Abstract

Baxter's early poem 'Letter to Piers Plowman' includes references to characters known to us not from Langland's poem but from one of the letters of John Ball (Royal manuscript). This note identifies a likely source in which Baxter could have encountered this little-known political text.

Highlights

  • First published by Pegasus Press in 1952, ‘Letter to Piers Plowman’ is one of the lesser-known poems of James K

  • The primary audience for The Cambridge Companion would no doubt have been familiar with the reference to ‘Ball’s letter’, but it is not well known beyond medieval historians and literary scholars, and its appearance in the context of James K

  • Published in 1921 and frequently reprinted, the work is a collection of representative texts from the fourteenth century excluding Chaucer (an omission that Sisam likens to creating ‘a body without a head’ (p. xxx))

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Summary

Introduction

First published by Pegasus Press in 1952, ‘Letter to Piers Plowman’ is one of the lesser-known poems of James K. A. Richards in the late 1940s, 4 and Victoria University College was readier than others to include New Zealand authors,[5] but all three select the same texts to cover the Old English and Middle English periods: Wyatt’s Anglo-Saxon Reader and Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose.

Results
Conclusion

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