The England of Piers Plowman : William Langland and his Vision of the Fourteenth Century

Du Boulay broadens the traditional, literary, view of Langland in this extended study of the poet and his world, the first to be written by a historian this century Professor Du Boulay's book is both a highly readable introduction to Langland's work and an original contribution to the history of religious thought. It rejects the view that Langland was primarily a political radical or a prophet of doom and sees him as both a great imaginative poet and a preacher of Christian charity. Writing in an age of intellectual subtlety and shifting social frontiers, Langland expressed deep anxieties yet offered to his fellow-Christians a way of interior repentance and practical love, guided by the enigmatic figure of Piers.