• Introduction: Allegory and Undoing


• Excursus: Personifications in Dialogue and Debate


• Part 1


• 1: The Hypocritical Figure


• 2: Ethical Adjacency in Piers Plowman


• Part 2


• 3: Animate Oppositions


• 4: Opposition and Debate in Piers Plowman


• Part 3


• 5: Anger, Insult, and Rebuff


• 6: Sharp Words and Violent Gestures in Piers Plowman


• Part 4


• 7: Natural Entropy and Piers Plowman


• 8: The Sad Vices


• Part 5


• 9: Piers Plowman and the Grail Romances


• 10: Tales of Piers and Perceval: Langland, Romance Aventure, and Doing well


• Conclusion: Undoing Well


• Appendix: Langland and Marguerite Porete

Nicolette Zeeman is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at King's College and in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. Author of Piers Plowman and the Medieval Discourse of Desire (2006), she co-edited with Jean Michel Massing and contributed to King's College Chapel 1515-2015: Art, Music and Religion in Cambridge (2014), and, with Dallas Denery II and Kantik Ghosh, Uncertain Knowledge: Scepticism, Relativism, and Doubt in the Middle Ages (2014). She is interested in and has also published on Chaucer, medieval literary theory, song, scepticism, mythography, and the chivalric 'idol'. She is working on personification, the Gawain Poet, and developing a project on the theory of the idol in later medieval culture.

This volume offers original readings of Piers Plowman and rethinks the genre of allegorical narrative in the Middle Ages. It presents five studies of allegorical narratives with implications for different aspects of medieval culture.