Prof. Richard F. Johnson
Studies in Middle English Literature

This course will focus on three disparate masterworks written in the decades before 1400: the anonymous Pearl, Langland's Piers Plowman, and Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love, or Showings. These texts represent the full range of writing of the Ricardian era: they differ in dialect (Northern, West Midlands, and East Anglian); in form (elegant stanzaic verse, long-line alliterative poetry, and supple prose); and in social situation (the Pearl-poet was presumably a courtier, Langland an itinerant cleric, Julian an anchoress).

Nevertheless, the three texts also have many tantalizing similarities. Each, for example, features a search for a solution to a seemingly insoluble problem (personal bereavement in Pearl, social injustice in Piers, and eternal damnation in Julian). Each belongs to the genre of visionary literature; and each represents a woman in the role of theological teacher. Together, then, these contemporary works prove mutually illuminating and display the rich variety of religious sensibilities and artistic possibility in the "age of Chaucer."

Primary Texts:

• William Vantuono, ed., The Pearl Poem in Middle and Modern English (University Press of America, 1987)
• A.V.C. Schmidt, ed., The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Complete Edition of the B-Text (London, 1978)
• Edmund College and James Walsh, eds., Julian of Norwich: Showings (Paulist Press, 1978)

Supplementary Readings will be taken from some of the following works:

• Robert Blanch et. al., eds., Text and Matter: New Critical Perspectives of the Pearl-Poet (Whitson, 1991)
• Alford, John, A Companion to Piers Plowman (Berkeley, 1988)
• Edward Vasta, ed., Interpretations of Piers Plowman (U of Notre Dame Press, 1968)
• Paul Szarmach, ed., An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe (SUNY Press, 1984)
• Wolfgang, Riehle, The Middle English Mystics (Routledge, 1981)
• Bernard Levy and Paul Szarmach, The Alliterative Tradition in the Fourteenth Century (Kent State UP, 1981)

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