In this class, we will get to know one of the strangest and most difficult literary works of the Middle Ages: Piers Plowman, a fourteenth-century poem that asks what it means to live well and do good in a world with few clear answers. The poem’s unstable journey through a kaleidoscopic landscape of dreams and allegorical visions functions both as a skeptical exploration of the human capacity to know and a scathing visionary critique of late fourteenth-century collective life. It is a uniquely weird and rewarding text.

The class will also function as an advanced introduction to late medieval British literature, and to the intricacies of the period’s social and religious conflicts. Previous experience of reading Middle English is not required, but students should be prepared to move quickly as we learn.

The reading text for this class is Schmidt’s marginal-gloss Everyman edition of the B-text (ISBN: 978-0460875097): please get hold of a copy before our first meeting.