"PIERS PLOWMAN" AND THE PROBLEM OF BELIEF by Britton J. Harwood ( 9780802076557 )

Item Details

Title:

"PIERS PLOWMAN" AND THE PROBLEM OF BELIEF

By:

Format:

Paperback

List price:	£14.30
We currently do not stock this item, please contact the publisher directly for further information.

ISBN 10:

0802076556

ISBN 13:

9780802076557

Publisher:

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Pages:

237

Synopsis:

Piers Plowman is one of the greatest poems of Middle English. In this study Britton F. Harwood considers it as an expression of a crisis of faith and, as such, a landmark in the theological and philosophical history of the medieval era. Harwood shows how the protagonist of the poem represents himself as one in need of a knowledge of Christ as present and existing. This kind of knowledge was elaborated in late thirteenth- and fourteenth century thought as 'notitia intuitiva': the poet wants, not a report of Christ, but Christ as an object of perception. Any conversion for him is consequent upon the vision of God. The action of the poem, then, consists in the poet's testing of certain human capacities for their ability to recover the vision of God. Following through each segment of the poem, Harwood charts the course of the poet's inquiry, showing how each vision advances the poet's search until he reaches the knowledge of Christ in remorse--suffering being the point where God and humanity meet. On this basis, Harwood suggests that Piers Plowman is the first Middle English poem to have been motivated by the deterioration in theological and philosophical foundations experienced by the fourteenth-century writer, as argued by Muscatine and Middleton. This is the first book on Piers Plowman to take the narrator seriously when he rejects moral instruction as a substitute for the knowledge of God, and to argue that the poem is authentically exploratory.

Publication:

Canada

Imprint:

University of Toronto Press

Returns:

Non-returnable

Some other items by this author:

"PIERS PLOWMAN" AND THE PROBLEM OF BELIEF (HB)

CLASS AND GENDER IN EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE (HB)

CLASS AND GENDER IN EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE (PB)