Piers Plowman
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Astonishing in its cultural and theological scope, William Langland’s iconoclastic masterpiece is at once a historical relic and a deeply spiritual vision, probing not only the social and religious aristocracy but also the day-to-day realities of a largely voiceless proletariat class.
E. Talbot Donaldson’s translation of the text has been selected for this Norton Critical Edition because of its skillful emulation of the original poem’s distinct alliterative verse. Selections of the authoritative Middle English text are also included for comparative analysis.
"Sources and Backgrounds" includes a large collection of contemporary religious and historical documents pertaining to the poem, including selections from the Douai Bible, accounts of the plague, and legal statutes.
"Criticism" includes twenty interpretive essays by leading medievalists, among them E. Talbot Donaldson, George Kane, Jill Mann, Derek Pearsall, C. David Benson, and Elizabeth D. Kirk.
A Glossary and Selected Bibliography are also included.
Elizabeth Robertson is Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is the author of Early English Devotional Prose and The Female Audience and Chaucerian Consent. She is co-author of Chaucer’s Religious Tales and Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Stephen H. A. Shepherd is a professor of English at Loyola Marymount University. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Queen’s University at Kingston and his doctorate from the University of Oxford. His honors include fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Bibliographical Society of America, and the Huntington Library. He is the editor of the Early English Text Society edition of Turpines Story and of the Norton Critical Edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, and he is a coeditor of the Norton Critical Edition of William Langland’s Piers Plowman. The primary focus of his research and publication is the critical, codicological, and historical contexts of medieval English literature.