15 Facts About Piers Plowman

1.

Piers Plowman or Visio Willelmi de Petro Ploughman is a Middle English allegorical narrative poem by William Langland.

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2.

Piers Plowman contains the first known reference to a literary tradition of Robin Hood tales.

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3.

Piers Plowman considers what use scholarship might have in helping him achieve salvation.

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4.

Piers Plowman now meets Imaginatif, who advises Will to be patient.

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5.

Piers the Plowman offers a definition of Do Well, Do Better and Do Best.

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6.

Piers Plowman falls asleep again and now dreams of the Antichrist.

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7.

Piers Plowman is considered to be one of the most analytically challenging texts in Middle English textual criticism.

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8.

Since it is hard to see how this is credible to those who read the poem, perhaps the idea was that Piers Plowman was a mask for the author.

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9.

Or, as the ideal character of the poem, Piers Plowman might be seen as a kind of alter-ego for the poet that was more important to his early readers than the obviously authorial narrator and his apparent self-disclosures as Will.

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10.

The earliest literary works comprising the Piers Plowman tradition follow in the wake of these events, although they and their sixteenth-century successors are not anti-monarchical or supportive of rebellion.

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11.

Piers Plowman actually added a line to his second and third editions that clearly refers to Marian intercession .

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12.

Sometimes "Piers Plowman" was referred to as the author of the poem, and when writers refer to a list of medieval authors, they will often mention "Piers Plowman" as an author's name or a substitute for one.

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13.

One gets the overall impression that Langland and Piers Plowman had less existence as author and text than did the fictional figure of Piers, whose relationship to a definite authorial and textual origin had been obscured much earlier.

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14.

Piers Plowman has often been read primarily as a political document.

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15.

Conversely, Piers Plowman was preceded by and contemporary with a number of similar works in the 14th and 15th centuries.

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