Description
Book SynopsisBy comparing Anglo-Saxon charters, sermons, and law codes with Langland'sPiers Plowmanand similar poems, Yeager demonstrates that this legal and homiletical literature had an influential afterlife in the fourteenth-century poetry of William Langland and his imitators.
Trade Review'Yeager's literary-historical argument is powerful and marches on firmly to the fifteenth-century poems of the Piers Plowmen... It convincingly demonstrates the durability of certain Anglo-Saxon attitudes as they were annealed in the distinction of style.' -- Christopher Cannon Modern Philology, vol 113:03:2016 'This is an innovative, textually grounded inquiry into the connections between Old and Middle English literature.' -- M.B. Busbee Choice Magazine vol 52:11:2015
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction Chapter 1 From Written Record to Memory: A Brief History of Anglo-Saxon Legal-Homiletic Discourse Chapter 2 Leges Cnuti, Sermones Lupi: Homily, Law, and the Legacy of Wulfstan Chapter 3 Ecclesiastical Anglo-Saxonism in Thirteenth-Century Worcester:The First Worcester Fragment and The Proverbs of Alfred Chapter 4 La amon's Brut: Law, Literature, and the Chronicle-Poem Chapter 5 Defining the Piers Plowman Tradition Chapter 6 Documents, Dreams and the Langlandian Legacy in Mum and the Sothsegger Conclusion Bibliography
