Piers Plowman
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Langland's exploration of what it means to live a good life, written when the Black Death had overturned many of the old certainties.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss William Langland's poem, written around 1370, about a man called Will who fell asleep on the Malvern Hills and dreamed of Piers the Plowman. This was a time between the Black Death and The Peasants鈥� Revolt, when Christians wanted to save their souls but doubted how best to do it - and had to live with that uncertainty. Some call this the greatest medieval poem in English, one offering questions not answers, and it can be as unsettling now as it was then.
With
Laura Ashe
Professor of English Literature at Worcester College, University of Oxford
Lawrence Warner
Professor of Medieval English at King鈥檚 College London
And
Alastair Bennett
Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Last on
LINKS AND FURTHER READING
READING LIST:
Laura Ashe, Richard II (Penguin, 2016)
Anna Baldwin, A Guidebook to Piers Plowman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
Michael Calabrese, An Introduction to Piers Plowman (University of Florida Press, 2016)
Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
William Langland (ed. A.V.C. Schmidt), The Vision of Piers Plowman: The B Text (Everyman, 1995)
William Langland (trans. A.V.C. Schmidt), Piers Plowman: A New Translation of the B Text (Oxford University Press, 2009)
William Langland (ed. by M铆膵e谩l F. Vaughan), Piers Plowman: The A Version (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011)
William Langland (ed. by Derek Pearsall), Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-text (University of Exeter Press, 2008)
Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in the Middle Ages (W&N, 2017)
James Simpson, Piers Plowman: An Introduction (Liverpool University Press, 2007)
Emily Steiner, Reading Piers Plowman (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
Lawrence Warner, The Myth of Piers Plowman: Constructing a Medieval Literary Archive (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
Broadcasts
- Thu 29 Oct 2020 09:00麻豆社 Radio 4
- Thu 29 Oct 2020 21:30麻豆社 Radio 4
Featured in...
![]()
Medieval—In Our Time
Browse the Medieval era within the In Our Time archive.
![]()
Culture—In Our Time
Popular culture, poetry, music and visual arts and the roles they play in our society.
In Our Time podcasts
Download programmes from the huge In Our Time archive.
The In Our Time Listeners' Top 10
If you鈥檙e new to In Our Time, this is a good place to start.
Arts and Ideas podcast
Download the best of Radio 3's Free Thinking programme.
Podcast
-
![]()
In Our Time
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas, people and events that have shaped our world.
