The Yearbook of Langland Studies

This essay investigates the nature of Langland’s thought experiments by introducing a less frequently noted aspect of Piers Plowman: its interest in non-human animals. It argues that the poem’s philosophical interest in animals is key to understanding its approach to literary experiment, and further, that its literary experiments with animals are key to understanding its more radical ideas about virtue and salvation.

This essay explores the surprisingly large and variegated body of Middle English allegorical texts that personify Dread (or Fear) near a door. It argues that these allegories were designed to facilitate what I call dreadful didacticism: a pedagogical effort, not only to impart to their audience an understanding of dread’s psychic function, but also to teach them how (not) to properly practise dread in their day-to-day lives. In advancing this argument, the essay surveys three interrelated groups of allegories: one in which Dread is a messenger from hell, one in which Dread guards the doorway to the self or a society, and one in which Dread sows social dysfunction. In addition to contextualizing the brief but pivotal personification of Dread in passus 2 of Piers Plowman within this tradition, the essay contextualizes this passage in the mercurial discourse on dreadful didacticism scattered throughout the three major versions of Piers Plowman.

This essay sets out as opposites the careers of two important players in the promulgation and reception of Piers Plowman, Chaucer, and Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede in the years leading up to the death of Archbishop Matthew Parker in 1575. First, a catalogue of thirty-three items by the hand of the Crede in Trinity College MS R.3.15, most of them quite staid products of the archbishop’s household. Then, a corrected and extended catalogue of books and manuscripts owned or inscribed by Stephan Batman, who claimed to have collected 6700 books for the archbishop and whose imagination ran rampant. The final section investigates the ways in which these two have been combined into one, especially in the work of Simon Horobin. An appendix tracks the history of the cancelled classmarks found in Trinity College Library’s manuscripts, the misreading of one of which, in the Piers Plowman manuscript R.3.14, as Batman’s erased initials is symptomatic of the mode of argumentation that made the historical Batman into his opposite: the Crede scribe, a George Kane avant la lettre, textual critic of Middle English poetry.

This article places Langland’s Piers Plowman and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast at two points on the generic continuum of Weird fiction; it makes a case for how and why Weird fiction differs from mainstream speculative fiction or SFF; it considers how and why contemporary medievalists are drawn to writing Weird fiction, using the works of Sarah Tolmie, Helen Marshall, Lisa Hannett, Sofia Samatar, and Christian Livermore as examples.

This essay explores teaching Piers Plowman in a resolutely secular context: the University of Colorado Boulder, where students tend to see the poem as Christian and, therefore, unfamiliar and/ or irrelevant. The author first discusses her efforts to teach the poem via historicism and literary analysis, the two modes fundamental to her own training, and the ways in which these modes ultimately proved unsatisfying. Then, the author advocates for teaching the poem in terms of moral interests, as an evaluation of human behavior, thoughts, and feelings. She includes a couple of exercises that help students see the poem as an attempt to make sense of the self and its relation to the social world.

While Florence Converse’s novel of the Rising, Long Will, has received some attention from Langlandians, the work of her companion — medievalist and Wellesley professor Vida Dutton Scudder — has been relatively unexamined. Our essay details how Scudder blended activism with teaching toward a socially informed pedagogy. We then examine social pedagogy in Long Will in light of Scudder’s commitments. Finally, we present how Scudder’s lifework might inform teaching Piers Plowman via Long Will with attention to service learning. We conclude by considering the lessons of these two women activists in this moment of ‘anti-wokeness’ in Florida, where both of us teach.

This essay considers the integral role that Piers Plowman played within American colonial settlement and westward expansion and how that history has influenced the authors’ pedagogy in literature and visual design classes, respectively. Beginning with its earliest-known American reader — Thomas Dudley, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company — Piers Plowman appeared regularly in the libraries, letters, and speeches of consequential figures in American law and land use, including Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt. By tracing the allegory of the Plowing of the Half-Acre from colonial New England to twentieth-century California, the essay demonstrates how Langland’s agricultural metaphorics of collective obligation and individual conscience embedded themselves deeply within not just English but American histories of land management and social improvement. This background has inspired new teaching initiatives for both authors, including an environmental humanities partnership between CSU Monterey Bay students and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

This essay describes a course on the topic of premodern disability, and it argues that Piers Plowman was instrumental in helping students recognize the capaciousness, interpretive complexity, and ethical significance of disability as a category both in the medieval past and today. Reading excerpts from the C text, students studied the poem’s varied representations of impairment, and they explored how these resonate with modern paradigms such as Jasbir Puar’s theory of debility and the framework of neurodiversity. Ultimately, Piers Plowman’s use of personification proved to be an especially powerful tool in helping students understand disability as a form of personhood.

This essay is a product of my own passion for teaching Piers Plowman (a poem traditionally seen as inaccessible) to community college students, an often-overlooked demographic that is rarely exposed to the rich fields of medieval literature and history. After outlining the importance of finding value in the inevitable ‘failures’ and uncertainty of scholarly work and connecting this process to Piers, I trace out the conflicting value systems that have long structured the post-secondary education system: the vocational and liberal arts models of education. I explore ways in which Piers Plowman itself and our modes of teaching it can bridge the gap between these models and help us to reconsider what is valuable in our own labour as instructors. Furthermore, careful attention to these issues can also aid us in teaching our students to value their own scholarly labour and begin to trust their own abilities to navigate challenging texts — and to reap the rewards of doing so. The last section of the essay offers practical steps toward integrating Piers Plowman into the community college teaching environment in a way that is pleasurable and rewarding. Ultimately, I argue that Piers Plowman should be considered an open, accessible poem that speaks to the struggles most of us experience. We are all ‘Piers people’.

Piers Plowman encourages and permits us to confront trauma. Students in my medieval literature class connected Langland’s description of Christ’s Passion and crucifixion with their own memories of religious abuse. The students’ engagement was not just a modern phenomenon but deeply tied to what the poem enables us to feel and what it intends. As they recognized, Langland indicates that spiritual survival is possible, and he tells a story about the potential for recovery. My students participated in a discourse of religious trauma and recuperation that is both their own and also part of the understanding and reception of the poem.

In this ‘reflection’ I discuss the tool of ‘translation pedagogy’ that has animated my presentation of Piers Plowman, a text that has been central to my teaching and scholarship for decades. I teach my own (sometimes gritty and very ‘Jersey’) translation of The A Version, but I get the students to translate themselves from the original Middle English text throughout the course of the semester, putting their own experiences and backgrounds to work in the process. With Piers and other Middle English texts, ‘translation’ as classroom practice can be particularly transformative, because when students not only read an important work in translation but also compose their own versions of the target text under study, they become active participants in the reading experience.

This is a composition in two parts. The first is a reflection on how motherhood helped me to see a better way to teach medieval literature, one not so closely bound to the praxis of today’s literature classroom. And the second is a lesson plan that emerged from those experiences that shows how a teacher could use these strategies to draw and visualize key scenes in William Langland’s Piers Plowman in a scaffolded and schematic manner — a form of reverse outlining or idea mapping of the figurae that constitute the dreamer Will’s world, and which, in turn, serves as the hermeneutic framework for further interpretation.

How might reading Piers Plowman help our students reflect on living well in catastrophic times? How does the poem invite speculation on navigating social injustices, widespread suffering, crises of care, and ecological disasters? In this collaborative essay, we suggest several of the possible answers that might emerge by teaching key moments of Piers Plowman alongside contemporary Anglophone speculative fiction, including Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Margaret Atwood’s ‘MaddAddam’ trilogy, and more.  Considered together, these works suggest the ethical possibilities of allegorical and speculative worldbuilding in both Langland’s dream vision and modern fiction.

Teaching Piers Plowman to beginners can be a daunting task both personally and professionally. It requires the instructor to reckon with both the unique pedagogical challenges of their specific educational environment as well as their own personal anxieties about teaching the poem well. This essay offers some suggestions for approaching the text through these potential roadblocks.