Sunday 1 November 2020

Voices from the Middle Ages ....... Piers Plowman ...... on the wireless

Piers Plowman is a collection of  poetic and prose works from the 1380s through the reign of Elizabeth I and beyond, and reflect economic, social, political, and religious grievances.


"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’ 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’s College London, and Alastair Bennett, Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London

Producer: Simon Tillotson"*

Picture; Folio 170r from the 14th century Luttrell Psalter, showing "en:drolleries." At the bottom is a plowman.

*Piers Plowman, In Our Time,  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000nvsl

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