Langland, William

This dissertation pursues two distinct but parallel projects in relation to the work of Bernard of Clairvaux and Middle English imaginative literature. First, I argue for a Bernardine anagogical lens as a way to better understand the deepest theological commitments and most dist…

This study reads some Middle English poetry in terms of crusading, and it argues that the most prominent English poets, namely Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and John Gower, were against the later crusades regardless of their target. However, since the anti-crusade voice of…

The appearances of Piers in Piers Plowman are most appropriately explained by a "figural" perspective. Piers as a plowman in the Visio, firmly rooted in the contemporary socio-economic reality, is a "true" human and Christian, potentially an imago dei, and a quasi-Old Testament …

In this dissertation I argue that the representation of the Jews and Judaism in late fourteenth-century Middle English narratives, written a century after the expulsion of the Jews, belies long-held scholarly assumptions of this period's conventional and monolithic anti-Judaism.…