Piers Plowman
29 Oct, 2020
820 English and Old English literatures
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss William Langland’s poem, written around 1370, about a man called Will who fell asleep on the Malvern Hills and dreamed of Piers the Plowman. This was a time between the Black Death and The Peasants’ Revolt, when Christians wanted to save their souls but doubted how best to do it - and had to live with that uncertainty. Some call this the greatest medieval poem in English, one offering questions not answers, and it can be as unsettling now as it was then.
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Guests
- Laura Ashe
11 episodes
Professor of English Literature at Worcester College, University of Oxford -
Lawrence Warner No other episodes
Professor of Medieval English at King's College London -
Alastair Bennett No other episodes
Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London
Reading list
-
Richard II
Laura Ashe (Penguin, 2016) -
A Guidebook to Piers Plowman
Anna Baldwin (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) -
An Introduction to Piers Plowman
Michael Calabrese (University of Florida Press, 2016) -
The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman
Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway (eds.) (Cambridge University Press, 2014) -
The Vision of Piers Plowman: The B Text
William Langland (ed. A.V.C. Schmidt) (Everyman, 1995) -
Piers Plowman: A New Translation of the B Text
William Langland (trans. A.V.C. Schmidt) (Oxford University Press, 2009) -
Piers Plowman: The A Version
William Langland (ed. by Miceal F. Vaughan) (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) -
Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-text
William Langland (ed. by Derek Pearsall) (University of Exeter Press, 2008) -
Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in the Middle Ages
Liza Picard (W&N, 2017) -
Piers Plowman: An Introduction
James Simpson (Liverpool University Press, 2007) -
Reading Piers Plowman
Emily Steiner (Cambridge University Press, 2013) -
The Myth of Piers Plowman: Constructing a Medieval Literary Archive
Lawrence Warner (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
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Programme ID: m000nvsl
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000nvsl
Auto-category: 821.1 (English poetry)
Hello (First sentence from this episode)
Hello. Seven centuries ago, William Langland wrote a poem about a man called Will, who fell asleep on the Malvern Hills and dreamed of Piers the Plowman.