The Place of God in Piers Plowman and Medieval Art

The Place of God in Piers Plowman and Medieval Art
Author: Mary Clemente Davlin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351884204

Probing spatial questions about God posed by Piers Plowman, the author of this interdisciplinary study turns to pictorial evidence-the use of religious space and relationships within such space in English art of the same period. The Place of God in Piers Plowman and Medieval Art is not only a study of the sense of God and of the relationship between God and creatures in the great religious poem, but also an analysis of art works of the high Middle Ages, especially English manuscript illuminations, in their placement of God. Such interdisciplinary analysis historicizes both literature and art, uncovering ways that medieval people imagined God and the understandings that they would have been able to bring to reading and viewing religious art.

William Langland's "Piers Plowman"

William Langland's
Author: William Langland
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 1996-12
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9780812215618

"A gifted poet has given us an astute, adroit, vigorous, inviting, eminently readable translation. . . . The challenging gamut of Langland's language . . . has here been rendered with blessed energy and precision. Economou has indeed Done-Best."—Allen Mandelbaum

Earthly Honest Things

Earthly Honest Things
Author: A. V. C. Schmidt
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2012-03-15
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1443838705

Earthly Honest Things brings together the complete shorter writings of a leading international authority on William Langland. Of A. V. C. Schmidt’s recent two-volume Piers Plowman: A Parallel Text Edition, Derek Pearsall has said in Speculum that ‘By any standards, it is a monumental achievement … resolute, patient, deeply learned … magisterial. … Schmidt … is always interesting and writes with a controlled passion.’ Lawrence Warner in The Medieval Review has called this edition ‘nothing short of awe-inspiring’ and Andrew Galloway in The Yearbook of Langland Studies has noted how ‘under Schmidt’s brilliant attention to the poem’s scenic and poetic originality, an editorial and literary attentiveness shines luminously throughout.’ Including four that are completely new, these twenty-five pieces cover a wide range of topics, from critical essays on the poem’s imagery, structure, themes and intellectual and literary background (including the philosophical, devotional and mystical traditions) to more technical studies of its text and metre. The previously published essays have been thoroughly revised, updated and cross-referenced, and are provided with a full Bibliography and an Index. Together they represent an indispensable companion to the poem for Langland specialists and an exciting introduction for students to one of the most challenging and rewarding masterpieces of medieval English literature.

Consolation in Medieval Narrative

Consolation in Medieval Narrative
Author: C. Schrock
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2015-05-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137447818

Medieval writers such as Chaucer, Abelard, and Langland often overlaid personal story and sacred history to produce a distinct narrative form. The first of its kind, this study traces this widely used narrative tradition to Augustine's two great histories: Confessions and City of God .

Two Guides for the Journey

Two Guides for the Journey
Author: Sheryl Overmyer
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2016-10-27
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1498228992

Thomas Aquinas and William Langland inherited the dynamic metaphor of journeying as a fundamental concept of the Christian life and harnessed it to animate their magisterial texts: the Summa Theologiae and Piers Plowman. Christians' journey back to God consists in the way of charity, yet it is far from straightforward or sequential. Rather, it is impinged upon by epistemic ambiguity, our willful continued habits of resistance, and inherent limitations on our perfection. In sum, the virtues are divine gifts humanly received, treasure in earthen vessels. Together these authors show the complexity we ourselves will find along this life's journey, enable our understanding to appreciate that complexity, and in limited ways cultivate in us the virtues they describe.

Encounters with God in Medieval and Early Modern English Poetry

Encounters with God in Medieval and Early Modern English Poetry
Author: Charlotte Clutterbuck
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351940341

Engaging with four English poems or groups of poems - the anonymous medieval Crucifixion lyrics; William Langland's Piers Plowman, John Donne's Divine Poems, and John Milton's Paradise Lost - this book examines the nature of poetic encounter with God. It constitutes an important contribution to our understanding of the relationship between literature and theology.

Poetics of the Incarnation

Poetics of the Incarnation
Author: Cristina Maria Cervone
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2013-02-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0812207475

The Gospel of John describes the Incarnation of Christ as "the Word made flesh"—an intriguing phrase that uses the logic of metaphor but is not traditionally understood as merely symbolic. Thus the conceptual puzzle of the Incarnation also draws attention to language and form: what is the Word; how is it related to language; how can the Word become flesh? Such theological questions haunt the material imagery engaged by medieval writers, the structural forms that give their writing shape, and even their ideas about language itself. In Poetics of the Incarnation, Cristina Maria Cervone examines the work of fourteenth-century writers who, rather than approaching the mystery of the Incarnation through affective identification with the Passion, elected to ponder the intellectual implications of the Incarnation in poetical and rhetorical forms. Cervone argues that a poetics of the Incarnation becomes the grounds for working through the philosophical and theological implications of language, at a point in time when Middle English was emerging as a legitimate, if contested, medium for theological expression. In brief lyrics and complex narratives, late medieval English writers including William Langland, Julian of Norwich, Walter Hilton, and the anonymous author of the Charters of Christ took the relationship between God and humanity as a jumping-off point for their meditations on the nature of language and thought, the elision between the concrete and the abstract, the complex relationship between acting and being, the work done by poetry itself in and through time, and the meaning latent within poetical forms. Where Passion-devoted writing would focus on the vulnerability and suffering of the fleshly body, these texts took imaginative leaps, such as when they depict the body of Christ as a lily or the written word. Their Incarnational poetics repeatedly call attention to the fact that, in theology as in poetics, form matters.

Piers Plowan

Piers Plowan
Author: William Langland
Publisher: CUA Press
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2023-08-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813237750

Passionate about trying to create social justice in a time of crisis after the Black Plague, William Langland spent his entire life working on Piers Plowman, an epic study of the human quest for truth, justice, and community. The "A Version," the first and shortest of the three versions he crafted, is wonderfully relatable and completely teachable to a modern student audience. Piers Plowman is becoming ever more relevant to students and scholars in English studies. Perhaps because the poem involves culture, religion, community, and work and engages explicitly with the histories of government and popular revolt, this allegorical tale of a wandering Christian named "Will," searching for truth with the aid of a humble plowman named Piers, has found new critical and pedagogic life in the last 20 years. Currently there are no translations of the A-version of Piers Plowman in print, so readers, scholars and teachers have been longing for an affordable, student-centered translation. The apparatus includes a 30-page historical and critical introduction, footnotes, a bibliography, a note on translation theory and practice, and samplings of the original text in Middle English, with a guide to pronunciation of that language. Piers Plowman is an extraordinary important document about the issues dramatically relevant to this day. It confronts poverty and inequity in 14th-century England and explores the need for virtue and social justice, encouraging its readers to create equality with open access for people of all classes and abilities. Though a Christian poem, Piers addresses issues of inclusivity, social responsibility and communal duty, as the poem's protagonist wanders about the world, facing injustice and persecution as he looks for truth and salvation. Michael Calabrese, author of An Introduction to Piers Plowman and director of the Chaucer Studio's Middle English recording of the poem, brings Piers Plowman to life for 21st-century students and for all readers interested in the history of society, virtue, faith and salvation.

The Absent Image

The Absent Image
Author: Elina Gertsman
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2021-06-24
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0271089032

Winner of the 2022 Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association Guided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Medieval art, according to modern scholars, abhors the same. The notion of horror vacui—the fear of empty space—is thus often construed as a definitive feature of Gothic material culture. In The Absent Image, Elina Gertsman argues that Gothic art, in its attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the invisible, actively engages emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures. Exploring complex conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics, piety, and image-making, Gertsman considers the concept of nothingness in concert with the imaginary, revealing profoundly inventive approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture, from ingenious images of the world’s creation ex nihilo to figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of conception and death. Innovative and challenging, this book will find its primary audience with students and scholars of art, religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. It will be particularly welcomed by those interested in phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approaches to the visual culture of the later Middle Ages.

Medieval Poetics and Social Practice

Medieval Poetics and Social Practice
Author: Seeta Chaganti
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2012
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0823243249

This collection responds to the critical legacy of Penn R. Szittya. Its contributors investigate how medieval poetic language reflects and shapes social, political, and religious worlds. In addition to new readings of canonical poetic texts, it includes readings of texts that have previously not held a central place in critical attention.