英文摘要 |
This essay focuses on the identification of poverty with transcendence in the fourteenth-century Middle English poem Piers Plowman, as a way of exploring the relation between the religious and the socio-political in the poem. It suggests that poverty as transcendence has a political meaning for the poet William Langland and that such a meaning is relevant to the poet’s vision of social change in Piers. In the essay, I locate such a meaning in the idea of resistance in Piers, which for Langland informs the way the spiritually righteous engage with political society in this world. Resistance is a form of political engagement that is perennial and ever vigilant. In Langland’s vision of the religious basis of political action, resistance identifies closely with an unyielding, unfailing opposition to worldly plenitude of power and is underpinned by the celebration of patient poverty and righteous suffering. |