The International Piers Plowman Society is circulating a petition expressing support for Dorothy Kim, who became the target of racially inflammatory blog posts by Rachel Fulton Brown and Milo Yiannopoulos this week. The petition is a collective statement of solidarity with Dorothy Kim, with medievalists who are people of color, and with untenured scholars.
All medievalists and friends of medieval studies are welcome to sign.
I have a piece out today in The Conversation comparing fourteenth- and twenty-first-century anxieties about the destructive power of young people.
My essay comparing American political discourse around poverty to Piers Plowman appears in the Times Literary Supplement. I’d like to record my gratitude to Emily Steiner, whose book Reading “Piers Plowman” taught me about the poet’s complex attitudes toward poverty, and Holly Wood, whose critiques of class politics are an inspiration.
My note, “More Prophetic Piers Plowman,” appears in ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews. In a previous essay, I announced the discovery of two previously unrecognized prophetic excerpts from Piers Plowman in a sixteenth-century manuscript. This note identifies five more excerpts from Piers Plowman in five other late manuscripts. Here is the opening paragraph:
A key conclusion of recent bibliographical scholarship is that William Langland’s Piers Plowman (c. 1370–90) circulated as political prophecy in manuscript and print in the sixteenth century. Evidence for prophetic Piers Plowman includes an early sixteenth-century manuscript presenting the poem as “The Prophecies of Piers Plowman,” complete with glosses and table of contents; excerpts of two prophetic Piers Plowman passages (B.6.321–31 and 10.322–35) in sixteenth-century manuscripts; sixteenth-century annotations of these and other prophetic passages in earlier Piers Plowman manuscripts; sixteenth-century verse prophecies alluding to the same two Piers Plowman passages; and Robert Crowley’s anxiety about a prophetic interpretation of Piers Plowman in the preface to his 1550 printed edition of the poem. This essay registers five new entries in the sixteenth-century archive of Langlandiana, representing two textually distinct excerpts. I present transcriptions of the five texts and discuss their textual relationship to one another and to other texts of Piers Plowman.
My review of Michael Calabrese, An Introduction to “Piers Plowman” (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016), appears in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology. Here’s the opening of the review:
The alliterative poem Piers Plowman survives in three distinct versions (‘A,’ ‘B,’ and ‘C’), composed in the 1370s and 1380s by one William Langland. The A version consists of a prologue and eleven ‘passūs’ or sections; B extends A to twenty passūs; and C reorganizes B into twenty-two passūs. The B text has received the most attention from literary scholars and is most often taught to students. James Simpson’s Piers Plowman: An Introduction (Exeter, 1990; rev. ed. 2007) and Emily Steiner’s Reading “Piers Plowman” (Cambridge, 2013) both focus on B, with glances at A and C.
The book under review is the first introduction to devote equal attention to all three versions. Michael Calabrese presents an integrated, passus-by-passus summary of Piers Plowman A, B, and C in twenty-four short sections (“Narrative Reading Guide”). Exposition begins from the earliest version for each passus, with generous discussion of insertions, deletions, and revisions in later versions. Surrounding the reading guide is a variety of supplemental material: a preface advocating the study of Piers Plowman in contemporary America; a chronology of significant people and events; essays on Langland’s biography and political contexts (“Life of the Poet”) and the relationship between Piers Plowman and other canonical medieval literature (“Langland and His Contemporaries”); an appendix listing characters or actants in the poem (“Persons, Personifications, and Allegorizings in Piers Plowman”); an appendix introducing Middle English pronunciation and alliterative meter (“Pronunciation Guide: Reading Piers Plowman Aloud”); and a partially annotated bibliography.
The preface makes a strong case for the urgency of Piers Plowman in the twenty-first century. […]
Eric Weiskott 
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