
Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature
Rebecca Davis(Author)
Oxford University Press
Published on 29. September 2016
Book
Hardback
288 pages
978-0-19-877840-0 (ISBN)
Description
Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature explores the relationship of divine creativity, poetry, and ethics in William Langland's fourteenth-century dream vision. These concerns converge in the poem's rich vocabulary of kynde, the familiar Middle English word for nature, broadly construed. But in a remarkable coinage, Langland also uses kynde to name nature's creator, who appears as a character in Piers Plowman. The stakes of this
representation could not be greater: by depicting God as Kynde, that is, under the guise of creation itself, Langland explores the capacity of nature and of language to bear the plenitude of the divine. In doing so, he advances a daring claim for the spiritual value of literary art, including his own searching form of theological poetry.
This claim challenges recent critical attention to the poem's discourses of disability and failure and reveals the poem's place in a long and diverse tradition of medieval humanism that originates in the twelfth century and, indeed, points forward to celebrations of nature and natural capacity in later periods. By contextualizing Langland's poetics of kynde within contemporary literary, philosophical, legal, and theological discourses, Rebecca Davis offers a new literary history for
Piers Plowman that opens up many of the poem's most perplexing interpretative problems.
representation could not be greater: by depicting God as Kynde, that is, under the guise of creation itself, Langland explores the capacity of nature and of language to bear the plenitude of the divine. In doing so, he advances a daring claim for the spiritual value of literary art, including his own searching form of theological poetry.
This claim challenges recent critical attention to the poem's discourses of disability and failure and reveals the poem's place in a long and diverse tradition of medieval humanism that originates in the twelfth century and, indeed, points forward to celebrations of nature and natural capacity in later periods. By contextualizing Langland's poetics of kynde within contemporary literary, philosophical, legal, and theological discourses, Rebecca Davis offers a new literary history for
Piers Plowman that opens up many of the poem's most perplexing interpretative problems.
Reviews / Votes
The structure of Davis's analysis artfully reflects her aim of shedding light on the interrelation of the cosmos and the earthly microcosm: her book centres on the complexities hidden within a single keyword, which she then connects to debates and discourses springing from medieval mythology, allegory, science, law and philosophy. * Mary C. Flannery, The Times Literary Supplement *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 222 mm
Width: 145 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
499 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-877840-0 (9780198778400)
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Rebecca Davis
Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature
E-Book
09/2016
1st Edition
OUP eBook
€54.49
Available for download

Rebecca Davis
Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature
E-Book
09/2016
1st Edition
OUP eBook
€54.49
Available for download
Person
Rebecca Davis is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD from the University of Notre Dame in 2006. Her work has appeared in the Chaucer Review, Yearbook of Langland Studies, postmedieval, and Studies in the Age of Chaucer. She is currently co-editor of the Yearbook of Langland Studies.