Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 1 of 1
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
Contrite Hearts: Lay Clergie In Late Medieval England, Sara Fredman
Contrite Hearts: Lay Clergie In Late Medieval England, Sara Fredman
Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This project reads two texts composed by women in the shadow of Arundel’s Constitutions – The Book of Margery Kempe and Eleanor Hull’s Commentary on the Seven Penitential Psalms – as two forms of response to the late fourteenth-century critique of clergy best exemplified by William Langland’s Piers Plowman. Langland’s poem describes the failures of institutional clergy, particularly that of their responsibility to evoke contrition in lay penitents. The poem deftly questions “Clergie,” revealing a multiplicity of meanings and the inability of the myriad forms of clerical authority to serve the “lewed.” The poem ends with the allegorical figure of …