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.