Preaching And Narrative In Piers Plowman

William Langland's Piers Plowman was written and read during a “golden age” of English preaching. The poem describes a world where sermons took many different forms and were delivered in many different contexts, from public events in the life of the realm to pastoral instruction in the parish. It dramatises preaching as part of its allegorical action, showing how sermons shaped their listeners' understanding of the world; it also includes polemical critique of corrupt, self-interested preaching, and offers radical prescriptions for its reform. This book argues that Langland's central insight into the way that sermons moved and engaged their audiences had to do with their characteristic use of narrative. Preachers in the poem address listeners who are absorbed in the concerns of their present moment, and encourage them to new forms of social and spiritual endeavour by locating that moment in a larger, interpreted plot: the story of an individual life, or an emergent community, or of salvation history as a whole. The book employs a critical vocabulary derived from Paul Ricoeur to describe the process by which these narratives are composed, and to show how they mediate and reconfigure their listeners' experiences.

William Langland's Piers Plowman was written and read during a "golden age" of English preaching. The poem describes a world where sermons took many different forms and were delivered in many different contexts, from public events in the life of the realm to pastoral instruction in the parish. It dramatises preaching as part of its allegorical action, showing how sermons shaped their listeners' understanding of the world; it also includes polemical critique of corrupt, self-interested preaching, and offers radical prescriptions for its reform. This book argues that Langland's central insight into the way that sermons moved and engaged their audiences had to do with their characteristic use of narrative. Preachers in the poem address listeners who are absorbed in the concerns of their present moment, and encourage them to new forms of social and spiritual endeavour by locating that moment in a larger, interpreted plot: the story of an individual life, or an emergent community, or of salvation history as a whole. The book employs a critical vocabulary derived from Paul Ricoeur to describe the process by which these narratives are composed, and to show how they mediate and reconfigure their listeners' experiences.

The first full survey of crucial witnesses to the reception of Piers Plowman.

Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages presents research by specialists of preaching history and literature. This volume fills some of the lacunae which exists in medieval sermon studies. The topics include: an analysis of how oral and written cultures meet in sermon literature, the function of vernacular sermons, an examination of the usefulness of non-sermon sources such as art in the study of preaching history, sermon genres, the significance of heretical preaching, audience composition and its influence on sermon content, and the use of rhetoric in sermon construction. The study looks at preaching history and literature from a wide geographical and chronological area which includes examples from Anglo-Saxon England to late medieval Italy. While doing so, it outlines the state of sermon studies research and points to new areas of investigation.

Probing spatial questions about God posed by Piers Plowman, the author of this interdisciplinary study turns to pictorial evidence-the use of religious space and relationships within such space in English art of the same period. The Place of God in Piers Plowman and Medieval Art is not only a study of the sense of God and of the relationship between God and creatures in the great religious poem, but also an analysis of art works of the high Middle Ages, especially English manuscript illuminations, in their placement of God. Such interdisciplinary analysis historicizes both literature and art, uncovering ways that medieval people imagined God and the understandings that they would have been able to bring to reading and viewing religious art.

Because they are speaking to a younger society more attuned to lively dialogue and visual images, pastors need a fresh wineskin for a timeless message of redemption. Calvin Miller, who has preached and equipped preachers for decades, offers a volume of helpful insights for pastors to deliver the heart of the gospel via the Jesus-endorsed vessel of compelling storytelling. For the working pastor, Miller's crash course on preaching is a welcomed study. Now available in trade paper.