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This essay offers a reading of Piers that centres on the poem’s famous and muchstudied repetition of reddere. Rather than construing that repetition as simply repetition, the essay suggests that we think of that repetition as a poetic refrain in the poem. In making this suggestion, the essay also synthesizes and contributes to the extant body of theories of refrain - both in contemporary and medieval contexts. Encountering reddere as a refrain fosters a non-linear and non-argumentative orientation toward the poem’s deeply-graven commitment to economic justice.
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