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Beyond Reformation? - An Essay on William Langland's Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity (Hardcover)
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Beyond Reformation? - An Essay on William Langland's Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity (Hardcover)
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In Beyond Reformation? An Essay on William Langland's Piers Plowman
and the End of Constantinian Christianity, David Aers presents a
sustained and profound close reading of the final version of
William Langland's Piers Plowman, the most searching Christian poem
of the Middle Ages in English. His reading, most unusually, seeks
to explore the relations of Langland's poem to both medieval and
early modern reformations together with the ending of Constantinian
Christianity. Aers concentrates on Langland's extraordinarily rich
ecclesiastic politics and on his account of Christian virtues and
the struggles of Conscience to discern how to go on in his often
baffling culture. The poem's complex allegory engages with most
institutions and forms of life. In doing so, it explores moral
languages and their relations to current practices and social
tendencies. Langland's vision conveys a strange sense that in his
historical moment some moral concepts were being transformed and
some traditions the author cherished were becoming unintelligible.
Beyond Reformation? seeks to show how Langland grasped subtle
shifts that were difficult to discern in the fourteenth century but
were to become forces with a powerful future in shaping Western
Christianity. The essay form that Aers has chosen for his book
contributes to the effectiveness of the argument he develops in
tandem with the structure of Langland's poem: he sustains and tests
his argument in a series of steps or "passus," a Langlandian mode
of proceeding. His essay unfolds an argument about medieval and
early modern forms of Constantinian Christianity and reformation,
and the way in which Langland's own vision of a secularizing,
de-Christianizing late medieval church draws him toward the idea of
a church of "fools," beyond papacy, priesthood, hierarchy, and
institutions. For Aers, Langland opens up serious diachronic issues
concerning Christianity and culture. His essay includes a brief
summary of the poem and modern translations alongside the original
medieval English. It will challenge specialists on Langland's poem
and supply valuable resources of thought for anyone who continues
to struggle with the church of today.
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