The Piers Plowman tradition is made up of about 14 different poetic and prose works from about the time of John Ball (d.1381) and the Peasants Revolt of 1381 through the reign of Elizabeth I and beyond. All the works feature one or more characters, typically Piers, from William Langland's poem Piers Plowman. (A much larger number of texts, with less obvious connection to Piers Plowman, may also be considered part of the tradition.) Because the Plowman appears in the General Prologue to the The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer but does not have his own tale (one of seven such characters), plowman tales are sometimes used as additions to The Canterbury Tales, or otherwise conflated or associated with Chaucer.
As a rule, they satirically reflect economic, social, political, and religious grievances, and are concerned with political decisions and the relation between commoners and king. In these respects they resemble works such as Poem on the Evil Times of Edward II (1321–27), The Song of the Husbandman (c. 1340), Wynnere and Wastoure (c. 1353), and The Parlement of the Thre Ages (c. 1375-1400). The Piers Plowman tradition therefore contributed to an emerging early modern "public sphere". Most of the works of the tradition are anonymous; many are pseudepigraphic by authorial design or later misattribution. The distinction between fiction and history in them is often blurred.
Read more about Piers Plowman Tradition: 14th and 15th Centuries, 16th and 17th Centuries, Trends and Influences
Famous quotes containing the words piers, plowman and/or tradition:
“Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“When the plowman fled,
having left a highborn woman
in the throes of ecstasy,
thinking her dead,
the cotton plant
bobbed with the weight
of new bloom on its stalk
as if laughing.”
—Hla Stavhana (c. 50 A.D.)
““Where do architects and designers get their ideas?” The answer, of course, is mainly from other architects and designers, so is it mere casuistry to distinguish between tradition and plagiarism?”
—Stephen Bayley (b. 1951)