William Langland

Langland, William 

Born circa 1330 in Cleobury Mortymer, Shropshire; died circa 1400. English poet. A cleric in minor orders, Langland spoke out against the existing social structure on the eve of the peasant uprising of 1381.

Langland’s allegorical narrative poem, Piers Plowman (1362), is probably his only work. It is known in three versions (1370, c. 1377, and c. 1393). The poem was written in traditional alliterative unrhymed verse. Interest in it grew during the Reformation and the years of the English Bourgeois Revolution of the 17th century. J. Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress under the influence of the poem.

WORKS

The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman in Three Parallel Texts, Together With Richard the Redeless, vols. 1–2. Edited by W. W. Skeat. London, 1924.
In Russian translation:
Videnie Uil’iama o Petre Pakhare. Introduction by D. M. Petrushevskii. Moscow-Leningrad, 1941.

REFERENCES

Alekseev, M. P. Iz istorii angliiskoi literatury. Moscow, 1960. (See name index.)
Donaldson, E. T. Piers the Plowman: The C-text and Its Poet. New Haven, 1949.
Fowler, D. C. Piers the Plowman: Literary Relations of the A and B Texts. Seattle, 1961.
Robertson D. W., and B. F. Huppe. Piers Plowman and Scriptural Tradition. New York, 1969.

M. A. NERSESOVA