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The sole surviving manuscript of "The Plowman's Tale" (written in a 16th-century hand) was inserted at the end of The Canterbury Tales in a copy of Thomas Godfrey/Godfray's 1532 printed edition of Chaucer's Works (STC 5068), edited by William Thynne. (This is in PR 1850 1532 cop. 1 at the University of Texas Harry Ransom Center.)
Central themes of the book are their opposing views on life, mankind, and morality. The work also represents a concept of marriage as a communion of love, a notion not generally accepted at the time. The work consists of 34 short chapters. In odd-numbered chapters the ploughman accuses Death of robbing him of his beloved young wife.
Piers Plowman contains the first known reference to a literary tradition of Robin Hood tales. [1] [2] There exist three distinct versions of the poem, which scholars refer to as the A-, B-, and C-texts. The B-text is the most widely edited and translated version; it revises and extends the A-text by over four thousand lines. [3]
"Langland's Dreamer": from an illuminated initial in a Piers Plowman manuscript held at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. William Langland (/ ˈ l æ ŋ l ə n d /; Latin: Willielmus de Langland; c. 1330 – c. 1386) is the presumed author of a work of Middle English alliterative verse generally known as Piers Plowman, an allegory with a complex variety of religious themes.
A Lytell Geste how the Plowman lerned his Pater Noster (c. 1510), printed by Wynkyn de Worde and in circulation as late as 1560 and 1582. In it a Catholic priest is the figure of right religion while the plowman is an avaricious ignoramus. Perhaps broad sympathy for this point of view explains why Piers Plowman was not printed until 1550.
The resemblances to Piers Plowman are particularly numerous and close, leading Breeze to conclude that Iolo consciously drew on that poem, though Dafydd Johnston and Glanmor Williams have each argued that Iolo, Langland and Chaucer were all influenced by a common source, the body of Middle English sermons on social themes.
Full text Confessio Amantis at Wikisource Confessio Amantis ("The Lover's Confession") is a 33,000-line Middle English poem by John Gower , which uses the confession made by an ageing lover to the chaplain of Venus as a frame story for a collection of shorter narrative poems.
The poet appears to have produced several versions of Piers Plowman at different times. Brewer's book Piers Plowman: the Z version (edited with A.G. Rigg, Toronto 1983) advanced the view that a disregarded manuscript in Oxford's Bodley Library (Bodley 851) might be an early, or even first, iteration of the poem rather than a conflation of two ...