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10 - William Langland

from Part II - Literary Texts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

By
Emily Steiner
Edited by
Candace Barrington  and
Sebastian Sobecki
Candace Barrington
Affiliation:
Central Connecticut State University
Sebastian Sobecki
Affiliation:
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands
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Summary

William Langland’s Piers Plowman, one of the most influential poems of the English Middle Ages, is a poem steeped in law. The poet’s profound engagement with legal concepts, with fourteenth-century legislation and with legal instruments, such as charters and seals, is key to his innovative poetics as well as to his larger project of making English verse a discourse of theology, ethics and reform. Throughout the poem, Langland explores the dynamics of justice and mercy; along the way he touches on such bread-and-butter legal topics as contract, crime, inheritance and bondage. As the poem shows, legal language, whether derived from scripture, from canon, civil, or common law, or from contemporary practice can forge creative, even daring links between politics, religion and social life.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature , pp. 121 - 134
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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References

Further Reading

Boboc, Andreea D., Theorizing Legal Personhood in Late Medieval England, Leiden: Brill, 2015.Google Scholar
Cole, Andrew and Galloway, Andrew, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Fowler, Elizabeth, ‘Civil Death and the Maiden: Agency and the Conditions of Contract in Piers Plowman’, Speculum 70:4 (1995), 760–92.Google Scholar
Galloway, Andrew, The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman, Vol. 1: C Prologue-Passus 4; B Prologue-Passus 4; A Prologue-Passus 4. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Galloway, Andrew, ‘Piers Plowman and the Subject of the Law’, The Yearbook of Langland Studies 15 (2001), 117–40.Google Scholar
Giancarlo, Matthew, Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England, vol. 64, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Holsinger, Bruce W., ‘Langland’s Musical Reader: Liturgy, Law, and the Constraints of Performance’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21:1 (1991), 99–141.Google Scholar
Kennedy, Kathleen, Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval English Literature, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.Google Scholar
Middleton, Anne, ‘Acts of Vagrancy: The C Version “Autobiography” and the Statute of 1388’, in Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship, ed. Justice, Steven and Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, 208–317.Google Scholar
Scase, Wendy, Literature and Complaint in England 1272–1553, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Sobecki, Sebastian, Unwritten Verities: The Making of England’s Vernacular Legal Culture, 1463–1549, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Steiner, Emily, Reading Piers Plowman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature, vol. 50, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Steiner, Emily and Barrington, Candace, eds., The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Taylor, Jamie K., Fictions of Evidence: Witnessing, Literature, and Community in the Late Middle Ages, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Thomas, Arvind, ‘The Subject of Canon Law: Confessing Covetise in Piers Plowman B and C and the Memoriale presbiterorum’, The Yearbook of Langland Studies 24 (2010), 139–68.Google Scholar
Yeager, Stephen, From Lawmen to Plowmen: Anglo-Saxon Legal Tradition and the School of Langland, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014.Google Scholar

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