Piers Plowman
Piers Plowman (1360 - 1399) is the title of a Middle English allegorical narrative, written in unrhymed alliterative verse, and generally considered the earliest great work of English literature, and the greatest Middle English poem before Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
The poem is primarily a vision of the correct Christian life, in terms of the medieval mind. It achieves this end by an examination into the lives of three allegorical characters, Do-Wel, Do-Bet, and Do-Best.
There are three major versions of the text, known as Text-A, Text-B, and Text-C. The first two are almost certainly works of William Langland.
External Links
- A multi-level, hyper-textually linked electronic archive of the textual tradition of all three versions of the fourteenth-century allegorical dream vision Piers Plowman.
