Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship - The Middle Ages Series

Jacket Description/Back: "Written Work marks a major shift in orientation by focusing on William Langland instead of Piers Plowman, offering a set of readings that assertively and unapologetically seeks to place the poet himself in history."--BOOK JACKET. "The five original historicist studies collected here are less concerned with searching for Langland's identity in medieval records than with examining the marks, even scars, left on him by the history he touched."--BOOK JACKET. Publisher Marketing: Critics of "Piers Plowman" have often behaved as if the great fourteenth-century English poem were written by committee, "Written Work" marks a major shift in orientation by focusing on William Langland instead of "Piers Plowman." The five original historicist studies collected here are less concerned with searching for Langland's identity in medieval records than with examining the marks, even scars, left on him by the history he touched. Derek Pearsall studies what Langland knew about London--its geography, economics, and social life--and the way his focus on the city shifted in the course of revising the poem. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton examines the conditions for authorship and publishing in late fourteenth-century England and uncovers evidence of Langland's struggles to attract patronage and maintain control over the text and circulation of Piers. Anne Middleton's stunning chapter explores how the long shadow of fourteenth-century labor laws fell across Langland as he reworked his text. Ralph Hanna III examines the conflicting demands of manual and intellectual labor on the poet, while Lawrence M. Clopper uncovers the deep impressions that contemporary controversies about Franciscan poverty made on Langland and his life-work. Each of the chapters unfolds from Langland's apologia, the extraordinary autobiographical passage unique to the last of the three distinct versions of "Piers Plowman" that have come down to us.

Contributor Bio:  Justice, Steven Steven Justice is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Contributor Bio:  Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn Kathryn Kerby-Fulton is The Notre Dame Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author most recently of Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England, which won the Haskins Medal from the Medieval Academy of America. She is coeditor with Maidie Hilmo of The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower and The Medieval Reader: Reception and Cultural History in the Late Medieval Manuscript and coeditor with Linda Olson of Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages.