VL1 PENN COMMENTARY ON PIERS PLOWMAN [Hardcover]

A work of enormous importance. Of all the poems of the English Middle Ages,Piers Plowmanis the one that most deserves and needs annotation of the fullest and best possible kind, both because it is a text of unrivaled literary quality and interest, and because it is characteristically knotty and deploys a language of unusual richness, density, and allusiveness. Much of this allusiveness is to areas of learning that are not at every modern reader's fingertips. A particular difficulty is the existence of the poem in three authorial versions of almost desperate complexity. It will be an immense triumph to have a commentary which elucidates their relationships as a matter of policy and not simply as the result of conflating annotation on the different versions. —Derek Pearsall

The first full commentary onPiers Plowmansince the late nineteenth century is inaugurated with the publication of the first two of its five projected volumes.

The detailed and wide-rangingPenn Commentaryplaces the allegorical dream-vision ofPiers Plowmanwithin the literary, historical, social, and intellectual contexts of late medieval England, and within the long history of critical interpretation of the poem, assessing past scholarship while offering original materials and insights throughout. The authors' line-by-line, section by section, and passus by passus commentary on all three versions of the poem and on the stages of its multiple revisions reveals new aspects of the poem's meaning while assessing and summarizing a complex and often divisive scholarly tradition. The volumes offer an up-to-date, original, and open-ended guide to a poem whose engagement in its social world is unrivaled in English literature, and whose literary, religious, and intellectual accomplishments are uniquely powerful.

The Penn Commentaryis designed to be equally useful to readers of the A, B, or C texts of the poem. It is geared to readers eager to have lcc