{"product_id":"9781442643475","title":"Rewriting the Unwritten: Vernacular Law and Vernacular Literature from Wulfstan to Piers Plowman","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe reappearance of alliterative verse in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries remains one of the most puzzling issues in the literary history of medieval England. In \u003cem\u003eFrom Lawmen to Plowmen\u003c\/em\u003e, Stephen M. Yeager offers a fresh, insightful explanation for the alliterative structure of William Langland’s \u003cem\u003ePiers Plowman\u003c\/em\u003e and the flourishing of alliterative verse satires in late medieval England by observing the similarities between these satires and the legal-homiletical literature of the Anglo-Saxon era.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eUnlike Old English alliterative poetry, Anglo-Saxon legal texts and documents continued to be studied long after the Norman Conquest. By comparing Anglo-Saxon charters, sermons, and law codes with Langland’s \u003cem\u003ePiers Plowman\u003c\/em\u003e and similar poems, Yeager demonstrates that this legal and homiletical literature had an influential afterlife in the fourteenth-century poetry of William Langland and his imitators. His conclusions establish a new genealogy for medieval England’s vernacular literary tradition and offer a new way of approaching one of Middle English’s literary classics.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Toronto Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47015263863024,"sku":"9781442643475","price":55.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781442643475_p0.jpg?v=1763811062","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781442643475","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}