Preaching and Narrative in Piers Plowman

William Langland's Piers Plowman was written and read during a “golden age” of English preaching. The poem describes a world where sermons took many different forms and were delivered in many different contexts, from public events in the life of the realm to pastoral instruction in the parish. It dramatises preaching as part of its allegorical action, showing how sermons shaped their listeners' understanding of the world; it also includes polemical critique of corrupt, self-interested preaching, and offers radical prescriptions for its reform. This book argues that Langland's central insight into the way that sermons moved and engaged their audiences had to do with their characteristic use of narrative. Preachers in the poem address listeners who are absorbed in the concerns of their present moment, and encourage them to new forms of social and spiritual endeavour by locating that moment in a larger, interpreted plot: the story of an individual life, or an emergent community, or of salvation history as a whole. The book employs a critical vocabulary derived from Paul Ricoeur to describe the process by which these narratives are composed, and to show how they mediate and reconfigure their listeners' experiences.

Alastair Bennett, Lecturer in Medieval Literature, Royal Holloway, University of London

Alastair Bennett is Lecturer in Medieval Literature in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published on Langland, Chaucer, and late medieval religious and devotional culture. He is currently editing the Pardoner's Prologue and Tale for the Cambridge Complete Works of Chaucer, and the A-text of Piers Plowman from Lincoln's Inn MS 150 for the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive. He edits the Yearbook of Langland Studies with Katharine Breen and Eric Weiskott.

Introduction: Preaching and Narrative in Piers Plowman
1. Preaching on the Coronation: The Prologue and the Sermon of Conscience
2. Preaching on the Half-Acre: Fear, Hope, and Narrative in the Second Vision
3. Preachers and Minstrels: Study's Complaint and the Feast of Conscience
4. Preaching on the Lifetime: Sermons and the "Self-Constant" Subject in Piers Plowman
5. Histories of the Self, the World, and the Sermon: Anima and the Tree of Charity
Coda: Atonement and Emplotment at the Harrowing of Hell