TALK: he Fortunes of Piers Plowman and Its
Readers
Maura Nolan (English, Berkeley)
Thursday, April 26 / 4:00 PM
South Hall 1415
This lecture will focus on the role of Fortune in
Piers Plowman and in two poems from the Findern manuscript
that reference Piers Plowman but have not been recognized
as part of the Langlandian tradition. The Findern manuscript
from the second half of the fifteenth century includes
a variety of Middle English texts by Chaucer, Gower,
Lydgate, and Hoccleve. It functioned as a kind
of ‘commonplace book’ for an aristocratic
family and its visitors, and illustrates the tastes
and worldviews of late medieval gentry readers. The
poems I discuss are concerned with Fortune, especially
the way in which Fortune can or cannot be remedied
by human action and ultimately rely on a Langlandian
vision of will to experiment with the potentials for
human agency that ill fortune creates and destroys.
Professor Nolan is an associate professor at UC Berkeley
and has published John Lydgate and the Making of Public
Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005
and The Text in the Community: Essays on
Medieval Works, Manuscripts, Authors and Readers.
Edited with Jill Mann. Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2006.
Sponsored by Medieval Studies, English and the IHC
