and acknowledge the recalcitrance of communities when presented with opportunities to change, but it also, in the figure of Piers, hints at the possibility of going beyond the lay/clerical impasse. The poem’s recognition of sin and the need for repentance, in contrast to Hind language of management and effectiveness, and its requirement of the reader to participate in the making of new meaning, present an ongoing challenge to a culture of ‘learning outcomes’.

William Langland's The Vision of Piers Plowman was probably the first medieval English poem to achieve a national audience because Langland chose to write in the vernacular and he used the specialized vocabularies of his readership to open the poem to them. During the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, writers began using the vernacular in an attempt to allow all English people access to their texts. They did so consciously, indicating their intent in prologues and envois when they formally address readers. Some writers, like Langland and the author of Mankind, actually use representatives of the rural classes as primary characters who exhibit the beliefs and lives of the rural population. Anne Middleton's distinction between public-the readership an author imagined-and audience-the readership a work achieved-allows modern critics to discuss both public and audience and try to determine how the two differed. While the public is always only a presumption, the language in which an author writes and the cultural events depicted by the literature can provide a more plausible estimate of the public. The vernacular allowed authors like Gower, Chaucer, the author of Mankind, and Langland to use the specialized vocabularies of the legal and rural communities to discuss societal problems. They also use representatives of the communities to further open the texts to a vernacular public. These open texts provide some representation for the rural and common people's ideas about the other classes to be heard. Langland in particular uses the specialized vocabularies and representative characters to establish both the faults of all English people and a common guide they can follow to seek moral lives through Truth. His rural character, Piers the Plowman, allows rural readers to identify with the messages in the text while showing upper class and educated readers that they too can emulate a rural character who sets a moral standard.

Les poèmes allitératifs anglais, dont le représentant le plus illustre est le Piers Plowman de William Langland, s'inscrivent au sein d'un système de communication en pleine évolution dans l'Angleterre du XIVe siècle. L'extension de la literacy – l'aptitude à lire et à écrire – et le développement de l'anglais en sont les éléments les plus significatifs. L'objet de cette étude est l'interaction entre les différents aspects de ce système et les poèmes, afin de dégager toute la richesse de textes littéraires qui peuvent être considérés comme des sources historiques à part entière. Les thèmes abordés sont nombreux, au regard des multiples intérêts des poètes, préalablement replacés dans leur cadre social et culturel : l'organisation de la société, le gouvernement et la justice, l'institution ecclésiastique et la connaissance, la perception du salut de chacun et de tous, le positionnement des auteurs par rapport à leur activité. Leurs critiques, mais aussi leurs propositions et leurs espoirs, reflètent et enrichissent un dialogue de plus en plus large au sein de la société anglaise.

This thesis argues that the Middle English alliterative prosody of the Piers Plowman tradition was influenced by a discourse combining law, history, homily and poetry which was inherited from the administrative practices of the Anglo-Saxon period. As literary and legal textual genres developed recognizably distinct formal characteristics in the later Middle Ages, the combination of homiletic rhetoric and alliterative sound-patterning evoked a surviving discourse in which the formal characteristics of poems and documents were less clearly distinguished. Thus insofar as it evoked Anglo-Saxon textual culture, Piers Plowman provided a formal model which was particularly suitable to criticisms of political institutions that consolidated their power by developing new distinctions between the genres of bureaucratic texts. In each of the texts and traditions studied – Wulfstan’s homiletic law code I–II Cnut and its Latin translations, The First Worcester Fragment, Laȝamon’s Arthurian Brut chronicle-poem, The South English Legendary "Life of St. Egwine", and the Piers Plowman tradition poem Mum and the Sothsegger – apparently “literary” devices are used to authorize historically-based “legal” claims, particularly on behalf of ecclesiastical institutions looking to maintain their local influence in the face of increasingly consolidated royal administrative authority. Though oaths played a much less important procedural role after the Norman Conquest than they did in the Anglo-Saxon period, the appearance of "creative" authenticating procedures in "commemorative" texts created the appearance of orality to post-Conquest readers, to criticize a government which claimed its English "common" law to originate in the remotest recorded antiquity, even as it abandoned the practices actually recorded in the earliest surviving law codes and documents to be written in England. Comparing these texts allows a deeper understanding of their shared authenticating strategies, and also a re-appraisal of the methods we use to describe the relationships between medieval documents and authors, literature and law, texts and contexts. Appended to the dissertation is an edition of the SEL "Life of St. Egwine." Because Egwine's hagiographic tradition is so thematically invested in political concerns and closely interconnected with legal documents attributed to Egwine himself, the edition provides an opportunity to take a "disjunctively" literary and diplomatic approach to the tradition, in the process exploring some of the practical implications of the larger theoretical issues raised by the thesis as a whole.