Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'William Langland'

This thesis is concerned with reading practices and the late medieval vernacular text. More specifically, it is concerned with the ways in which the medieval text was read and received in early modern England. The analysis focuses on two texts in their early modern instantiations: the late fourteenth century allegorical dream vision Piers Plowman by William Langland, and the early fifteenth century Fall of Princes, a translation of Boccaccio’s De Casibus Virorum Illustrium by Benedictine monk John Lydgate. The thesis considers the reception of these poems as they are reworked and reread by successive editors and readers during the shift from script to print, and from a culture of orality to a culture of silent reading. The reception of and editorial policy applied to these texts are considered in relation to the political and religious upheavals of the sixteenth century, and to developments in literacy and literary culture. The editions selected for analysis range from an early manuscript of a B-text version of Piers Plowman, Trinity College Cambridge, MS B.15.17, through to an early seventeenth century print of the Mirror for Magistrates, an early modern reworking of Lydgate’s Fall, published in 1619. The thesis engages with Zumthor’s theory of textual mouvance in that each edition is granted the authority of its own circumstances of production and reception. The synchronic analysis highlights the economic and political pressures which influenced and/or constrained editorial decisions. In charting the various editions through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the thesis provides a complementary diachronic perspective which places each edition within the wider history of textual transmission and in relation to developments in literary culture. The combined synchronic and diachronic analysis of the printed late medieval text provides an insight into developments in reading habits and changing attitudes towards authorship and the functions of literature more generally. The evidence for the development of reading practices can be found in the interaction between the text and its systems of punctuation and paratext. Systems of punctuation and features of paratext act as guide and mediator between the text and the reader; it is these forms and levels of mediation, and the relationship between them, which can indicate patterns of literacy and reader engagement. Thus, developments in the systems of punctuation and paratext interact with changing models of the reader and the various types of ‘literate activities’ available to them (Salter 2012: 67). The late medieval period has been described as a culture of ‘literate orality’ (Sponsler 2010: 1) and its readers exhibited a diverse range of reading practices. The oral and aural characteristics of literary culture gradually declined in the late medieval and early modern periods but a ‘critical mass’ of silent readers did not emerge until the end of the seventeenth century (Jajdelska 2007). Adopting and adapting Jajdelska’s theory of the changing reader model, this thesis focuses on the chosen texts as they appear before the emergence of this ‘critical mass’. The analysis of reading practices, therefore, pertains to the period of transition during which readers negotiated existing oral/aural reading environments while moving towards a predominantly silent reading culture. The thesis demonstrates that the transition was gradual and that sixteenth-century literary culture was diverse in both its reading habits and reading practices. The emerging discipline of historical sociopragmatics provides the theoretical and methodological bridge between the diachronic description of punctuation and paratext, and the examination of reading practices. Historical sociopragmatics allows established insights from sociolinguistics and pragmatics to be applied to the written historical text, creating new opportunities for the recovery and analysis of textual production, editorial treatment and reader engagement. This thesis brings the sociopragmatic concept of ‘situational contexts’ (Culpepper 2011: 4) to the analysis of the physical page and, more specifically, to the interactions between punctuation and paratextual systems. By applying a sociopragmatic approach to the concept of the reader model, this thesis demonstrates that systems of punctuation and paratext provide important evidence for the history textual transmission, reader engagement and the development of reading practices.

William Langland's The Vision of Piers Plowman was probably the first medieval English poem to achieve a national audience because Langland chose to write in the vernacular and he used the specialized vocabularies of his readership to open the poem to them. During the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, writers began using the vernacular in an attempt to allow all English people access to their texts. They did so consciously, indicating their intent in prologues and envois when they formally address readers. Some writers, like Langland and the author of Mankind, actually use representatives of the rural classes as primary characters who exhibit the beliefs and lives of the rural population. Anne Middleton's distinction between public-the readership an author imagined-and audience-the readership a work achieved-allows modern critics to discuss both public and audience and try to determine how the two differed. While the public is always only a presumption, the language in which an author writes and the cultural events depicted by the literature can provide a more plausible estimate of the public. The vernacular allowed authors like Gower, Chaucer, the author of Mankind, and Langland to use the specialized vocabularies of the legal and rural communities to discuss societal problems. They also use representatives of the communities to further open the texts to a vernacular public. These open texts provide some representation for the rural and common people's ideas about the other classes to be heard. Langland in particular uses the specialized vocabularies and representative characters to establish both the faults of all English people and a common guide they can follow to seek moral lives through Truth. His rural character, Piers the Plowman, allows rural readers to identify with the messages in the text while showing upper class and educated readers that they too can emulate a rural character who sets a moral standard.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2004.
Document formatted into pages; contains 213 p. Includes bibliographical references. Abstract available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2009 May 29.

In this dissertation, I examine the various ways in which medieval authors used the term "lollard" to mean something other than "Wycliffite." In the case of William Langland's Piers Plowman, I trace the usage of the lollard-trope through the C-text and link it to Langland's dependence on the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares. Regarding Chaucer's Parson's Tale, I establish the orthodoxy of the tale's speaker by comparing his tale to contemporaneous texts of varying orthodoxy, and I link the Parson's being referred to as a "lollard" to the eschatological message of his tale. In the chapter on The Book of Margery Kempe, I examine that the overemphasis on Margery's potential Wycliffism causes everyone in The Book to overlook her heretical views on universal salvation. Finally, in comparing some of John Lydgate's minor poems with the macaronic sermons of Oxford, MS Bodley 649, I establish the orthodox character of late-medieval English anti-Wycliffism that these disparate works share. In all, this dissertation points up the eschatological character of the lollard-trope and looks at the various ends to which medieval authors deployed it.

Les poèmes allitératifs anglais, dont le représentant le plus illustre est le Piers Plowman de William Langland, s'inscrivent au sein d'un système de communication en pleine évolution dans l'Angleterre du XIVe siècle. L'extension de la literacy – l'aptitude à lire et à écrire – et le développement de l'anglais en sont les éléments les plus significatifs. L'objet de cette étude est l'interaction entre les différents aspects de ce système et les poèmes, afin de dégager toute la richesse de textes littéraires qui peuvent être considérés comme des sources historiques à part entière. Les thèmes abordés sont nombreux, au regard des multiples intérêts des poètes, préalablement replacés dans leur cadre social et culturel : l'organisation de la société, le gouvernement et la justice, l'institution ecclésiastique et la connaissance, la perception du salut de chacun et de tous, le positionnement des auteurs par rapport à leur activité. Leurs critiques, mais aussi leurs propositions et leurs espoirs, reflètent et enrichissent un dialogue de plus en plus large au sein de la société anglaise.

This thesis investigates the use to which William Langland puts the Glossa Ordinaria to authorise his vision of ethical, social and ecclesiastical reform in Piers Plowman. There was much in late fourteenth-century England to arouse the ire of the reformer and satirist and among Langland's targets was glossing the Bible. Yet the Bible was only available in glossed editions; so why and how did he differentiate between the Glossa Ordinaria and contemporary glossing? The answer seems to lie in the exploitative and dishonest use to which glossing was often put. Langland sees beyond that, however, recognising the ethical perils of linguistic diversity and more serious still, the lack of ethical content in, and even the antinomian tendencies of conventional (mostly Augustinian) understandings of some major Christian doctrines, such as predestination and free will, original sin, grace, the image of God in man, the Incarnation of Christ, and the relationship between wisdom, knowledge and love. This thesis examines the extent to which Langland deviates from these conventional understandings and revisits older understandings with more ethical productivity and a greater motivation for the laity to live ethically. He finds in the Gloss a source of such understandings.

Notre thèse vise à présenter l'image du pouvoir royal dans quatre poèmes allitérés moyen-anglais (Piers Plowman, Mum and the Sothsegger, Richard the Redeles, The Crowned king). Nous y évoquons les relations complexes entre le pouvoir royal et les diverses composantes de la société de l'époque. Ce travail s'articule autour de trois grandes parties : l'origine de la fonction royale et la nature des pouvoirs du roi, les rapports entre la Couronne, la noblesse et l'Eglise nationale et, enfin, le gouvernement de l'Etat monarchique. Trois des quatre textes du corpus sont traduits pour la première fois en langue française
The aim of our thesis is to account of the representation of royal power in four Middle-English alliterative poems (Piers Plowman, Mum and the Sothsegger, Richard the Redeless, The Crowned King). We try and present the much intricate relations between royal power and the different estates of the contemporary English society. This study is divided into three distinct parts : the origin of the function and the nature of royal powers, the relationships between the Crown , the nobility and the national Church, and, in a last part, the government of the monarchical state. Three poems of our corpus have eventually been translated for the first time into French

This thesis fills a gap in knowledge by systematically identifying ways in which Julian of Norwich’s 'Revelations of Love' and William Langland’s 'Piers Plowman' were influenced by the biblical Apocalypse and exegetical writings. It considers the implications of areas of confluence such as spiritual warfare and other salient thematic elements of the Apocalypse which both writers reapply and emphasise. It contends that the exegetical approach to the Apocalypse is more extensive in Julian’s 'Revelations' and more sophisticated in 'Piers Plowman' than previously thought, whether through primary or secondary textual influences. The thesis explores concepts of authority and medieval interpretations of the Apocalypse within the orthodoxy versus heterodoxy debate. It considers Julian’s explications of her vision of the soul as city of Christ and all believers – the fulcrum of her eschatologically-focussed Aristotelian and Augustinian influenced pneumatology. It explores the liberal soteriology implicit in her Parable of the Lord and the Servant in its Johannine and Scotistic Christological emphasis, the Bernadine influenced concept of the Motherhood of God, the absent vision of hell, and the eschatological ‘grete dede’, vis-à-vis a possible critique of the prevalent hermeneutic. It contextualises Julian’s writing by considering contemporaneous Apocalypse-influenced women writers such as Marguerite Porete and Margery Kempe. The thesis argues that Langland transposes Apocalypse 1-17 onto fourteenth-century England as a loose template for his own apocalypse. It considers his poetics with reference to Bakhtinian theoretical concepts which Langland employs within nuanced re-applications of the Apocalypse. It explores the agrarian metaphor and apocalyptic imagery in the poem’s opening, and the innovative employment of the allegorical dream vision genre. In discussing Langland’s apocalyptic dreams’ openings and personifications it highlights his re-imaginings of sections of the Apocalypse, arguing that the didactic oraculum of his personification, Lady Holy Church, bears similarities with Apocalypse 2-3. It reconsiders Lady Meed as Whore of Babylon and Langland’s evocation of the Antichristus Mysticus comparable to the perceived threat to the nascent Christian community in the Apocalypse.

Several earlier generations of historians described the later Middle Ages as an 'age of fear'. This account was especially applied to accounts of the presumed mentality of the later medieval layperson, seen as at the mercy of the currents of plague, violence and dramatic social, economic and political change and, above all, a religiosity characterised as primitive or even pathological. This 'great fear theory' remains influential in public perception. However, recent scholarship has done much to restitute a more positive, affective, incarnational and even soteriologically optimistic late-medieval vernacular piety. Nevertheless, perhaps due to the positive and recuperative approach of this scholarship, it did not attend to the treatment of fear in devotional and literary texts of the period. This thesis responds to this gap in current scholarship, and the continued pull of this account of later-medieval piety, by building an account of fear's place in the rich vernacular theology available in the Middle English of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It takes as its starting point accounts of the role of fear in religious experience, devotion and practice within vernacular and lay contexts, as opposed to texts written by and for clerical audiences. The account of drede in Middle English strikingly integrates humbler aspects of fear into the relationship to God. The theological and indeed material circumstances of the later fourteenth century may have intensified fear's role: this thesis suggests that they also fostered an intensified engagement with the inherited tradition, generating fresh theological accounts of the place of fear. Chapter One begins with a triad of broadly pastoral texts which might be seen to disseminate a top-down agenda but which, this analysis discovers, articulate diverse ways in which the humble place of fear is elevated as part of a vernacular agenda. Here love and fear are always seen in a complex, varying dialectic or symbiosis. Chapter Two explores how this reaches a particular apex in the foundational and final place of fear in Julian of Norwich's Revelations, and is not incompatible even with her celebratedly 'optimistic' theology. Chapter Three turns to a more broadly accessed generic context, that of later medieval cycle drama, to engage in readings of Christ's Gethsemane fear in the 'Agony in the Garden' episodes. The N-Town, Chester, Towneley and York plays articulate complex and variant theological ideas about Christ's fearful affectivity as a site of imitation and participation for the medieval layperson. Chapter Four is a reading of Piers Plowman that argues a right fear is essential to Langland's espousal of a poetics of crisis and a crucial element in the questing corrective he applies to self and society. It executes new readings of key episodes in the poem, including the Prologue, Pardon, Crucifixion and the final apocalyptic passus, in the light of its theology of fear.

A common assumption in theories of the aesthetic is that it is a concept and experience that belongs to modernity. However, as Umberto Eco has shown, the aesthetic was a topic of great consideration by medieval thinkers. As this project demonstrates in the study of the poetry of William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer, the aesthetic was, in fact, a dynamic and complex concept in the Middle Ages that could affirm institutional ideologies even as it challenged them and suggested alternative perspectives for comprehending truth. This project focuses on the ways in which the poets' respective vernacular literary masterpieces, Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales, individually craft theories of the aesthetic and defend its role as a privileged discursive epistemology. I argue that, for Langland and Chaucer, the aesthetic is a discursive mode through which the reader comes to possess a complex knowledge that matches his or her nature, material and immaterial, sensitive and intellective; the reader arrives at this knowledge by engaging his or her wits in a translation of the poetics of Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales. For Langland, this translative exercise is evoked by the complex interplay of allegory and irony, and the result of the aesthetic experience is an embodied knowledge of God's truth that he refers to as "kind knowing." For Chaucer, the aesthetic is configured through the experience of irony, a figure that engages the process of translation as it confirms the complexity of truth as we can comprehend it. The aesthetic is also, for Chaucer, represented by the privileged mode of parody, which allows the reader to hear, as it were, what is missing and, in reading, supply the missing voice and create a dialogue--between text and reader and/or tale and tale--that in effect remasters whatever is monoaural by translating it into stereo. Ultimately, for both Langland and Chaucer, the aesthetic engenders instruction and pleasure, and both together are essential to our embodied comprehension of truth.
10000-01-01

This study considers Thomas Hoccleve’s role, throughout his works, as a “religious” writer: as an individual who engages seriously with the dynamics of heresy and ecclesiastical reform, who contributes to traditions of vernacular devotional writing, and who raises the question of how Christianity manifests on personal as well as political levels – and in environments that are at once London-based, national, and international. The chapters focus, respectively, on the role of reading and moralization in the Series; the language of “vice and virtue” in the Epistle of Cupid; the moral version of Chaucer introduced in the Regiment of Princes; the construction of the Hoccleve persona in the Regiment; and the representation of the Eucharist throughout Hoccleve’s works. One main focus of the study is Hoccleve’s mediating influence in presenting a moral version of Chaucer in his Regiment. This study argues that Hoccleve’s Chaucer is not a pre-established artifact, but rather a Hocclevian invention, and it indicates the transnational literary, political, and religious contexts that align in Hoccleve’s presentation of his poetic predecessor. Rather than posit the Hoccleve-Chaucer relationship as one of Oedipal anxiety, as other critics have done, this study indicates the way in which Hoccleve’s Chaucer evolves in response to poetic anxiety not towards Chaucer himself, but rather towards an increasingly restrictive intellectual and ecclesiastical climate. This thesis contributes to the recently revitalized critical dialogue surrounding the role and function of fifteenth-century English literature, and the effect on poetry of heresy, the church’s response to heresy, and ecclesiastical reform both in England and in Europe. It also advances critical narratives regarding Hoccleve’s response to contemporary French poetry; the role of confession, sacramental discourse, and devotional images in Hoccleve’s work; and Hoccleve’s impact on literary tradition.

碩士
國立中正大學
外國文學所
96
Piers Plowman exposes a radical social and moral problem of William Langland''s London: the problem of sloth. This thesis argues that true labor is crucial both to the scheme of salvation presented in Langland''s Piers Plowman and to Langland''s idea of how to live an ethical life in a poor and slothful society. Langland uses the complexity of dream narrative to probe the problem of sloth in his day. His moral vision modifies a more severe scholastic approach to the problem of sloth or acedia as a sin of the flesh mainly associated with one’s spiritual dryness. Langland''s depiction of Sleuthe the figure or of the theme of sloth emphasizes more the aspect of one''s negligence of worldly duties than a sin of the flesh. Chapter One aims to demonstrate that the poem presents itself as the site of an emerging awareness of the vital importance of labor to the individual and to the good of society. What do the three Dos mean in the poem? Why does Will the Dreamer fail in his search for Do-Well? By highlighting the fraudulent beggary, Langland demonstrates how dishonest labor can sabotage justice and deteriorate the society. Chapter Two explores Langland’s concept of sloth and the poet''s concern of the waste of worldly goods, time, and manual labor in the society. Langland elaborately describes Will the Dreamer as the embodiment of sloth in order to further reveal the Franciscan ideal of patient poverty. In the inner dreams, Will follows Fortune to the Lond of Longyng, misspending his lifetime without the slightest idea that his primary obligation is to repair his relationship with God--redde quod debes (“pay what you owe”). In the economy of salvation, God demands restitution. Will’s wanhope is a result of his sloth. In traditional teaching, the confession of Sleuthe includes despair or wanhope—the extreme spiritual effect of acedia. Langland not only incorporates the popular images of sloth into the poem, but also associates the sin of sloth with Will''s lack of true labor to win salvation.

Langland's use of moral distichs from the medieval text known as the Disticha Catonis has been noted but never critically examined as a whole. The figure of 'Cato' and the distichs attributed to him stand out in Piers Plowman. I will begin by placing both Piers and the Disticha in their medieval literary context. Questions of audience and literacy have always been central to Piers, and I will look at the way in which Langland's use of Latin quotations from the Disticha relates to these issues. I will also examine the role of ' Cato' and the distichs in Piers in order to dispell the prevailing critical view that 'Cato' represented a pagan authority. The medieval Christian commentaries which accompanied the Disticha illuminate Piers as well. Critics have often wondered why Langland choose to write in a mixture of languages. 'Cato' and the Disticha are part of the answer.
Graduate

This dissertation explores the use of romance across religious poetry in late medieval England. Medieval devotional poems frequently borrow motifs and devices from romance; they might, for example, figure Jesus as a knight jousting with the devil or adopt the romance technique of interlace to narrate the Passion. Critics most frequently read these borrowings as a popularizing method, arguing that the poets of these religious texts turn to romance in order to appeal to their secular audience. I argue instead that late 14th century Middle English poets use romance to explore difficult theological paradoxes and Christian practices. In Pearl, the romance descriptio personae helps articulate the paradoxes of divine reward, at once hierarchical and egalitarian. In Piers Plowman, the romance incognito demonstrates the shifting and multivalent nature of the Trinity. In St. Erkenwald, the slow indulgence of romance wonder stands in contrast to God’s time, which is simultaneously immediate and drawn-out. In the Canterbury Tales, the romance parody of Thopas primes the reader for the prudential lessons of Melibee. This dissertation adds to a growing body of scholarship that reads medieval romance, and in particular Middle English romance, as a genre that does not simply entertain audiences but also interrogates, challenges, or reiterates medieval values and ideas. However, this project adds to current scholarship by examining romance out of its native context and inside or beside religious genres instead. In the first three chapters, I argue that by triggering a romantic reading, the Middle English poems Pearl, Piers Plowman, and St. Erkenwald enact and demonstrate the conceptual difficulties of certain theological paradoxes. In these poems, romance serves as a contemplative tool by demonstrating the reader’s comprehensive limits in the face of the divine. My fourth chapter, which explores Chaucer’s romance parody Sir Thopas alongside his pedagogical treatise Melibee, instead considers the Christian virtue of prudence; here, the exaggerated romance tropes of Sir Thopas prepare the pilgrims to pay penance prudentially by feeling and contemplating time in daily Christian life. While romance does not articulate a paradox about God in Thopas-Melibee, it still prompts contemplation about a difficult Christian virtue, prudence. In all four chapters, I find that romance serves as a vehicle for spiritual contemplation because of its own modes of thinking, whether that be social, economic, or temporal. Whether romance is set within or beside devotional texts, the secular genre allows the reader to contemplate difficult Christian theology and practices and to experience them as difficult in contemplation. Romance, I argue, is a critical tool in the vernacular theologian’s toolkit.