P. L. Heyworth

What we have here are the Medieval equivalent of opinion pieces. There’s no real value as literature, but taken together they present the English Reformation in miniature.

Jack Upland is sort of in the Piers Plowman tradition, but fully Lollard. The ascription to Jack is rather a thin fiction, much like someone today signing off as White Van Man. It consists mainly of a series of biting rhetorical questions addressed to the Friars and accuses them of being in league with Satan. Friar Daw’s Reply, much like the Church’s reply in real life is patronising and wholly inappropriate. He counter-accuses the Lollards of being in league with Satan, but in much nicer writing, and says they should be burnt to death. Upland’s Rejoinder says, No, you’re in league with Satan AND you’re all Sodomites.

So that escalated quickly.

This edition of the three pieces is rather well done. Nice paper. Excellent, thorough introduction. The purpose is twofold. First, to bring the reader as close as possible to the manuscripts. No modernised spelling and expanded contractions are printed in italics. Second, to bring the reader as close as possible to the meaning. There’s an excellent commentary that’s longer than the works themselves. The main failing of the book is the lack of a glossary. If your Middle English is rusty you’re really going to struggle. If it’s not too bad you can often work out the difficult words if there’s a general note on the passage in the commentary. If you have an ME dictionary or glossary in another book you might want to get it down before you get comfy. Likewise if you can’t speak Latin. There are occasional lines in Latin. Most of these are quotations from the Vulgate. Heyworth gives the references in the commentary, but honestly, a quick translation would have taken him like 2 minutes.… (mehr)