PIERS PLOWMAN: GLOSSARY: WILL'S VISIONS OF PIERS PLOWMAN, DO-WELL, DO-BETTER AND DO-BEST: A GLOSSARY OF THE..

"The Glossary is designed to facilitate access to William Langland's fourteenth-century dream-vision poem Piers Plowman which, with Dante's Divine Comedy and Chaucer's Troilus and Canterbury Tales, proclaimed the coming of age of European vernacular poetry. It defines the more than 5,000 English words, and words used as English, in the three forms of the poem printed in the Athlone series." "The first of its kind since Sir Walter Skeat's pioneering Glossarial Index of 1886, this glossary takes full account of the intervening advances in both Middle English lexicography and Piers Plowman scholarship. Each definition is supported by reference to instances in each of the forms where the word occurs. Where this applies they were chosen with an eye to the dialectal and morphological differences in the three texts, and to the rhetorically sophisticated grammar of the poet's style. The glossary, moreover, gives full attention to the remoteness of many elements in the poem's content from modern culture and its values."--Jacket.