From Lawmen to Plowmen - Anglo-Saxon Legal Tradition and the School of Langland

By comparing Anglo-Saxon charters, sermons, and law codes with Langland’s Piers Plowman and similar poems, Yeager demonstrates that this legal and homiletical literature had an influential afterlife in the fourteenth-century poetry of William Langland and his imitators.

List of contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter 1

From Written Record to Memory: A Brief History of Anglo-Saxon Legal-Homiletic Discourse

Chapter 2

Leges Cnuti, Sermones Lupi: Homily, Law, and the Legacy of Wulfstan

Chapter 3

Ecclesiastical Anglo-Saxonism in Thirteenth-Century Worcester:The First Worcester Fragment and The Proverbs of Alfred

Chapter 4

Läamon’s Brut: Law, Literature, and the Chronicle-Poem

Chapter 5

Defining the Piers Plowman Tradition

Chapter 6

Documents, Dreams and the Langlandian Legacy in Mum and the Sothsegger

Conclusion

Bibliography

About the author

By Stephen Yeager

Summary

By comparing Anglo-Saxon charters, sermons, and law codes with Langland’s Piers Plowman and similar poems, Yeager demonstrates that this legal and homiletical literature had an influential afterlife in the fourteenth-century poetry of William Langland and his imitators.

Product details

• Authors: Stephen Yeager
• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 17.10.2014
• EAN: 9781442643475
• ISBN: 978-1-4426-4347-5
• No. of pages: 280
• Series: Toronto Anglo-Saxon Series; Toronto Anglo-Saxon; Toronto Anglo-Saxon Series; Toronto Anglo-Saxon
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies