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Public Piers Plowman:
Modern Scholarship and Late Medieval English Culture. by C. David
Benson. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.
Pp. xix + 283. $45 (cloth); $25 (paper).
In 1997 David Benson published an essay in the Yearbook of Langland
Studies called "Piers Plowman and Parish Wall Paintings" (YLS
11, 138). Illustrating his essay with photographs of surviving wall paintings,
he argued that wall paintings in parish churches were a major means by
which ordinary people in the Middle Ages could envision what they believed
in, and that they give us insight into a popular aesthetic that is present
as well in Piers Plowman. I had never known a thing about this
subject, and the article taught me a lot: how ubiquitous church wall-painting
was, how much of it has been lost, what its major subjects were—and I
certainly saw how one might regard Langland's religious sensibility, for
all its bookishness, and for all its air of fresh and personal response,
as schooled in this popular forum. though the word "public" was not featured,
perhaps not used, in that essay, it was certainly a bold attempt to wrest
the poem away from its learned context and associate it with what we call
"popular culture." It did not offer some startling new understanding of
the poem, but it was a salutary reminder of how Langland always manages
to stay in touch with ordinary experience.
Traugott Lawler
Yale University
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