Piers Plowman Questions and Answers
by William Langland

Piers Plowman is strongly influenced by the plague, or the Black Death, to give it its more famous name, which is demonstrated in its setting and characters. The Black Death devastated the English...

Piers Plowman is a Middle English poem written in the 14th century by one William Langland. Little is known about the author except that he might be from the area in the west of England. The poem...

Conscience, along with Reason and other abstract qualities, is personified in this medieval work of literature as a character in its own right. The personification is of course very allegorical, as...

In Piers Plowman, Will falls into a dream vision, which was a popular mode of alliterative poetic narrative, and has a vision of the conflict between the Catholic Church and Theology. Truthe,...

The exact date that these two important texts of English literature were written is by no means certain and is even now subject to much scholarly debate. However, generally speaking, it is...

Both Everyman and Piers Plowman are medieval allegories dealing with religious and moral instruction. In Piers Plowman, the narrator has a series of dreams relating to how to live a Christian life...

Great question! It is true that the beginning of the prologue uses the tower and the dungeon as representations of Heaven and Hell. On an even deeper level, the tower represents God's Truth and the...

Langland uses the allegory of Jesus as a knight to represent the titanic struggle between the forces of good and evil over humanity. In the 14th century, the time when the poem was written, the...

Wit, the personification of intelligence, has a profound teaching role in Piers Plowman. In Langland's allegory, Wit is divided into two components: first, Wit itself is natural intelligence or...

In the Prologue to Piers Plowman, Will falls asleep and dreams of a tower and a "deep dale" beneath the tower: "A[c] as I biheeld into the eest an heigh to the sonne,/I seigh a tour on a toft...