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Winner of a 2004 Choice Award for
an Outstanding Academic Title
"As valuable in its learned accuracy as it
is provocative in its efforts to critique pursuits of the poem as
a spiritual or literary autobiography, BensonÉs study selectively
but successfully limns a öpublic culture where the phenomenon of
Piers was at home." —A. Galloway, Choice
"David Benson tackles the difficult and vital question of Piers
Plowman's engagement with its history by getting down to the
basics of the text, the circumstances of its production, and the
real world from which it emerged. His historical re-envisioning
of Piers is exactly what Langland's poem, at this stage in
its career, needs. Public Piers Plowman is a major achievement."
—Derek Pearsall, Harvard University
The
fourteenth-century alliterative poem Piers Plowman was widely
popular in its own day. The number of its surviving manuscripts
ranks just below that of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Although
the poem has been the subject of some interesting recent critical
scholarship, it continues to be marginalized by medievalists and
non-medievalists alike. According to C. David Benson, this is because
the tendency of modern criticism has been to read Piers as an autobiography
mired in the singular intellectual obsessions of its author or as
a recondite exploration of theological and political issues. In
Public Piers Plowman, Benson returns the poem to the center
of late medieval English culture by treating it as a public rather
than a personal or elite work.
Public
Piers Plowman is divided into two parts. The first is an extended
essay on what Benson calls the "Langland myth." He traces the evolution
of Piers scholarship and demonstrates the limitations of
treating Piers as a direct expression of the poet's life
and intellectual views. Well over a century after its creation,
the Langland myth remains dominant in studies of the poem, blocking
other potentially fruitful approaches.
In
the second part Benson offers an alternative history for the poem.
Although Piers is usually compared with high art and thought,
such as that of Chaucer or scholasticism, Benson approaches it from
a broader public context, using representative examples from vernacular
writing, parish art, and civic practices. He argues that Piers
reached a wide contemporary audience because, far from being an
expression of the author's own life and opinions, it was securely
rooted in the common culture of its time and place.
Public
Piers Plowman is an ambitious work that dares to confront a
true literary masterpiece. In the process, it makes this great poem
more accessible, exciting, and necessary to modern readers. |
