1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910807972203321

Autore

Aers David

Titolo

Beyond reformation? : an essay on William Langland's Piers Plowman and the end of Constantinian Christianity / / David Aers

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Notre Dame, Indiana : , : University of Notre Dame, , 2015

©2015

ISBN

0-268-07484-4

0-268-15800-2

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (201 pages)

Disciplina

821/.1

Soggetti

Christian poetry, English (Middle) - History and criticism

Literature and society - England - History - To 1500

Religious thought - Middle Ages, 600-1500

Religion and culture

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references.

Sommario/riassunto

"In Beyond Reformation? An Essay on William Langland's Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity, David Aers presents a sustained and profound close reading of the final version of William Langland's Piers Plowman, the most searching Christian poem of the Middle Ages in English. His reading, most unusually, seeks to explore the relations of Langland's poem to both medieval and early modern reformations together with the ending of Constantinian Christianity. Aers concentrates on Langland's extraordinarily rich ecclesiastic politics and on his account of Christian virtues and the struggles of Conscience to discern how to go on in his often baffling culture. The poem's complex allegory engages with most institutions and forms of life. In doing so, it explores moral languages and their relations to current practices and social tendencies. Langland's vision conveys a strange sense that in his historical moment some moral concepts were being transformed and some traditions the author cherished were becoming unintelligible. Beyond Reformation? seeks to show how Langland grasped subtle shifts that were difficult to discern in the fourteenth



century but were to become forces with a powerful future in shaping Western Christianity" --