Salter 1962
Salter, Elizabeth. Piers Plowman: An Introduction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962.
Piers Plowman has been read as a sermon, or as medieval religious allegory
we need to be more sensitive to it as art, the product of a creative imagination
poem's art is "part of a larger web of allegorical significances, which Langland can only help us to understand if we will accept the initial premise -- a potential though fluctuating richness of connected meanings" (9)
popular in its own tiem; over 50 manuscripts from c14-15, and printed four times before 1561 (12)
by early c16, was pilloried for social/religious satire, used (ironically) to support the Reformation
alliterative verse: aligns Langland with medieval poets from west and north of England who inherited alliterative tradition from pre-Conquest times, used it in preference to French metres (13); display or rhetorical flourishes, not concealment (17)
- Langland does not give "alliteration the dominance it so often has in other contemporary works" (22)
- "No other poem of the alliterative tradition combines so distinctively rational procedure (in the verse paragraph, the individual speech or episode) with what appears, at first, to be a larger irrationality -- an almost inconsequential attitude to the problems of developing and sustaining actions and arguments." (22)
manuals on preaching and writing sermons common in late medieval period; focus on balance between beauty and usefulness (Ciceronian triple aim of rhetoric -- docere, movere, delectare)
- Langland drawing on this tradition
- liken a well-structured sermon to a well-structured cathedral (30)