Piers Plowman - Definition and Overview

Piers Plowman (1360 - 1399) is the title of a Middle English allegorical narrative, written in unrhymed alliterative verse, generally considered the earliest great work of English literature, and one of a very few Middle English poems that can stand beside Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

The poem is primarily a vision of the correct Christian life, in terms of the medieval mind. It achieves this end by an examination into the lives of three allegorical characters, Do-Wel, Do-Bet, and Do-Best. The poem begins on the hillside in Malvern, Worcestershire.

There are three major versions of the text, known as Text-A, Text-B, and Text-C. The first two are almost certainly works of William Langland. The Text-Z, which is a combined version of the A-Text and the C-Text, is the shortest version. The authenticity of the Z-text is disputed.

External links

• Piers Plowman Electronic Archive (http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/seenet/piers/) A multi-level, hyper-textually linked electronic archive of the textual tradition of all three versions of the fourteenth-century allegorical dream vision Piers Plowman.
• University of Virginia e-text of Piers Plowman. (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/LanPier.html)