ENGLISH 4270 MEDIEVAL ENGLISH LITERATURE SPRING 2011

GRADY FOURTH ESSAY ASSIGNMENT

Essays are due in class on Wednesday, May 4; they should be typed, double-spaced, and five to six pages long in a 12-point font. In considering these topics, bear in mind that they are starting points, and that simply answering in sequence the questions below will not produce a good or even coherent essay. Develop your own particular thesis, and be sure to support your argument through frequent and specific reference to the text. Please let at least one human being—one who knows the difference between “its” and “it’s”—proofread your essay before you hand it in.

Also, please note on your essay whether you would like to have it returned at the final exam on May 11 with a grade but no comments, or whether you would like to pick it up at a later time (or have it sent to you) with the usual set of reader’s comments.

1. Design your own topic, of suitable specificity and sophistication, about something that interests you in Piers Plowman or the Book of Margery Kempe. Provide me with a one-paragraph description of your topic no later than Friday, April 29. Feel free to consult with me in developing this topic; discussing it with your classmates is highly recommended, too.

2. [held over from last time!] Write an essay about one of the following topics in Piers Plowman, referring to its importance in at least two different places in the poem.

(a) poverty (d) the Seven Deadly Sins

(b) Clergy (i.e., learning) (e) money

(c) clergy (i.e., clerics) (f) labor

3. Piers Plowman appears in five manuscripts with Mandeville’s Travels, more often than with any other work. What would lead the compiler of a manuscript to put these two works together in the same MS? How would you describe the interests of a patron who might order such a manuscript made? What, in other words, do these texts have in common? What kind of pair do they make?

4. Compare the attitude(s) demonstrated towards clerical and institutional authority in both the Book of Margery Kempe and Piers Plowman. How does each author represent figures of authority? Be sure to attend both to what gets said, and to who says it.

5. Margery Kempe's Lynn was an international center of trade in the later middle ages. Her father and her husband were successful merchants, and she started a couple of businesses herself. Discuss the presence and effect of money, commerce and the language of bargaining in her Book's vocabulary, style, and/or structure. In other words, how does her mercantile background influence the way she discusses spiritual matters?

6. "Is Langland mainly concerned with the redemption of society or with that of the individual?" This question has produced many divergent answers in the criticism of Piers Plowman, and now you get to take your place in the ongoing conversation. In articulating your position, you might find helpful James Simpson's recent observation that "Langland's conception of what it is to be a person is different from our own. One of these differences concerns the intimacy of relationship between the self and institutions in Langland's poem"--for example, the close identification of Conscience with the Church in the last two passus.

7. Write an essay about the various attitudes towards pilgrimage that are displayed in at least two of the following: Piers Plowman, The Book of Margery Kempe, Mandeville’s Travels.

8. The Pearl-maiden, Holy Church, Dame Study, Scripture—fictional females conveying theological and spiritual truth apparently don’t present the same problems that Margery Kempe does. Why not?

9. Does Langland’s Will have anything in common with Malory’s Lancelot?